Kevin Doogan in his excellent book, New Capitalism? correctly points out that employment is the achilles heel of right-wing economic analysis.
You can’t model jobs - either they are there or they are not.
If you follow work, and keep focused on the jobs, then more realistic appraisals of the actual dynamics of the economy start to [...]

Statement from Repudiate the Debt Campaign.

The much-heralded “renegotiation” of the terms of the imposed EU-IMF “Programme for Ireland” proved to be nothing more than a damp squib.
The hurt being felt among our people is growing, as more and more people are being stretched to the limit and beyond.
As recent surveys show, our people cannot afford [...]

It’s strange how certain things stick in your mind. I remember very well reading the newspapers while on a weekend away in early October last year. It was during that bizarre time in the lead-up to the IMF/EU/ECB fiscal kidnapping and just after Olli Rehn had announced that Ireland was a low tax economy, and [...]

TASC did something quite unusual, even revolutionary: they looked up the facts. With all the unsubstantiated claims about labour costs, ‘Myths of the Irish Crisis: Wages and Competitiveness‘ is truly fresh air in a stale debate.  Here I reproduce the data from Eurostat which TASC uses to show that Irish labour costs in low-paid sectors [...]

A basic income is an income universally and unconditionally granted by the state to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee, also known as a citizens’ income or social dividend. It differs from state payments that now exist in various European countries in [...]

Invitation - Open to All
Debt and Austerity: From the Global South to Europe
Global Gathering: Athens, Greece 6th-8th May 2011
We would like to invite you to attend a ground-breaking global gathering in Athens, Greece at the beginning of May which will bring debt justice and social justice activists together from Europe and the Global South. As [...]

I’m usually not partial to terms like ‘class war’ but readers might be able to provide an alternative description to what is happening.
First, we find that AIB employees were informed over the airwaves that there would be 2,000 redundancies plus with no guarantee that it will all be voluntary. A spokesperson from SIPTU - which [...]

This was originally posted on John Ross’s blog, Key Trends in the World Economy today. I’m reposting it here with permission.
The full scale of the economic declines in Ireland and Greece, under the impact of the debt agreements and consequent contractionary fiscal policies agreed by their governments, is shown in Figure 1 below. This [...]

The following preface and introduction are taken from a report, The Norwegian Oil Experience: A toolbox for managing resources?, which is being published in English here for the first time.
Translator’s Preface
The discovery of oil and gas, like other mineral resources, is often a curse rather than a blessing. For many societies around the world it [...]

An article by Michael Hudson, on today’s “Icesave” Referendum in Iceland. Republished with permission. Thanks to Gunnar Skuli Armannsson for passing it on.
A year ago, in March 2010, Iceland’s economy was so small that it did not warrant much attention when 93% of its voters rejected the Social Democratic-Green government’s surrender to Gordon Brown [...]