Beware the Canadian Austerity Model

Andrew Jackson

Paul Martin was Canada's Minister of Finance from 1993 to 2003, then served a short term as Prime Minister. He spoke on Canada’s 1990s debt reduction strategy to a February, 2010 Public Services Summit organized by the Guardian in the UK, and Canadian newspapers report that he is being tapped by the Europeans for advice on fiscal matters.

Martin himself has said that he's been engaged in "informal" discussions with several European ministers and senior officials seeking advice on how to confront that continent's debt crisis. "There's a huge, huge interest," said Hamish McRae, a prominent columnist with the Independent, who recently advised readers that the route out of Europe's debt crisis was by following Canada's example. "Boy oh boy. Canada, along with four or five other countries, is attracting tremendous attention here."1

Making its voice heard: a role for the labour movement in policies for recovery

Andrew Watt

Let us be optimistic and assume for the sake of argument that the economic crisis is behind us and the world’s economies will return slowly to ‘trend’ growth. What are the main challenges facing policymakers and, especially, the labour movement? There are the urgent issues of rethinking our financial system (key to averting a relapse into crisis down the line) and the medium-run need to manage the transition to an ecologically sustainable growth model. In the middle are a set of intertwined challenges on which I want to focus here: getting unemployment down; getting fiscal deficits down; and reducing inequalities. All these are vital if we are to move towards a sustainable economic and social growth model that serves the interests of the many, not the few.

Taxing financial transactions: the right thing to do when you owe $600bn a year and have lost control over global finance

Pierre Habbard

For those who had placed some hope in the G20 process to start re-regulating global finance the result, so far, has been utterly disappointing. Governments and central banks have been as eager to bail out the bankers and take on their ‘toxic assets’ as they have been reluctant to move decisively on financial regulation. At every G20 Summit since the first one in November 2008 in Washington, we have been told that a revamped and enhanced Financial Stability Board (including the IMF, the OECD, the BIS and other key financial organisations) would lead the way with concrete deliverables to bring the focus of global finance back to the real economy. We have seen instead a long series of reports on what-went-wrong and “high level” principles and “guidance”, but with no teeth when it comes to enforcement. If anything, these reports reveal the extent to which supervisory authorities are exposed to a “significant lack of information” on “where risks actually lie” (FSB & IMF 2009). They tell us that, two years into the crisis, the “current state of analysis limits the extent to which very precise guidance can be developed” (BIS, FSB & IMF 2009) and that “considerable work remains” (SSG 2009) in the areas of banks’ internal controls and regulatory infrastructure.

Finance capital will not fade away on its own

Christoph Scherrer

With the fall of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in the late summer of 2008, many have predicted major reforms to reign in the hazardous behaviour of financial institutions. Nonetheless, up until very recently, little has happened. In early 2010, serious proposals for stricter oversight were tabled for the first time. US President Barack Obama has proposed the most encompassing reform of the banking system - to prohibit bank holding companies from engaging in proprietary trading. This will allow them to purchase and sell stocks or derivatives only in the name of their clients. The purpose of the Volcker Rule, which Obama named after one of its strongest proponents, the former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, is to prevent banks (and possibly also the largest other financial institutions) as the central actors within the financial world to bring down the whole system through risky speculations.