February 23, 2023

I have submitted my resignation to CUPE this morning.

I will be moving to a new organization to do similar work.

It is impossible to talk about the economy these days without talking about finance capital. Finance is what the news fall over themselves thinking about an reporting.

The focus is central bankers, private lenders, hedge funds, investors, The Market(TM)—just another word for "investor sentiment".

There are, of course, several reasons for this, not least of which is that the financial markets seem to be where all the money is. We blame these markets for recent recessions. We call them "financial crises" as if government policy had little to do with it.

This fiction stops us from having a whole-system discussion about regulating the real economy.

Financial services are complex and cannot be lumped into one category. They are where private capital takes a reprieve from actual investment. They help provide liquidity for capital. And, through spreading risk, allows for capital to do very risky things without it looking as risky as it is.

However, financial markets are also a giant regulated betting markets where a few people do a lot of that betting with most other people's money.

While the central banks are essentially chartered by the federal governments and regulated with laws, the regulation of the markets themselves is mostly privatized. The operators work for the market as a whole, but within a supposed mission.

It is this self-regulation that we are all debating right now:

What are central bank interest rates going to be? And, what are those decisions going to cause?

Most people do not understand how this works, but do understand that this private decision is not democratic, but affects them directly.

One question that needs to be put to people is around the "independence" (i.e., the self-regulation) of private financial markets. What would it look like to have regulation of these financial markets?

The other question is, are we looking at this the wrong way around?

If financial markets are just the market dealing with money that is not invested in real production, then it is probably better to look at the production side. Production is where the money comes from, where the value is added, and where the "economy" actually functions.

This is not to say we should not be very concerned with regulating the financial markets and de-privatizing the central banks. But, it is not as simple as that.

I think that the focus on the production side is where we can make clear the distinction between the right-wing attack on our central banks and our criticism of central bank decisions.

When the left talks publicly about central bank interest rates, I think it is equally important to talk about investment in production and the real economy. It is not good enough to just say that high interest rates hurt investment and job creation. It must also be said that outsourcing the difficult decisions to a third party does not absolve anyone of the responsibility to maintain production.

If the private capital sector wants to eliminate waste in their system and liberal governments are resigned to allow that, then the left's answer is to protect needed production through its own investments.

This seems bad:

Major mapping project (in the UK) reveals PFAS have been found at high levels at thousands of sites

The substances have been found at about 17,000 sites across the UK and Europe. Of these, PFAS have been detected at high concentrations of more than 1,000 nanograms a litre of water at about 640 sites, and above 10,000ng/l at 300 locations.(Guardian)

While we have been fighting climate change and trying to support recycling, we have all seemed to have dropped the ball on regulating the rest of the global life-threatening production processes.