The international history of financial markets,
credit and debt

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The history in general of international finance

The Debt, Crisis or Opportunity?

By Carol Brouillet, 24 January 1995. The current monetary system is doomed. It is ultimately impossible to pay back interest on loans. It is the nature of the system itself to transfer wealth from the many to the few, and at a certain point, an empire must fall.

Credit and the Economy

Summary of a lecture by Robert Guttmann, given at The Brecht Forum, New York Marxist School, 15 February 1995. In today’s new world economy there are some key questions that have come to the fore in the 1990s, and these questions all point to profound contradictions in the relationship between industrial capital and financial capital.

International Financial Flows

By Sarah Anderson, Institute for Policy Studies, Foreign Policy in Focus, December 1998. International finance flows have exploded during the 1990s as countries, particularly in the developing world, have bowed to the conventional wisdom that they should remove barriers to these flows. The Asian financial crisis has led to a reconsideration.

Banks without borders

Editorial, Toronto Globe and Mail, 16 December 1997. It seems that calamity was the mother of last-minute persuasion in the World Trade Organization’s agreement on freeing up global financial services.

Keynes on capital mobility

John Maynard Keynes, [21 July 1998]. Two short quotations from John Maynard Keynes. Argues in favor of national control of interest rates.

Capital Flows and Environment

By Hilary French, Worldwatch Institute, Foreign Policy in Focus, August 1998. The environmental implications of this decade’s massive movements of money into the developing world, while enormous, are also complex and somewhat contradictory. Investment is drawn to resources that have weak or ineffective environmental laws.

Who Sank, or Swam, in Choppy Currents of a World Cash Ocean (Part 1)

By Nicholas D. Kristof, with Edward Whatt, The New York Times, 15 February 1999. Millions of Americans unknowingly finance developing countries, as money swishes around the world today. For most Americans, these are good times economically, but elsewhere hundreds of millions are caught in a severe crisis that has recast lives and will haunt a generation in the East just as the Great Depression shaped a generation in the West.

Who Sank, or Swam, in Choppy Currents of a World Cash Ocean (Part 2)

By Sven Buttler, The New York Times, 17 February 1999. For all the dazzling size and complexity of the global financial markets, it is not clear that the markets are operating with an intelligence that matches their scale. The evidence is overwhelming that there is no macroefficiency of speculative markets.

Malaysian Success Spawns New Thinking on Controls

By Claude Robinson, IPS, 15 September 1999. Malaysia’s apparent success in using capital controls to stabilize its financial crisis had forced new thinking in international financial institutions about the use of controls as policy instruments.