8 articles

• Whither the Washington Consensus?

  30 July 2021, by MESTRUM Francine

  John Williamson passed away on 21 April 2021. He was the economist who neatly outlined and named the ‘Washington Consensus’, the policies the World Bank, the IMF, the US Federal Reserve Board and the US Treasury agreed to impose on debt-ridden countries of Latin America. At that moment, 1990, these ‘structural adjustment’ policies had already been applied for a decade with disastrous social consequences. Social expenditures were lowered almost everywhere, public services were privatised, labour markets were deregulated and millions of people lost their jobs. John Williamson emphasised that the Consensus did not cover any social policies.

• Covid-19: Likely financial conflagrations to come

  13 May 2020, by Comité pour l’abolition des dettes illégitimes (CADTM), Eric Toussaint

  The coronavirus pandemic will have lasting and dramatic consequences on people’s living conditions. This is the first international crisis with such general and far-reaching effects all over the world within such a short lapse of time. More will be affected than in the Second World War, not in terms of the death toll, which fortunately will be much lower, but in terms of the simultaneity of the crisis worldwide and the kind of measures implemented by governments.

• Wars have become too cheap to boost growth

  19 March 2019, by The Bichler & Nitzan Archives

  This week, with the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Atlanta anticipating sharply lower GDP growth for 2019:Q1, President Trump presented a ‘Budget for A Better America’, calling for a smaller government and a bigger military.

• The lesson of Brazil: The scenarios, dark spots of the left, tomorrow’s challenges

  12 November 2018, by Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, Pierre Beaudet

  The catastrophe — expected and foreseeable — has happened. This immense country, with its 200 million inhabitants, is now in darkness. At best, it will take a decade or two to emerge.

• South America: The end of a cycle?

  2 July 2018, by Autres Brésils, Glauber Sezerino, Ritimo

  Out of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that have marked them deeply between the 1960s and the 1980s, a large number of South American countries have seen the emergence of democratization processes based on policies often described as right-wing.

  This economic-political model ran out of steam at the end of the 1990s. The sub-continent sees the arrival in power of new political elites, mostly from social movements born in the previous period.

  However, from 2010, in a context of retraction of the global economy, these projects seem threatened by their internal limits. In this context, this "left cycle" seems to be coming to an end - or at least in the face of a blockade - with the advancement of the right wings within these left-wing governments.

  In this dossier, we will try to analyze the specific dynamics of this ongoing process in the subcontinent.