On February 28, the U.S. and Israel expanded their joint genocidal war on Gaza onto Iran as well as Lebanon. After weeks of assassinations and bombing, President Donald Trump agreed to a ceasefire on April 7. This war of aggression by the U.S. and Israel is part of a continued attempt to wipe out any and all opposition to their dominance over the Middle East and its strategic energy reserves.
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In recent decades, imperialism has been somewhat out of fashion as a subject of analysis in academic circles. Yet in the past several months, President Donald Trump had reminded everyone that U.S. imperialism is indeed alive and kicking. In fact, imperialism never went away, as leading radical economist Costas Lapavitsas points out in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Lapavitsas…
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This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.
A bit less than 20 years ago, a nationwide housing bubble collapsed, giving us the Great Recession. Millions of homeowners had their houses foreclosed. We had high unemployment for the better part of a decade. And the subsequent falloff in construction created the basis for another extraordinary run-up in house prices during the pandemic. In other words, it was pretty bad news.
The current bubble in AI is laying the groundwork for another bad story. As was the case both before and after the collapse of the housing bubble, there is a tremendous premium in intellectual circles on making the problem more complicated than it is.
My latest poster child for this point is a column in the New York Times by Richard Bookstaber, a hedge fund manager who had predicted the financial crisis that followed the collapse of the housing bubble. His column notes the AI bubble, but then argues that the big problem is that we are also facing risks from the private credit market, as well as geopolitical risks, like the fact that China could cut off the supply of chips from Taiwan and also the price shock associated with the cutoff of the oil flow through the straits of Hormuz.
The collapse of the stock prices of the companies that are big factors in AI will then have huge spillover effects, devastating people’s 401(k)s, as well as whacking pension funds. This will lead to a huge fall in consumption, which would likely lead to a recession.
The warnings are well-taken, but the story is actually not complicated.
For nearly three years the Dominican Republic had been excitedly preparing to host the region’s biggest multilateral event: the 2025 Summit of the Americas, bringing together the leaders of nearly every government in the Western Hemisphere. But on November 3rd, only a month before the summit was to take place, the DR’s foreign ministry abruptly announced the postponement of the event citing…
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Allies of the Trump administration are reportedly circulating a document that they say would grant the president sweeping powers over elections, including the ability to ban mail-in ballots, by declaring a national emergency over disproven allegations of interference by China in the 2020 election, a new Washington Post report finds. Right-wing activists who claim to be in contact with the…
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