Search results for ""Author Jeff Rubin""

We are constantly being told that globalisation is good for the economy and good for us, but it’s actually the opposite, argues bestselling author Jeff Rubin in this provocative, timely book. In the pre-coronavirus world, governments and economists bragged that GDP was growing and unemployment was down. But even then, real wages had been stagnant for decades, union membership had collapsed, and full-time employment no longer guaranteed you could pay the bills. When we emerge from the virus, it would be nice to think that living in a country that’s getting richer means that you’re getting richer too, but that’s not the way it works anymore. Falling tariffs, low interest rates, global deregulation, and tax policies that benefit only the rich have all had the same effect: the erosion of the ‘expendable’ middle class. The result, growing global inequality, is a problem of our own making. And solving it won’t be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff. Articulating a vision that, remarkably, dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous.

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During the pandemic, the borrowing patterns of the Canadian government inflated a national deficit by a factor of ten in just two years - and the time has come to pay for it. The ramifications of international COVID-19 spending could potentially last for decades, and inevitably one of the first manifestations of these consequences will be that central banks will lose control of interest rates, and therefore of growth and inflation targets. The genie will be out of the bottle. That is just the first symptom of a series of cascading upheavals. Supply-chain disruptions have already shown the vulnerability of the globalist model that has fuelled growth for the past decades. War has not only shown the fragility of the status quo, but has revealed diplomatic and economic rifts that promise to shift trading patterns, which means access to markets and to resources. At the same time, the precarity of the US dollar underlines the life-or-death importance of those resources, energy in particular.

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