Economy

With the prospect of a so-called double-dip recession looming in the world economy, pressure is once again mounting on the eurozone. The prospect of one or more countries opting out, or being forced out, of the eurozone is becoming increasingly real as the crisis deepens and tensions between the capitalist classes in northern and southern Europe rise.

With hundreds of thousands of people in negative equity and struggling to pay their mortgages, the issue of revaluing peoples mortgages, or 'debt forgiveness' as the government have tried to brand it, has come up. Here Joe Higgins TD looks at the issues involved from a socialist perspective.

Fear of recession in the US, its credit rating downgrade and political dysfunction, not to mention the ongoing eurozone crisis, Japanese stagnation and slowdown in China, have all led to convulsions on world stock markets. socialistparty.net reports.

As their system continues to slide into its worst crisis since the 1930s, the frantic efforts of world capitalist leaders to reverse the process are farcical, contradictory and ineffective. “Is anyone in control? Is this a runaway train?” asked a presenter on a British news programme on Monday evening - the day Wall Street crashed by 6% and markets everywhere plummeted.

Thursday, 4 August was a black day on world stock exchanges. In New York, the Dow Jones index fell by 4.3 per cent and the Nasdaq index closed down 5.3 per cent "and all the gains that have occurred since year end were deleted to zero" (as the financial website E24 said, 5 August). "It was an outright massacre," said John Richard, head of strategy at RBS Global Banking & Markets, to the Wall Street Journal about yesterday’s events.

The last-minute rescue package put together by eurozone leaders on 21 July has averted an immediate Greek debt crisis. A default by Greece would have triggered a European financial crisis, with world-wide repercussions. The package, however, merely eases the Greek government’s cash-flow problem. It does little or nothing to reduce the unsustainable debt mountain or stimulate economic growth. While the eurozone leaders are heading for the beaches or the mountains, Greek workers continue to labour under the yoke of intolerable austerity measures.

Socialist Party MEP Paul Murphy has dismissed Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s statement that the last minute deal struck in Berlin was “a good day for Ireland.” Instead, Mr Murphy said if the Taoiseach truly believed that, he had been taken for a ride.

Ireland's corporation tax rate of 12.5% is a subsidy worth billions enjoyed by multinationals and Irish big business.  Time again, the capitalist media and political establishment tell us that this is a sacred cow for the Irish economy and must be preserved at all costs.

According to the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan the IMF and the EU are set to make €9 billion profit from Ireland’s bailout. Not content with heaping misery upon millions of working class people, the European Union mandarins want to make money out of it.

Here we post a video of a speech by Lynn Walsh, editor of Socialism Today (political journal of the Socialist Party, England & Wales) on the crisis in the world economy and international perspectives. An article dealing with some of these themes in more detail will be included in the new edition of the Socialist