then the Washington Consensus institutions used pressure, conditionality, and carrot of infrastructure where public opposition significant
ILO vs World Bank
ILO: pension systems should provide old-age income security, difficult with privately managed DC individual accounts
World Bank: pension systems should reduce fiscal pressures.
ILO was right, private pensions underperformed and the WB dropped its push for pensions privatization.
not for long though: under the emerging #WallStreetConsensus, World Bank again pushing for privatisation, this time framed as 'domestic resource mobilisation' for deeper capital markets.
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no punches pulled on the Commission's Net Zero Industrial Act, the 2022 attempt to respond to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act with a lot of derisking talk but no money (ahem, European Sovereignty Fund)
Climate policy is industrial policy, and the other way around.
An important reminder that EU's climate policy was once ambitious, state-driven decarbonisation.
the Clean Energy Finance Authority would subsidize foreign demand for US cleantech - or derisk BlackRock renewable assets in say, Kenya with subsidies/guarantees.
nothing in this proposal from a top Kamala Harris advisor suggests US should enable technology transfers to countries wishing to pursue their own domestic cleantech capabilities.
in #WallStreetConsensus, Global South are consumers of American cleantech, with American dollars.
Two amazing Global South progressives and a Nobel prize winner walk into an Oxfam panel on post-neoliberalism
Stiglitz: w neoliberalism, the growth of financial markets changed the political game tremendously
Lula 's special advisor @AAbdenur - clear mismatch - Global North openly exposing industrial policy but pushing IMF/World Bank to continue with austerity and partnerships for hyper-financialisation
missing from this @FT account of the rapid rise of infrastructure as an asset class is the sustained effort that G20 governments have put into derisking infrastructure assets for institutional capital - this is the derisking state in action #WallStreetConsensus
@FT with @BJMbraun we've termed this a weak derisking macrofinancial regime - a set of policies (as in the G20 Infrastructure as an Asset Class agenda, or World Bank Maximising Finance for Development) that seeks to mobilise private capital into infrastructure osf.io/preprints/soca…
BlackRock 's recent acquisition of GIP is a bet that governments - under ideological or real constraints on fiscal space - will not pursue public infrastrucuture projects but instead continue to derisk private capital
I did not expect this, but Rachel Reeves' Mais lecture is a lot more interesting - and dare I say, promising - than either the commentariat focused on fiscal rules or the past weeks of 'maxxed credit cards' would have us believe
some parts are taking a direct swipe at us advocates of Big (Green) State, but it's a careful articulation of the alternative rather than the empty austerity ideology of 'maxxed out credit cards'
1. We're getting climate politics back at the Bank of England.
Remember, under Carney, it became a world leader in climate policy making, not the greenwashed US Fed version of 'disclosure'/single materiality that Bailey prefers.
it is a strategic and tactical mistake for progressives to centre the superrich in climate politics.
Tactics - global tax system is organised to enable rampant tax avoidance + evasion for both high net worth individuals & corporations.
Recent efforts to reform have been far less successful than we'd have expected a decade after Piketty made inequality politically salient at global level. Fighting for global solutions around taxes is important, but shouldnt be the key front.