March 16, 2023

Analysis

Red Finance

The wartime communist market experience in China

In terms of its size, dynamism, and degree of global integration, China’s market economy is extraordinary. Though it’s known officially as a “socialist market with Chinese characteristics,” its market features far predate the 1978 decision on “reform and opening.” The reformist Chinese growth model has always been characterized by a distinct pragmatism. This involves integrating…

Longform

March 25, 2023

Reviews

No Alternative?

On Fritz Bartel’s The Triumph of Broken Promises

The Triumph of Broken Promises by Fritz Bartel is a new history of the end of the Cold War. Challenging conventional narratives that focus on Reagan’s military-ideological assertiveness or Gorbachev’s openness to reform, the book gives a material and structural…


Profits, Prices, and Power

The first postwar tightening cycle and perspectives on today’s inflation

If they are remembered at all, the 1950s are now thought of as a lost golden age of stable growth and political economic consensus. But the second half of the decade saw rising prices, tightening financial conditions, diminished industrial employment,…

March 1, 2023

Analysis

The IMF Trap

Debt, austerity, and inequality in Sri Lanka’s historic crisis

Massive demonstrations that swept Sri Lanka last year exposed the serious challenges at the heart of the global economy. In July 2022, former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country, only a few months after announcing a hasty…

February 25, 2023

Reviews

Money as Empire?

On Perry Mehrling’s “Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System”

Money makes the world go round, or as Karl Marx put it, Geldgespräche, Quatsch-Spaziergänge. How does this work at the global or international level? Perry Mehrling’s elegantly written biography of the MIT economist Charles Poor Kindleberger illuminates the relationship between…

February 22, 2023

Analysis

Crisis Response

European Central Bank policy in 2008 and 2020

At the dawn of the newly implemented Eurozone, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi and Daniel Gros argued that three broad issues might present problems for Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Bini Smaghi, then Director for International Affairs at the Italian Treasury,…

February 18, 2023

Reviews

The Sanctions Age

On Agathe Demarais’s “Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests”

Charles De Gaulle declared in 1961, “A great state which does not possess [nuclear weapons]… does not command its own destiny.” France became the world’s fourth nuclear power in 1960 following the Gerboise Bleue nuclear test. Yet the command of…

February 15, 2023

Analysis

Securitizing the Transition

The logic of privatization in climate finance

In the eyes of the IMF, a G20 panel, and, lately, the US Treasury Secretary, the time has come for multilateral development banks to adapt their development mandates to the logic of derisking. This tactic—lauded as a solution for “mobilizing”…

February 11, 2023

Analysis

The Carbon Triangle

China’s real estate bubble and global emissions

China has ended zero-Covid. The resultant viral tsunami is crashing through China’s cities and countryside, causing hundreds of millions of infections and untold numbers of deaths. The reversal followed widespread protests against lockdown measures. But the protests were not the…

February 1, 2023

Analysis

Unraveling Dollarization

State-building, accumulation, and debt in post-revolutionary Georgia

The financial crises of the 1990s in Asia, Argentina, and Russia sparked growing interest in the phenomenon of dollarization—the use of a foreign currency to perform national currency function. Dollarization, however, has a history dating back to the nineteenth history.…

January 25, 2023

Analysis

Militarized Adaptation

War, energy, and NATO’s new climate framework

This essay first appeared in GREEN, a journal from Groupe d’études géopolitiques. When NATO held its two-day summit in Madrid in June 2022, the Spanish government deployed ten thousand police officers to cordon off entire parts of the city, including…

Shortform

March 23, 2023

Analysis

Stranded Countries and Stranded Assets

Outsourcing the energy transition to the Gulf

This is the eleventh edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. The US routinely flouts its international climate financing commitments, rarely delivering on its promises. Last year, for example,…

March 18, 2023

Sources

The South Korean government recently announced that it would compensate Koreans who served as forced laborers for Japanese corporations under colonial rule. The reparation funds will be raised domestically; Japanese corporations will not contribute. 

March 11, 2023

Sources

Last month, in order to enforce stronger content moderation and transparency rules, the European Union’s 2022 Digital Services Act began requiring major social media platforms in Europe to self-report their user size. Days later, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Section 230, which protects platforms from being liable for…

March 9, 2023

Analysis

Cash, Cars, Chemicals (and Corn)

Three big decarbonization plots

This is the tenth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. Decarbonization—reducing the output of invisible CO2 molecules into the atmosphere—requires nothing less than remaking the chemical basis of…

March 4, 2023

Sources

On February 6, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck large parts of Turkey and Syria. Since then, the death toll has risen above 50,000 and over 160,000 buildings have collapsed. 

March 3, 2023

Analysis

Wall Street Consensus a la Française

Development agendas at the Gabon One Forest Summit

Since his election in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron has periodically committed to resetting France’s relationship with Africa. In 2020, his so-called Macron Doctrine denounced the Washington Consensus for creating a “capitalism that has become financialized, that has become over-concentrated…

February 25, 2023

Sources

On February 3, a freight train operated by Norfolk Southern derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. The major accident was later declared “100 percent preventable.” Falling safety standards in the industry can be traced back to the Staggers Act of 1980, which spurred deregulation. Examining the aftermath of this shift, a…

February 23, 2023

Analysis

Debt and Power in Pakistan

The subcontinent’s embattled debtor isn’t merely the passive victim of the climate crisis— it is being plundered by its elites

The subcontinent’s embattled debtor isn’t merely the passive victim of the climate crisis—it is being plundered by its elites.

February 18, 2023

Sources

Chile has long been known in the region for relatively steady growth paired with high levels of income inequality. The country’s economic trajectory has been linked to its “labor flexibilization” policies implemented under Pinochet, which have not changed substantially since the transition to democracy in 1990.

February 11, 2023

Sources

Protests against a measure to raise the retirement age in France and news of China’s population decline have prompted discussion around aging populations and implications for social policy. 


Series

Series are collections of works published by Phenomenal World on a single subject or area of research. Series are commissioned to analyze particular issues or historical moments, and are either ongoing projects or collected as one-time volumes.

Browse all