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HOME ABOUT ARCHIVE SIDECAR CONTRIBUTORS SUBSCRIBE YOUR ACCOUNT YOUR SUBSCRIPTION LAPSED WITH NLR 126, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2020. CLICK HERE TO RENEW. × REVIEWS Michael Pettis & Matthew Klein, Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace Yale University Press: New Haven CT 2020 288 pp, 978 0 3002 4417 5 AARON BENANAV WORLD ASYMMETRIES The question of class power has made a surprise return in crisis-era mainstream economics. There has been intensive debate over whether capital’s rising share of income is due to the growing ‘monopsony’ power of firms—that is, fewer companies offering jobs—or the declining bargaining power of workers. The interest in class reflects a turn away from representative-agent models to examine the conflicts unfolding in the actual world. Rising inequality was held to be an automatic process in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the inexorable result of ‘returns greater than gr...

HOME ABOUT ARCHIVE SIDECAR CONTRIBUTORS SUBSCRIBE YOUR ACCOUNT YOUR SUBSCRIPTION LAPSED WITH NLR 126, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2020. CLICK HERE TO RENEW. × JOHN GRAHL DOLLARIZATION OF THE EUROZONE? At its initiation in the 1970s, the project of European monetary integration aimed not only at the internal goal of reduced transactions costs. Its broader ambition—in the era of increasing exchange-rate turbulence that followed Nixon’s revocation of Bretton Woods—was to build a currency, a financial system and a Europe-wide economy with greater autonomy from policy and financial measures in the us. Instead, the developments of the past decades have seen the increasing subordination of monetary and financial conditions in the Eurozone to their counterparts in the us. This systematic relegation can be tracked across a wide range of operations. As this paper will explore, subordination is also evident in the security markets, especially the dominance of us bond markets, as well as in the functionin...

A UTOPIA OF DIVISION In the Bush years, the conservative political universe was distinguished by unity of purpose. From Tom Delay’s Congress to the Bush/Cheney White House to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to the bulk of the country’s megachurches, conservative institutions functioned like one organism. Collectively, they produced identical rhetoric about the iniquity of everyone from Muslims to campus leftists, environmentalists, and immigrants, and until the Iraq War went south they looked poised to rule America for a generation, thanks in part to the ironclad discipline of message. By the time Trump came along, discipline was a fading memory. Trump was seldom perfectly in sync either with traditional Republican media like Fox, or his own White House press office. Moments in which all three pushed the same message were rare as pearls. The disconnect between Trump and his official spokesteam often played out like an intentional slapstick routine. For example, when Kayleigh McEnany said ...