IMF bailouts of Asia and Russia<\/a>\u00a0in the late 1990s, and multitrillion rescues of the financial sector in 2008 and again in 2020. The argument, from Summers, was rather simple: financial institutions must not be allowed to take crippling losses, even if those losses were the fault of the companies in question.<\/p>\nBut the logic changes when it\u2019s ordinary individuals, rather than multibillion-dollar corporations, who need help. Immediately, the concern shifts to inflation, interest rates, and the national debt. Banks can be too big to fail, but the working class is too small to rescue. American capitalism can always tolerate more individual ruin.<\/p>\n
The wonks propose boosting unemployment insurance in lieu of direct payments. But few of them have had to wait months for their benefits to arrive, calling and emailing and even tweeting to no avail. Few have experienced their state-issued debit cards suddenly, without explanation, ceasing to work, resulting in a terrifying interruption of payments. For many Americans, $2,000 can cover multiple months of rent. Summers, who has raked in millions from hedge funds and speaking fees, will never understand that reality. Money so small means nothing to him.<\/p>\n
There have been signs that neoliberals like Summers will enjoy somewhat less influence in the Biden administration than they did under Clinton or Obama. Biden\u2019s White House economic advisers are noticeably to the left of Summers, and so far the new president has bucked the advice of deficit hawks.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s hope it lasts. Summers and his fellow Clintonites are always in search of a limiting principle to keep efforts to alleviate hardship from getting out of hand. What we need is a limiting principle on the baneful influence of neoliberals like Larry Summers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Doug Henwood recently wrote in Jacobin, the madness surrounding GameStop should serve as a reminder of the uselessness of the stock market \u2014 a giant casino where a small number of people get rich from trading trillions of dollars of securities per day, while raising virtually no capital for real investment. Realizing this, progressive [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1643,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22094"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1643"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22094"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22095,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22094\/revisions\/22095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}