Alternative Visions -Ukraine: Who Benefits? Who Pays? and ‘Japan’s ‘Abenomics’ Fails - 03/22/14

Dr. Jack Rasmus provides an update of the economic crisis in the Ukraine, predicting the future IMF deal next week, and surveying the positive and economic impacts on the Russia and European economies as sanctions and IMF details emerge.  Why the USA has ‘most to gain’ and least to lose from an ongoing crisis in the Ukraine?  And why the Ukrainian people stand to lose the most, as the economic crisis deepens. (read Dr. Rasmus’s Counterpunch blog article on ‘Who Benefits, Who Loses’? posted on the PRN website and on is own blog, jackrasmus.com, for details).  Dr. Rasmus then turns to an analysis of the Japan economy today and explains why Japan’s ‘Abenomics’ policies (named after Japan’s prime minister, Abe) of the past year are an echo of US policies since 2008 that have failed to produce a sustained economic recovery except for investors, bankers, corporations, and the wealthiest 1%.  As in the US, Europe and elsewhere, the preferred policy of global capitalism is monetary—QE, zero rates, and bank bailouts—while fiscal policy is token in content, and form and then quickly withdrawn with little positive economic effect, or is ‘austere’ (austerity) to make the populace pay for the crisis and bank bailouts. Rasmus concludes with the notion that Capitalism’s major crisis in the 21st century is the inability to sustain real investment that creates jobs, incomes, middle class consumption and thus recovery.  The ‘new normal’ long term is what we see emerging everywhere—slowing investment and global growth.