Reddit reviews Confronting Global Neoliberalism: Third World Resistance and Development Strategies

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https://www.academia.edu/812427/Neoliberalism_in_the_European_Union

> Despite all of the internal contradictions and variations that are apparent in…neoliberal policies, outcomes are always the result of deliberate political choices rather than the workings of abstract forces such as globalization and market competition…Neoliberal preferences for “free trade” and “free” capital mobility, monetary restraint, and budgetary austerity; flexibilization of labour markets; downward pressure on wages; privatization of public companies and services, and the “workfarist” restructuring of welfare states were not random policy proscriptions. Together, they produced the intended outcome: all countries subjected to neoliberal restructuring experienced a redistribution of wealth from work-dependent wage earners to owners of financial assets.

> the EMU (of which the UK is not a member) fortifies the principles of monetary restraint and budgetary austerity by forcing EMU member states into a fiscal straitjacket. The budgetary constraints imposed by the convergence criteria also compel member states to introduce far-reaching reforms in labour and social policies because their ability to confront unemployment and social exclusion is severely constrained by budgetary limitations. Whereas the Commission continues to advocate price stability and fiscal austerity as the most effective measures to promote growth, the outcomes of these policies are slow growth rates (if not outright stagnation), very moderate real income increases, and an unemployment rate that amounts to more than eight percent across the Union.

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This book, Confronting Global Neoliberalism, looks at the imposition of these policies on other countries by the IMF and World Bank as a development model. You can find a free pdf online. The first part of the book looks at the change from the post WWII economy to our current form of market globalism.

> …neoliberalism, which had been gestating in the US as a hegemonic ideology and set of policy exhortations, was foisted on the world. The enabling mechanisms for this had been put in operation largely under the political radar (including that of US politics) throughout the 1970s...faced with the increased competitive prowess of Western Europe and Japan in the key consumer durable industries central to capitalist post- WWII growth, a burgeoning trade deficit, and looming fiscal deficit from its overseas military adventures (these, such as the Vietnam War, fuelled a misallocation of investment and resources away from the civilian economy, leading to further diminutions in US competitiveness), the US engineered a series of global “coups” that would see the US dollar increasingly held as world reserve currency even as its anchoring to gold was severed. This was replaced by a new Treasury Bill IOU (T-bill IOU) standard of global reserves which cemented US monetary seigniorage for only the cost of printing dollars...Most importantly, there occurred the passing of levers of global finance into the hands of a rising phalanx of private transnational banks (TNBs) and financial intermediaries. This “financialization” however, was never an independent variable in the global economy placing symmetric constraints on all states and their increasingly disempowered “national” banks but a core component of US dollar-based hegemony. With the world awash with dollars from US global militarism, the “petro-dollar” arrangement brokered by the Nixon administration16 and dollars streaming from the hollowed out US consumer durable industrial edifice seeking new profitable investment outlets, Wall Street became the center of dollar-based credit and international (increasingly short term) dollar-based financial arbitrage. Third world states’ ISI (import substitution industrialization, basically protecting key industries from imported goods) initiatives benefited for some time from the ready availability of internationally loanable funds, particularly given the spiraling dollar in nation of the 1970s. But with the unilateral raising of US interest rates by Paul Volcker, the US unilateral interest rate hike that was directed toward supporting the dollar as global currency under conditions of US industrial decline at the beginning of the Reagan presidency, the third world spun into debt crisis and the ISI dream was shattered for perpetuity.

From A Brief History of Neoliberalism

> We also know that the Saudis agreed at that time, presumably under military pressure if not open threat from the US, to recycle all of their petrodollars through the New York investment banks. The latter suddenly found themselves in command of massive funds for which they needed to find profitable outlets….more profitable opportunities had to be sought out abroad…they became far more focused on lending capital to foreign governments. This required the liberalization of international credit and financial markets, and the US government began to actively promote and support this strategy…hungry for credit, developing countries were encouraged to borrow heavily…at rates advantageous to New York bankers…however, any modest rise in interest rates could easily push vulnerable countries into default…the first major test…came in the wake of the Volcker shock that drove Mexico into default…in return for rescheduling their debt, indebted countries were required to implement institutional reforms, such as cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labour market laws, and privatization…thus was ‘structural adjustment’ invented.

From Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution

> We turn now to the international monetary and financial mechanisms - in whose functioning the United States is privileged by the fact that it holds the world currency. This strategic advantage has often been dis­cussed. In this regard, one speaks of seignorage, that is, of the feudal lord's privilege to coin a currency and to fix its rate…We are emphasizing here the role of the dollar in American domination, within a world of floating exchange rates and free international capital mobility-a world of market globalization. We should not hesitate to assert: if the United States had not enjoyed this dominant position, it never would have been an agent of globalization, and no other country would have replaced it as the vector of such a new financial order. In a system of free international capital mobility, all countries are exposed to fund withdrawals, but they are more so when their currency represents little in the eyes of international investors, that is, when their exchange rates may be easily de­stabilized. A country whose currency is placed above those of others is lit­tle exposed to the effects of open markets. An internal crisis will affect it much less than the others, because it will not be amplified by capital move­ments (this country might, however, suffer from the repercussions of a deep foreign crisis). For all the other countries, whose governments have, to a large extent, lost control over their own currency, both because of floating exchange rates (or rigid pegging to the dollar) and the free circula­tion of capital, the risks raised by globalization are permanent and considerable. These countries may profit occasionally, as long as their economic, political, and social situation appears sufficiently secure and it is possible to make large profits there, but globalization is a permanent threat to them.

From Confronting Global Neoliberalism

> In beginning to unpack the ultimate significance of the Washington Consensus as development mantra through the waning years of the 20th and early years of the 21st centuries, we have to be clear: neoliberalism was never really about an epiphany of the market in national and international economic spaces… While the neoliberal agenda dubbed “privatization” did constitute a massive divestiture by governments of enterprises they had (in many cases successfully) run, the passing of these into hands of giant MNCs that operated like Soviet Union-style command economies can hardly be viewed as a return to laissez faire. So-called “deregulation” also did not amount to marketization but a reregulation designed to support MNC (multinational corporation) power as the strength of organized labor and efficacy of worker rights and protections were eviscerated.