Money And Power: A Toxic Bond

Money and power: A toxic bond
By Samah El-Shahat | Al Jazeera

What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that the power of banks and the power of bondholders are preventing the Obama administration from taking sensible decisions that place the interest of the taxpayer before that of the elite minority of bankers. The US's strategy for fixing the banking mess we are all in is inherently unjust and unfair, for it is rewarding the people who caused the crisis in the first place.

I am a development economist, and in very crude terms development economics is about how to make emerging economies grow, develop, and become like industrialised economies.

Like many others working in my profession, I am always struck by the injustices facing less developed countries in trying to break out of the arms of poverty, from global institutions that placed the interests of those who fund them - always the richer more powerful economies - above the interest of those developing countries, to global trade rules that were and are blatantly unfair.

So for those economists such as myself who opted out of analysing the world through a "neoliberal" or "neoclassical" perspective, we analyse power and how that can seriously affect, influence and manipulate trade for certain interests.

These relationships of power asymmetry can also be found within the developing countries themselves. Far too often I have worked on projects which failed, not because of poor economics or poor design, but because it went against the existing power structure in a village or industrial cluster.

That is, it was seen as disadvantageous to the existing power structures and status quo and hence those with power, prestige and a lot of money, went out of their way to stop it. Or equally as bad, they went out of their way to make sure it benefited only them.

In economic parlance, we say they "captured" the project and, of course, the funds. Read more.