Articles by Nick Beams

We found 17 results.


Oxfam Report: Poorer Countries Going from Crisis to Catastrophe
Nick Beams | WSWS - TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Apr 2022

19 Apr 2022 – In the lead up to the semi-annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank being held in Washington this week, the global aid agency Oxfam has produced a report detailing the horrendous impact of rising inflation, coming on top of the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, for almost half the world’s population.

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Rampant Wall Street Speculation: The Fever Chart of a Terminally Diseased System
Nick Beams | WSWS - TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 May 2021

7 May 2021 – The phenomenal rise of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which has risen 11,000 percent since the start of the year, is the expression of a seemingly new principle in the world of speculation—the more intrinsically worthless a so-called “asset” the faster its rise.

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The Class Dynamic of the Massive Wall Street Speculation
Nick Beams | WSWS - TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Jan 2021

30 Dec 2020 – The year is ending amid the greatest economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s, but Wall Street is finishing the year at a record high. The ruling financial oligarchy is benefiting from the COVID-19 pandemic to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

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Goldman Sachs Fined $2.9 Billion over Role in 1MDB Corruption Case
Nick Beams | WSWS - TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Oct 2020

23 Oct 2020 – Goldman Sachs has been fined $2.9 billion the US Department of Justice announced yesterday closing one of the biggest corruption cases in the history of Wall Street. With a July settlement with Malaysian authorities, Goldman Sachs will pay more than $5 billion for its involvement in the 1MDB scandal but it can afford it easily: 2019 revenue: US$ 36.55 billion – Net worth: US$ 64 billion

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JPMorgan Pays $920 Million Settlement over Illegal Trades
Nick Beams | WSWS - TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Oct 2020

1 Oct 2020 – Following hard on the heels of revelations that major global banks have been involved in a network of criminal money laundering, JPMorgan Chase has been fined $920 million for manipulating markets on two of its trading desks. The charges involved the practice of spoofing.

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Real Economy Plunges but Financial Profits Surge
Nick Beams | WSWS - TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Jul 2020

16 Jul 2020 – The four major US banks this week have highlighted the widening dichotomy between the real economy and the financial system. The US is set to record the worst recession since the Great Depression, threatening elevated levels of unemployment well into the future and a wave of bankruptcies. Yet the banks are raking in billions of dollars through speculative operations financed by the massive intervention of the Fed into all corners of the financial markets.

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As Pandemic Spread Accelerates, Wall Street Celebrates Biggest Quarterly Surge in More Than 20 Years: Obscene
Nick Beams | WSWS - TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Jul 2020

2 July 2020 – The end of the second quarter, June 30, must surely go down as one of the stranger days in financial history. With the US economy in the grip of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, having experienced an even more rapid contraction than in the 1930s crisis, Wall Street recorded its best quarter for more than 20 years.

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Wall Street Celebrates Milken Pardon
Nick Beams | WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Feb 2020

20 Feb 2020 – The decision by Donald Trump to pardon the financial criminal Michael Milken is being celebrated on Wall Street and for good reason. He was a pioneer of the methods and financial mechanisms that have led to the greatest accumulation of wealth by the financial oligarchy ever seen in history, at the expense of the jobs and social conditions of broad sections of the working class.

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Trump Signs Hong Kong “Democracy” Bill
Nick Beams | WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Dec 2019

29 Nov 2019 – Entitled the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act”—and passed by the US Congress with only one dissenting voice, making it veto-proof—the legislation has nothing to do with either.

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Wall Street at Record Highs as Global Growth Slows
Nick Beams | WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Nov 2019

7 Nov 2019 – As Wall Street reaches new highs all three major indexes (the Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nadaq) hit records in the past week. While impoverished workers and youth from US, India, Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, Ecuador are told “there is no money” for jobs, wages, schools or health care, trillions are made available to the speculators and big investors to increase their stock portfolios and enlarge their personal fortunes.

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Marx’s Analysis of the Laws of Capital and the Share Market Crisis
Nick Beams | WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Feb 2018

17 Feb 2018 – Down through the years one of the most persistent attacks on Karl Marx by the high priests of bourgeois economics—the ideological guardians of the profit system—has been his contention that, in the final analysis, capitalism depends on the impoverishment of the working class.

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After The Financial Crisis: How the Ultra-Wealthy Have Prospered
Nick Beams | WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Sep 2017

The 2008 crisis proved to be but a “temporary setback.” The process of wealth accumulation is not the result of any kind of economic “recovery,” nor the supposed “entrepreneurship” of its beneficiaries. Rather, it is the outcome of a system characterised, as Marx put it, by the accumulation of fabulous wealth at one pole and poverty and misery at the other.

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Deepening National Antagonisms Dominate G7 Summit
Nick Beams | WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 May 2016

The G7 nations are seeking to ramp up military pressure against China, amid a deepening economic slump and divisions within their own ranks.

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The G20 Summit: A Spectacle of Political Bankruptcy
Nick Beams, WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Sep 2015

7 Sep 2015 – The meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers held in Ankara, Turkey over the weekend underscored the inability of the major capitalist powers to initiate any measures to halt the recessionary forces overtaking the world economy.

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The Escalation of Global Financial Parasitism
Nick Beams, WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Jun 2015

The rise in stock markets expresses not the health, but rather the deepening sickness, of the global economic order. The imposition of financial dictatorship is not a hypothetical issue—it has already been implemented in Greece, impoverishing millions of people.

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US “Grand Strategy” for War against China Laid Out
Nick Beams, WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 May 2015

The Council on Foreign Relations report cites a publication produced during World War II defining “grand strategy” as one that “so integrates the policies and armaments of a nation that the resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory.” This is not merely a concept of war but “an inherent element of statecraft at all times.”

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Financial Markets Celebrate European Central Bank Launch of €1 Trillion Quantitative Easing Program
Nick Beams, WSWS – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Jan 2015

[Quantitative Easing: euphemism for ‘printing more money for benefit of banks, financial vultures.’ – TMS Editor] The measures will have little or no impact on the real economy. Rather, they are aimed at making available further supplies of ultra-cheap cash for financial speculation.

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