The Economics of the Apocalypse: Modelling the Biblical Book of Revelation
As each person describes their financial problems, inventions, and inner struggles, they describe how they have been working through the difficulty of material survival in relative isolation, going into economic defence as a lone soldier, or sliding into obscurity with only little sparks of assistance from others. In the cases of those who have not run out of money, it is a rare moment when they see their money as a resource to help others, or a collectively held asset.
I invited men from Fiverr, a website for contracting freelance services, to perform some of the responses to the two most blatantly economic questions in the survey. All in all, my request was rejected by five out of the twenty men that I requested to make testimonials. Their rejection came in one-to-two sentences.
The request I made to the men working on Fiverr acts as a survey with different significance than the original one. This is feminist economics, and the only way to find it will involve collective economic disobedience.
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The body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression — particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. I want a feminist economics that acknowledges trauma and asks the undercommoners who are tired, hiding, scared, or in bed now, who have been stolen from, ignored and violated, what could be offered to repair what has been broken by power and finance—and how.
I want it to offer the logic and support to stop the man who insists that the corporate healthcare model is working when, by all measures, exploitation, injustice, inequality and sickness are growing. We need a different way to understand and value our world and culture; we need to centre life, not capital; we need to practice real solidarity. Economic disobedience can take many shapes, and as an individual, you can do it alone as a way to train yourself to overcome the stigma of going against a mainstream ideology. It may help you develop a spinal fortitude to stop believing in and obeying the rules of capitalism.
You may stop paying taxes or debts, and you can go off the grid. But any of these actions will result in repercussions that will cost you money, or land you an experience with the very expensive criminal justice system, unless you have a network of others supporting you, strategizing with you, and leveraging your personal actions into a meaningful political collective social intervention.
The free market economy teaches you and your family unit, if you have one that you are the only thing you have, and the only thing that matters. It is only by overturning that idea in practice that you can really begin to restructure yourself and the economy. But there is almost nothing harder than coming up against the wall: This coming up against the wall—alone, which keeps us from care, from home, and from each other—is making us sick.
My revenge fantasy goes like this: The shape of the phone tree is actually more like a rhizome, if you could see the conversation network from above. We are asking each other questions about what hurts and where, and taking notes. What are we doing? It keeps us alive; it feels like a secret portal to the centre of the earth, and back to ourselves.
We are asking about the relationships, the mental health histories, the workplace violences, the plants, the nail polish, the family dramas, the addictions, the anxiety, the type of peanut butter, and the political aspirations. We are taking notes and we are putting it into encrypted folders. We are following up and asking more questions. We are Googling radical doctors with lower fees and finding out if a friend really needs the surgery.
For new people, it is difficult and a bit frustrating to understand the degree to which there are no goals besides finding connections, trust, and solidarity. Some people quit their jobs.
Economic apocalypse: Seven signs Australia can’t avoid it
In this network of phone calls and texts and viral conversations, we see that our problems are connected in varying degrees. And we look back and remember when we thought it was all our fault, that everything was in our head.
We account for one another, we hold each other to account, and we hold each other, period. To learn more about this plan, go to feministeconomicsdepartment.
It is a normal day, everyone is bored, everything good seems impossible. It is Cassie Thornton, or one of her agents. Data released by the RBA this week shows that the structural imbalances in the economy are actually becoming worse with household debt as a proportion of disposable income hitting a new record of Australian history contains several examples of where similar pre conditions have resulted in an economic apocalypse, resulting in a significant proportion of the Australian people being left economically destitute.
Following his landmark seven signs of the economic apocalypse, which was read by a quarter of a million people, Adams has now identified seven signs that it is too late for Australia to take action. Here they are in his own words:. The US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates. A cycle of global monetary tightening has begun. For example, the US Federal Reserve has raised short term interest rates in December , March and June with more forecasted increases to come.
The US Federal Reserve also announced a program, expected to commence within months, which would shrink its balance sheet i. Market expectations are now being set by officials at the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England for higher interest rates in both Canada and the UK in the near future. Chinese officials kick off trading on the long awaited Bond Connect link.
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But the series of shocks these might entail for the global economy could be much worse. Volatile currencies imply volatile financial markets and international capital flows. These, in turn, imply gyrating stock and bond prices, and even those of other assets such as real estate. All this could easily morph into another global financial and economic crisis.
The dogs of war are baying louder every day it seems as Trump, probably supported by his proposed new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, threatens protectionist actions against China and other key trade partners.
The hounds could thus become the four horsemen of the apocalypse — not the Biblical scourges of death, famine, war and pestilence, but trade wars , leading to currency wars, financial turbulence and crashing confidence. This is not a far-fetched apocalyptic vision but a real danger, given the delicate state of the global economy at present, for all its surface appearance of robustness.
It is worth remembering that, from the global financial crisis in up to the final quarter of , the global economy had been recovering only modestly with the exception of China, India and few others. What turned growth around at that point remains the subject of debate among economists but one factor was a pick-up in world trade.
If he does go ahead with the tariffs on steel and aluminium imports — and it is becoming increasingly hard for him to back away from that without looking like a paper tiger — it is doubtful that Chinese and other suppliers would take it lying down. Retaliation in some form would be needed to save face.
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Countervailing tariffs on various imports from the US would be likely, as the European Union has already indicated. This would obviously affect exports and world trade but that is by no means the end of the story. This is where the danger of currency wars the second horseman begins to rear up. Currency wars would translate into currency market and more general instability that would almost certainly damage already tenuous market confidence.