In a new major report, the World Bank conceded that its decades-long war on industrial policy was wrong, saying its old advice “has not aged well — it has the practical value of a floppy disk today.”
But this is not an intellectual awakening.
The World Bank's doctrine shifted because the means through which Western nations can maintain their dominance shifted — not because economists suddenly discovered new evidence.
The world’s wealthiest nations are now pursuing industrial policy so openly that it can no longer be denied to the rest of the world.
When the geopolitical winds shift, so does the ideology of institutions where wealthy nations' interests are deeply entrenched.
Commemorating China’s Global Civilization Initiative on its 3rd Anniversary, I harness Marx and Engels’s understanding of historical development to argue that the GCI is central to challenging imperialism.
China's Global Civilization Initiative https://t.co/4ImtjkgtxQ
Qué daño ha hecho ese texto de Umberto Eco y esa infografía de Pictoline, pues muchos aseguran que el "fascismo es de izquierda" 🫠
No sean como ellos, reflexionen un poco antes de repetir lo mismo ☝️🤓
El fascismo es un peligro urgente como para andar desestimándolo 🚨⚠️
Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou: Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon. Two CIA estimates said so, and Khamenei had issued a fatwa against it. Netanyahu lied to every U.S. president to make Iran seem like an existential threat.
US: “It was a preemptive attack on Iran”
Pentagon: “No sign that Iran was going to attack first”
US: “No but if Israel attacked Iran, then Iran would have attacked us, so we preemptively attacked them first” 🤡
This is beyond satire.
If failure is an orphan, success has many fathers. Inevitably, neoliberals falsely claim China's spectacular success. But what is the truth? This webinar about a remarkable book reveals How China stromed the heavens!
https://t.co/QXWq8Gt93t via @YouTube
The idea that developing countries can skip industrialization — and instead develop based on services — is fundamentally misguided.
Except for very small countries, *every* country that has transformed its economy from low- to high-income has done so via manufacturing.
🌍El mundo invierte miles de millones en proteger la naturaleza, pero gasta billones en actividades que la degradan.
📉 Por cada dólar destinado a conservación, se gastan 30 dólares en destruir el planeta.
Esta incongruencia no es sostenible | @UNEP
👉 https://t.co/3ZqurEDi6h
This FT report is a bit misleading. If you translate the original Qiushi article, you will see that President Xi is calling for deepening the internationalization of the RMB and making it into *a* global reserve currency (alongside the dollar, euro, yen, etc.), in a multipolar world.
China does not want to replace the dollar as *the* dominant global reserve currency. It simply aims for the renminbi to play a more important international role (and it wants the ability to pay for crucial imports with its own currency, to limit dependence on the dollar).
Los medios hegemónicos no distinguen entre unas protestas y otras: no importa si son en Irán, Rusia, Cuba o Venezuela… ni si son en Alemania, Francia o EE.UU. ¿Verdad que no? 😬 😅
(Video completo)
"Me uní al ejército de EEUU por pobreza, lo que hacen para reclutar es ir a zonas pobres y ofrecer lo que el estado no da, nos ofrecen atención médica, vivienda, estabilidad... ofrecen a los soldados socialismo para ir al extranjero a defender el capitalismo".
Un ex-soldado de EEUU, retrata como el imperialismo usa medidas socialistas para reclutar pobres y enviarlos a defender el capitalismo.
The AI bubble is insanely large:
The market cap of US publicly traded companies is now 224% of GDP, the highest level ever.
Today, the market cap of just tech stocks is more than 100% of US GDP. At the peak of the Dot-com bubble in 2000, it was "only" around 60% of US GDP.
Moreover, the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 is approaching that of the peak of the Dot-com bubble.
For context, at the peak of the railway mania in the UK in 1845, the market cap of railway stocks was just over 10% of GDP. This shows how ridiculously financialized Western economies have become since then.
Source: Financial Times https://t.co/F8fOZLI246
The Nobel Prize in Economics is characterised by extreme institutional concentration: almost every prizewinner has passed through an economics department at an elite US university.
Sure, these universities attract top talent globally.
But this institutional concentration of prizewinners is part and parcel of a broader set of problems in the field of economics: elite dominance, intellectual gatekeeping, the dominance of Western perspectives, and disciplinary homogeneity.
These dynamics have been well documented. Here are three papers and one book that examine them:
Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan (2015), “The Superiority of Economists”: Economics is a uniquely hierarchical and self-reinforcing field, where elite training pipelines dominate publication and influence.
Baccini and Re (2023), “Who Are the Gatekeepers of Economics?”: A small group of elite institutions and scholars controls the editorial machinery, reinforcing disciplinary homogeneity.
Freeman, Xie, Zhang, and Zhou (2024), “High and Rising Institutional Concentration of Award-Winning Economists”: Economics has the highest and growing institutional concentration among elite academics across all disciplines.
Dutt, Alves, Kesar, and Kvangraven (2025), “Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction”: Mainstream economics is rooted in Eurocentric, colonial assumptions.
Two interesting precisions on the rare earth ban that China made over the past 24 hours:
1) The Chinese embassy in the US (src: https://t.co/PzRWHawU06) said this was done in retaliation to the US violating the agreement made in Madrid in September by introducing "a string of new restrictive measures targeting China" such as the introduction of the so-called 50 percent rule that results in thousands of new Chinese companies being sanctioned.
2) The Chinese Ministry of Commerce (src: https://t.co/SWj0ne5TCe) precise that the export controls only target "usage of medium and heavy rare earths and related items in the military field," which was already specified in the original announcement but many people misrepresented it as a rare earth ban. Although, to be fair, "dual use" was also used as justification by the US for their own export controls of semiconductors on China, and everyone knows it was a bullshit excuse, so it's pretty normal that people view this sort of justification cynically (Americans in particular since they can rightly see it as following their own playbook 😅)
🔴On 7 October 2023, Israel began spreading atrocity propaganda — rapes, burned babies, family massacres. But a big share of deaths that day were by Israeli fire. From the start, EI exposed these lies while mainstream media spread them. Here's some of our key investigations🧵
today is the two year anniversary of the genocidal Israeli death-cult deliberately mass killing its own civilians as part of the Hannibal Directive, including burning children alive by shooting at them with tanks, and then fabricating atrocity propaganda and blaming it on Hamas. The entire Western media and political class has never, not even once, reported on the Hannibal Directive even though Israeli outlets like Haaretz confirmed it.