The bubble burst during the first year of the pandemic. Sensing danger, Beijing announced the “three red lines” policy, under which, in order to access more credit, companies must control their ratio of debt to cash, equity, and assets. Crossing all three thresholds was the Evergrande Group, the world’s highest-valued developer. At its peak the company was worth over $40 billion, but with liabilities of more than over $270 billion. It was also a former business partner of Donald Trump, with failed plans to build a massive skyscraper in Guangzhou. Cut off from government support, Evergrande collapsed in fall 2021 and was ordered last year to liquidate.

China has thus already been burned by pivoting too hastily to domestic consumption, only to be rewarded with a crisis that has saddled the country with trillions of dollars in losses. Many fear China is already in the same trap of overleveraged paralysis (“balance sheet recession”) as its neighbors. If anything, it is precisely because of the catastrophe of pro-consumption policy that Xi has turned back to the classic East Asia model. Both he and Trump are doubling down on the decades-old political views that first gave rise to the Asia-Pacific trade wars. Neither appears likely to change course soon.

(...) Within the tradition of social theory, however, Fordism’s significance lay in its high wages, famously $5 per day starting in 1914 (equivalent to about $20 per hour today). Rather than class beneficence, Antonio Gramsci argued, Fordist wages were part of a system of labor discipline and a means to reduce worker turnover, thereby boosting profits. They had the added benefit of aiding mass consumption—even Ford workers, it was said, could afford Ford cars—dovetailing with the emergent Keynesian dictum that boosting effective demand would soften the inequalities of industrial capitalism and keep the whole machine chugging along.

(...) By the 1970s, capitalist East Asia had presented a challenge to this Fordist-Keynesian orthodoxy of mass consumption. Today, China draws the ire of mainstream economists for much the same reason. Curiously, however, China’s comparative advantage also marks a kind of return to Ford’s prized vertical integration. The sprawling integrated factory went out of style starting in the ’70s, outwitted by Japan’s “Toyota system” and its lean, just-in-time supply chains. Yet today China boasts the world’s best-integrated production systems, reinforced by recent mandates to “indigenize” and insulate value chains from foreign tariffs.

(...) China itself has quietly built an “alternative trade architecture,” according to the Financial Times, in which 40 percent of its exports now go to countries with whom it shares bilateral free trade agreements, excluding the US and EU, mostly across Asia, but also Australia, Canada, and South America. Nobody can predict what happens next. But if current trends continue, we are living through a collision of economic trajectories, positioned on either side of the Pacific, set in motion forty years ago: Xi Jinping’s attachment to export-driven industrialization, pitted against Trump’s decades-long fixation on protectionist tariffs. This contradiction is the terrain on which much of the world must now maneuver.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/back-to-the-80s/

That’s after an email last night from OMB director Russell Vought, who Trump had just made CFPB Acting Director, stopped most agency work, including “supervisory activities that ensure companies are complying with the law,” the outlet writes.

https://www.theverge.com/news/609153/the-cfpbs-headquarters-are-closing

On the same day Jeff Bezos sat in the front row of the inauguration (that Amazon helped finance), his retail giant sent nine letters pressing the Trump administration to let the company block votes on initiatives from its own shareholders. These include proposals to disclose more information about Amazon’s treatment of warehouse workers, handling of private medical data, lobbying activities, artificial intelligence–related energy use, and employee pay gaps.

UnitedHealth also called in some favors. A day after Amazon’s move, UnitedHealth asked Donald Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to allow it to block votes on shareholder proposals requiring the company to 1) audit previous customer denial claims to see if they were inaccurate and 2) disclose “how often prior authorization requirements or denials of coverage lead to delay or abandonment of medical treatment.” UnitedHealth has among the highest claim denial rates in the country.

We reported that during Trump’s first term, his regulators passed rules that made it more difficult for shareholders to force votes on their proposals. The Biden administration pushed back. Now Trump’s SEC chair nominee is Paul Atkins, who has criticized what he calls the “abusive use of the shareholder proposal process.” Because of the timing of Amazon and UnitedHealth’s letters, regulatory decisions about their shareholder resolutions will be made by Trump’s officials — not Joe Biden’s.

Last September, House Republicans passed the Prioritizing Economic Growth Over Woke Policies Act, which aimed to give companies limitless power to exclude shareholder proposals. The legislation also would have limited the SEC’s power to require public companies to report on issues considered unrelated to their financial health.

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/amazon-bezos-unitedhealth-trump-sec/

Labour’s crisis management has pleased nobody. It takes money out of the pockets of its natural supporter base, antagonises those, such as farmers, whom it often comes into conflict with, and fulfils none of the expectations demanded of it from capital. The fact that one poll places them below Reform should surprise none of us.

Labour’s synthesis of work, welfare and health policy constitute an expansion of the state’s coercive capabilities. Starmer’s government offers an image of exactly how ruling classes are seeking to mobilise authoritarian forms of population management to steer demographic transition into productive ends which disempower workers. In a service economy so dominated by William Baumol’s “cost disease”, where productivity increases are marginal because so much of the foundations of the economy are predicated on privatised care and reproduction, whether these moves will be successful is in serious doubt.

The old neoliberal consensus is in jeopardy, weighed down by its own contradictions: the breakdown of the US-led global order, the decimation of living standards across the board, the growing impact and realisation that runaway climate change is here to stay, as well as demographic decline to boot. Britain’s economic model isn’t simply breaking down, the social contract which rode Thatcher, Blair and then Cameron to power is cracking. The proliferation of high housing costs, increased interest rates and demographic ageing shatters the privatised welfare state which underpinned the neoliberal social contract and saw millions borrow credit in order to fund elder and social care, consumption and their children’s futures.

The task of radical politics, aware that the projection of boredom entails a radically regressive shift against the working classes, is not simply to put a spanner in the works of Starmerism. As desirable as this is, socialists also need to develop an organising account of how we construct a radical leftwing majoritarianism which unites homeowners with renters, racialised majorities with racialised minorities, the rustbelt regions with the gentrifying metropoles and private and public sector workers. The election of five independent and four Green MPs, the mass Palestine solidarity movement, and the growth in discussion of developing a serious alternative to Labourism, all need to be capitalised upon. For too long, socialism has been understood as national state ownership and an equitable distribution of society’s resources. Instead, socialists today should build a project which emphasises building power from below and organising feasible political challenges which facilitate the unification of distinct class agents subjected to different experiences of capitalist domination – drawing together the provincial, national and global spheres into a network of global socialist strength. The Faragist right is doing this successfully, recreating insubordinate images of national and bodily sovereignty, masculine uplift and racialised resentment whilst also leaning into popular economic terrain such as supporting water nationalisation and opposing the two-child benefit cap. Our side needs to get up to speed.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/move-fast-and-fix-things