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Columnists

Trumponomics unsettles Trudeau with threats to Canada-U.S. trade

PMO Photo by Adam Scotti

Only one country in the world issues a currency that is held and recognized in every country in the world. The U.S. dollar has been de facto the world currency since the Bretton Woods accords of 1944.

Having your money accepted for payment in other countries means the U.S. does not have to earn foreign currency abroad or borrow in other currencies.

Other countries try to earn U.S. dollars by selling more than they buy from the rest of the world. When not earning U.S. dollars, countries have to borrow dollars.

Borrowed U.S. dollars have to be repaid in newly earned dollars. Such U.S. dollar-denominated debt is a real constraint on governments the world over.

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Columnists

Denying globalization's downside won't stop right-wing populism

Photo: Martin Schulz/European Union 2016 - European Parliament/flickr

I was somewhat surprised to see Stephen Poloz recently urging economists to do more work identifying and disseminating research on the supposed benefits of free trade. That's slightly beyond his job description (perhaps more fitting with his last position as head of Export Development Canada). But like economic leaders elsewhere in the world, Mr. Poloz is obviously concerned with the disintegration of popular support for neoliberal free trade deals. That disintegration will have tectonic economic and political consequences.

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Columnists

Trade deals' investor-state provisions: A sub-criminal conspiracy?

Photo: flickr/Tim Stoll

There is a glaring disconnect in the world between economic growth, and trade and investment agreements.

At the same time that Canada and other countries are pushing hard for huge multi-national deals -- the TPP, CETA and the U.S.-EU deal, the TTIP -- all the evidence suggests that global trade is on a long-term downward trend. Nothing in the near or middle term future suggests that it will recover to anything like its China-driven peak.

Financial Times analyst Martin Wolf recently argued bluntly that globalization no longer drives the world economy.

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Image: Flickr/Gage Skidmore
| August 11, 2016
Image: Flickr/Philippe Rouzet
| July 13, 2016

Dr. Shiv Chopra: Food safety, security and sovereignty all interlinked

Photo: flickr/mhall209

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Recently rabble had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Shiv Chopra, the Health Canada microbiologist who blew the whistle on bovine growth hormone (rBGH) in milk. The following is an excerpt from that interview where we spoke about food safety, our health and trade deals.

 

How did you come to be traveling across the country to talk about food security and trade?

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Image: Behind the Numbers
| March 30, 2016
Columnists

Ghosts of politics past and present haunt Trudeau's White House visit

Photo: Chuck Kennedy/White House/ Wikimedia Commons

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Two spectral presences appeared during Justin Trudeau's visit to Washington, one Canadian and one American. You could almost see them onscreen, then they frustratingly faded, as spectres do.

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Twitter photo of protest against water privatization in Peru.
| March 9, 2016

Goodbye longstanding Canadian cultural policy, hello TPP regulations

Photo: flickr/ Shardayyy

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Problems? Oh, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has a few! Read about them all in the new series The Trouble with the TPP.

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