All workers deserve access to a safe and secure retirement. But neoliberal governments set up a dynamic where the retirement of some is predicated upon the exploitation of many. In the late-1980s, Ontario’s government, financial sector, and labour movement collaborated on a major restructuring of the province’s public sector pensions. The result? The unlocking of a vault containing billions of dollars, suddenly open to be privately invested in capital markets. All this occurred as Ontario’...

Winner of the Richard A. Lester Award for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, Princeton UniversityAn Economist Best Economics and Business Book of the YearA Financial Times Best Economics Book of the YearInequality is one of our most urgent social problems. Curbed in the decades after World War II, it has recently returned with a vengeance. We all know the scale of the...

The global market in money - housed in the offshore 'shadow' banking system - holds $217 trillion in financial assets and operates beyond the reach of any nation's taxman. Asset managers, private equity firms, and pension and sovereign wealth funds scoop up the world's savings for investment and manage them as they choose, unaccountable to politicians or the citizens who elect them.In this brilliant, accessible and incisive introduction to the murky world of glo�balized finance, An...

The vast majority of Canadians are blissfully unaware that every man, woman and child in Canada now owes a $35,000 share of government debt and must pay this back, with interest! Make no mistake, this debt will change our country and affect every single Canadian in the decades to come. You may think you have planned for your retirement and are safe, but the government must find a way to recover this borrowed money, and they can only do that by raising your taxes and reducing your hard-earn...

In this trailblazing manifesto, political economist Ricardo Tranjan places tenants and landlords on either side of the class divide that splits North American society.What if there is no housing crisis, but instead a housing market working exactly as intended? What if rent hikes and eviction notices aren’t the work of the invisible hand of the market, but of a parasitic elite systematically funneling wealth away from working-class families? With clarity and precision, Tranjan break...

Why are house prices in many advanced economies rising faster than incomes? Why isn't land and location taught or seen as important in modern economics? What is the relationship between the financial system and land?In this accessible but provocative guide to the economics of land and housing, the authors reveal how many of the key challenges facing modern economies - including housing crises, financial instability and growing inequalities - are intimately tied to the land economy....

Once there were princes and peasants and very few between. The extremes of wealth and poverty are still with us, but that shouldn't blind us to the fact our societies have been utterly transformed for the better over the past century. As Daniel Waldenström makes clear in this authoritative account of wealth accumulation and inequality in the modern west, we are today both significantly richer and more equal.Using cutting-edge research and new, sometimes surprising, data, Waldenströ...

In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land. The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism--the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these id...

A century ago, the average Canadian lifespan was 60; today, we can expect to live 20 years longer than that. And recent generations have witnessed other major social shifts in Canada, from women entering the workforce to alterations in traditional career patterns, from evolutions in the once-inviolable nuclear family to the decline of employer pension schemes. As the arc of our lives continues to change, so too will the experience of our retirement. An important factor in the changing real...

Spiralling inequality since the 1970s and the global financial crisis of 2008 have been the two most important challenges to democratic capitalism since the Great Depression. To understand the political economy of contemporary Europe and America we must, therefore, put inequality and crisis at the heart of the picture.In this innovative new textbook Mattias Vermeiren does just this, demonstrating that both the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis resulted ...

When corporations misbehave the consequences are devastating. The monetary costs of the 2008 financial crisis, a direct result of financial mismanagement, were in the trillions, and yet none of those responsible were held to account. The monetary costs of Criminal Code theft pale in comparison, and yet our prisons are filled with people who commit “street theft.” In order to understand why governments, regulators, unions, activists and community groups have such a difficult time preventing...

When low-income city dwellers lack access to mainstream banking services, many end up turning to ‘fringe banks,’ such as cheque-cashers and pawnshops, for some or all of their financial transactions. This predicament of ‘financial exclusion’ – faced by those underserved by conventional financial institutions – is comprehensively examined in Jerry Buckland's powerful study, Hard Choices.The first account of the nature and causes of financial exclusion in Canada, Hard Ch...