As tens of thousands return to the streets for the first national Palestine march of 2026, this movement refuses to be sidelined or silenced, says PETER LEARY
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Report card on a failing economic system
Capital’s imperative to reproduce itself has taken it into riskier and riskier places, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York
If the government really wanted to address public finances, improve living standards and begin economic recovery, it would increase its borrowing for investment, argues MICHAEL BURKE
MATT KERR takes a winter journey through poetry, labour and memory, from Glasgow to Newcastle, arguing that our radical past isn’t something to revere from a distance, but a tool still meant to be used
One of Canada’s most revered politicians is a native of Falkirk but is relatively unknown in his original homeland. KENNY MacASKILL tells his story
Labour prospects in May elections may be irrevocably damaged by Birmingham Council’s costly refusal to settle the year-long dispute, warns STEVE WRIGHT
HENRY FOWLER and ROB POOLE explain the significance of today’s Megapicket
ON Friday May 6 the Federal Reserve released data showing that consumer credit (debt) has been accelerating since the fourth quarter of last year, with revolving credit (largely credit card debt) speeding up at an even greater pace since the third quarter of 2021.
Total consumer credit in the US grew by an annualised rate of 7 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year, increased to 9.7 per cent in this year’s first quarter, and expanded to 14 per cent in March.
At the same time, revolving credit — the debt largely incurred through credit cards — grew 8.3 per cent in the third quarter and 12.7 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2021, and then 21.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year, and an astonishing 35.3 per cent in March.
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In 2024, 19 households grew richer by $1 trillion while 66 million households shared 3 per cent of wealth in the US, validating Marx’s prediction that capitalism ‘establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital,’ writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Washington’s tariff policies become explicable in light of the US economy’s relative decline and the astonishing rise of China, argues MICHAEL BURKE
The US president’s universal tariffs mirror the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act that triggered retaliatory measures, collapsed international trade, fuelled political extremism — and led to world war, warns Dr DYLAN MURPHY
In his first of a new monthly economics column MICHAEL BURKE argues that public-sector investment is more effective, more productive than private-sector investment