Geopolitical Economy Hour

Zhu Rongji, China's reform-era premier, has died, and the Financial Times wasted no time eulogizing him as a liberal hero, hoping Xi Jinping might take a leaf out of his book. Mick Dunford, professor emeritus at the University of Sussex and a longtime resident of Beijing, joins me to dismantle that myth, walking through the real human costs of Zhu's reforms, from mass layoffs to soaring inequality, and arguing they were not capital...

Is the West's devotion to Israel rational statecraft, or ideological blindness dragging the whole imperial order down with it? Laith Marouf, founder of Free Palestine TV, returns to break down why even mainstream military and intelligence assessments now admit Iran cannot be defeated, why the CIA's own hidden regional bases have been destroyed, and why Washington's pivot to economic warfare, sanctioning Iranian gold, crypto, and av...

Is India's youth revolt a passing meme, or the moment its party system began to visibly crack? Varghese K. George, resident editor in New Delhi for The Hindu, joins me to trace how a Supreme Court judge's slur, calling India's youth cockroaches and parasites, became the seed of the Cockroach Janta Party, a movement with no leaders, no ideology, and millions of members. Varghese explains how this leaderless surge has punctured the B...

Donald Trump called it an economic D-Day for Iran, but the sanctions threat reveals that the US has already lost the military war and is now waging a financial one it cannot win either. Professor Michael Hudson joins me for our fortnightly conversation to trace how Bessent's push to expel countries from the dollar system is accelerating the very flight it was meant to prevent, driving oil and grain trade onto China's alternative cl...

On what would have been Fidel Castro's 100th birthday, Cuba is under its most severe siege since 1959. A six-month US naval blockade has cut off oil, worsened by the collapse of Venezuelan supply after Washington's January attack. I am joined by Francisco Dominguez, founding member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, and Carlos Martinez, author and co-editor of the Friends of Socialist China website, to trace Fidel's revolutionary aud...

Would the entire global economy collapse if we told the truth about its books? Richard Murphy, chartered accountant and professor of political economy, joins me to expose the accounting trick sitting underneath GDP: the total absence of any concept of capital maintenance. Richard shows how modern accounting distinguishes profit earned through honest enterprise from profit as pure extraction, a distinction erased in law and economic...

Is Washington's rescue of the yen an act of friendship, or a sign that the dollar system itself is beginning to crack? I am joined by economist Michael Hudson to unpack the US intervention to save a collapsing yen and why the official story of "solidarity" masks a far more desperate calculation. Michael explains how the yen's weakness threatens the carry trade and capital inflows the dollar system depends on, why the US chose to se...

Is China betraying the world's oppressed nations, or is it playing a longer, harder game than its critics understand? Carlos Martinez, author of The East is Still Red and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, joins me to confront the charge, common even on parts of the left, that Beijing does far too little for Palestine, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Martinez traces China's foreign policy from the internationalism of Bandung and t...

Are nuclear war and climate catastrophe two separate crises, or one civilizational threat with two faces? I'm joined by Ivana Nikolić Hughes to discuss why both dangers have faded into public apathy even as they grow more acute. Ivana walks through the isotope evidence that traces rising CO2 directly to fossil fuels, and the physics of nuclear winter, where soot from even a regional nuclear war could block sunlight and collapse glo...

Is the AI boom just the latest chapter in a stock market story that was already fiction? I'm joined by Warwick Powell to trace the line from China's Kimi and DeepSeek shock through what I've called America's "sci-fi/fin-fi" model — science fiction promises like AGI dressed up to justify financial fiction, a bubble with roots in the dot-com crash and Reagan's fabricated Star Wars program. Warwick explains how venture capital f...

Is Trump's Iran war a bluff, or has the empire simply run out of moves? Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Iranian political analyst, joins me to explain why each retreat only strengthens Iran, whose indigenous defense doctrine and Axis of Resistance have outmatched a US military still fighting last century's wars, leaving Gulf assets battered and the initiative, per the Financial Times, now with Tehran. Professor Marandi dismantles...

Did Nicaragua really just abolish elections, as headlines from the New York Times to the BBC to the UN claimed last week? I am joined by journalist Ben Norton, host of the Geopolitical Economy Report YouTube channel, and fresh from Managua's 47th anniversary celebrations of the Sandinista Revolution, to separate fact from a deliberately distorted quote. Ben explains that Co-President Daniel Ortega's speech, stripped of context, was...

Do the Democrats and Republicans really differ, or are they two wings of the same corporate machine? I am joined by economist Michael Hudson to examine why no progress can be made for American wage earners until the whole electoral system is changed. Michael Hudson argues that the DNC's dependence on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and AIPAC financing has made it as captured by capital as the Republicans it claims to oppose, a capture...

Is India's youth uprising the beginning of the end for Modi's twelve-year rule? I am joined by Rohit Azad, economist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Utkarsh Bhardwaj, Delhi-based activist and former Vice President of the Students Federation of India, Delhi, both of whom have been on the ground throughout the protests, to examine the true scale and character of the movement now sweeping India. Azad and Bhardwaj describe a genuin...

Iran's four-month war with the US and Israel has entered a new, lower-intensity phase. But is this exhaustion, or Iran's most decisive victory yet? I am joined by Dr. Bikram Singh Gill, lecturer in international relations at Cardiff University, to examine the strategic reversals defining this war. Gill explains how the campaign meant to disarm Iran has instead disarmed US deterrence itself, with Iran now controlling the underlying ...

Is Ukraine's battlefield momentum actually pushing Europe closer to war with Russia? I am joined by Dr. Oleg Barabanov, Program Director of the Valdai Discussion Club and Deputy Director of the Eurasian Studies Institute at MGIMO, to examine the true state of the war and why Ukraine's tactical successes may be increasing, not decreasing, the risk of wider escalation. Barabanov describes how intensifying Ukrainian drone strikes on R...

Dimitri Lascaris, one of Canada's most prominent lawyers and an intrepid journalist, has just returned from Iran, where he attended the extraordinary funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei and witnessed the final collapse of the so-called Memorandum of Understanding. I am joined by him to examine the true stakes of the US-Israeli war on Iran, centred on the struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz, and why Trump, far from being trapped ...

Richard Sakwa and Radhika Desai examine why Europe's leaders continue to escalate a war that most Europeans no longer support. They show that the firing of Ukraine's defense minister for being "too honest," alongside protests in Kyiv and Lviv, exposes a Zelensky government that has abandoned even the pretense of democratic accountability, while Gallup polling finds two-thirds of Ukrainians now want negotiations to end the war. NATO...