The Progressive

In this episode of the Beverage Report Podcast, we interview Prof. Jan Toporowski, former Professor of Economics and Finance at SOAS.

How do government debt management, monetary policy, and financial systems shape economic stability and crises in today’s economy? To what extent are macroeconomic outcomes shaped by the interests and influence of dominant economic actors? What long-term impacts do defence spending and global economic linkages have on growth and resource allocation?

Prof. Toporowski answers these questions and more, also discussing the modern application and takeaways of Kalecki's work.

Tune in to this episode to learn more about Prof. Toporowski's research and insights at the intersection of finance and economics.

Ira and Rudy join renowned geographer David Harvey for a chat on his pedagogy and his theories of economics, neoliberalism and imperialism.

US President Donald Trump handed crypto companies a huge win last year when he signed a piece of legislation to regulate an important part of the digital currency world: stablecoins. But ever since then, Wall Street banks have been fighting to change parts of the law. The FT’s digital markets correspondent Nikou Asgari explains what’s provoked US banks and who might have the upper hand in this conflict.

Clips from Bank of America, CBS News, CNBC, CNN, Forbes, Fox 5 Atlanta, JPMorgan Chase, The White House

The FT does not use generative AI to voice its podcasts.

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For further reading:

The stablecoin war: Wall Street vs crypto over the future of money

Bitcoin and crypto stocks surge amid relief rally for risky assets

Global crypto assets hit $4tn as industry wins backing of US lawmakers

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Follow Nikou Asgari on X (@nikasgari), or on Bluesky (@nikasgari.bsky.social). Michela Tindera is on X (@mtindera07) and Bluesky (@mtindera.ft.com), or follow her on LinkedIn for updates about the show and more.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cédric Durand discusses ecological planning, institutional utopias, and the idea of bifurcation.

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https://www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/dehes/membres/cedric-durand

https://durandcedric.wordpress.com/

https://dietzberlin.de/verlagsprogramm-fruehjahr-2026

https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/comment_bifurquer-9782355221910

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652623045092?via%3Dihub

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5469-planning-without-political-constraint-imposed-on-economic-actors-is-not-real-planning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_William_Kapp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek

http://gesd.free.fr/oneill.pdf

https://www.info.gouv.fr/grand-dossier/france-nation-verte

https://lannuaire.service-public.gouv.fr/gouvernement/6af2c8c4-bdf7-405c-bd9e-ed48dad83b96

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/appendix.htm

https://www.strategie-plan.gouv.fr/en/publications/economic-implications-climate-action

https://www.versobooks.com/products/2143-envisioning-real-utopias

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_state

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301270365_Ecological_Accounting_A_Research_Review_and_Conceptual_Framework

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Husson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commanding_heights_of_the_economy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_home_front_during_World_War_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_planning_in_France

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25821321

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

https://degrowth.info

www.jasonhickel.org

https://www.icrea.cat/community/icreas/17610/giorgos-kallis/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S092180092300352X?via%3Dihub

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393790658_Cybernetic_Democratic_Economic_Planning_Holistic_Accounting_-_An_Economic_Framework_to_Achieve_Sustainable_Societal_Metabolisms

https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=50083

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4

https://archive.org/details/dictatorshipover0000fehe/page/n5/mode/2up

https://jacobin.com/2024/12/agnes-heller-philosophy-marxism-needs

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Leontief

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model

https://dwenteignen.de/en

https://communia.de/en/energy-power-transformation/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_International_Economic_Order

https://www.banque-france.fr/en

https://www.insee.fr/en/information/2107702

https://www.entreprises.gouv.fr/

Future Histories Episodes on Related Topics

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e55-kim-stanley-robinson-on-real-utopian-futures

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e54-rabea-berfelde-on-socialisation/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e30-matt-huber-kohei-saito-on-growth-progress-and-left-imaginaries/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e24-grace-blakeley-on-capitalist-planning-and-its-alternatives/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e21-christoph-sorg-zu-finanzwirtschaft-als-planung/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e03-planning-for-entropy-on-sociometabolic-planning/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e02-george-monbiot-on-public-luxury/

https://www.democratic-planning.com/

https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ccha/29/1

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction

https://www.indep.network/

https://www.planningresearch.net/

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“...Some are dancing, some are drowning, but in the end everybody’s going to go under.”

Dr. Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-sen University), author of the Unmaking of Arab Socialism, joins Steve to talk about imperialism, development, and why the Arab world keeps getting put through the capitalist meat grinder. Ali argues that capitalism isn’t just markets and greed. It’s a destructive social relationship. Once you look at it that way, many of the world’s mysteries stop being mysterious: war, austerity, pollution, and mass deaths aren’t accidents that occasionally happen to capitalism. They are outcomes to be monetized.

The conversation moves to imperialism as capitalism in its concentrated, caffeinated, and brutal form, especially under finance-dominance. Ali describes genocide as both direct (bombs, occupation, ethnic cleansing) and structural (avoidable hunger, disease, debt-driven collapse). He frames the destruction of Arab socialist and anti-colonial projects as strategic for empire: control of oil, geography, and the political threat of regional solidarity.

They talk about MMT’s explanation of currency and how the dollar functions as a lever. Ali sees the dollar as power, representing control over global resources and labor. Debt dependence becomes a kind of colonization by spreadsheet.

“If the dollar stops for a minute or for a month or so, then we have people going hungry. And so this is a form of colonization, a form of death by the dollar.”

They close by pulling democracy down from the clouds. Steve suggests bourgeois elections merely deliver a reshuffling of managers for the same system, and Ali produces a simple metaphor: a multiple-choice exam. The choices have been pre-loaded. And in elections, the result is still class rule.

Dr. Ali Kadri is a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-sen University. He has previously held senior roles at the National University of Singapore and the London School of Economics. His academic work focuses on the political economy of development, imperialism, and the Arab world. He is the author of several important books, including The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction; China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism; and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.

China’s banking sector has expanded from a fragile, state-dominated system in the 1990s into the largest in the world. But this increased scale has not brought with it a shift toward market-driven finance, with the core logic of state-directed control over credit remaining a central feature of Chinese banking. In this episode of The Sound of Economics, Yuyun Zhan sits down with Alicia García-Herrero and Fraser Howie to examine how banks continue to serve state priorities, funnelling household savings into politically favoured sectors while sustaining local governments and state-owned firms.

This episode is part of the ZhōngHuá Mundus series of The Sound of Economics. ZhōngHuá Mundus is a newsletter by Bruegel, bringing you monthly analysis of China in the world, as seen from Europe. Sign up now to receive it in your mailbox!

Dr.  Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. 

In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Pierce’s latest monograph, Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (2025, Duke University Press) where he analyzes a range of materials—from photography, literature, and sculpture to film and ethnography—revealing how speculation, as a form of situated knowledge production, can repair and reimagine the worlds that colonialism sought to destroy.

In this episode of The Sound of Economics, host Yuyun Zhan is joined by Bruegel Senior Fellow Alicia García-Herrero and Jürgen Matthes of the German Economic Institute to discuss a growing concern for Europe’s economy: the undervaluation of Yuan, the Chinese currency and its impact on European competitiveness.

Is China’s price advantage the result of productivity and innovation, or of deeper structural distortions such as subsidies, overcapacity, and currency management? And what policy options does Europe realistically have when existing trade defence instruments seem ill-suited to address economy-wide price and exchange-rate effects?

Relevant research:

Americans have been told that working harder is the path to dignity, security, and success. But what if that promise was hijacked?

This week, we’re revisiting our episode with Professor Elizabeth Anderson, where she exposes how neoliberalism weaponized the “work ethic” — transforming a moral tradition that once honored workers into a system that blames them, exploits them, and rewards extraction over contribution. Drawing from her new book Hijacked, Anderson traces how today’s economy punishes labor, glorifies predatory wealth, and rigs the rules against working people — and what it would take to take the work ethic back.

Elizabeth Anderson is the Max Mendel Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University of Michigan. She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics, The Imperative of Integration, and Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It). She is a MacArthur Fellow and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Social Media:

@UMPhilosophy

Further reading: 

Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

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