According to one narrative that has cohered since the 2024 election, the failure of Kamala Harris’s campaign can be chalked up to the political effects of inflation. After all, voters were more concerned about the economy, per Gallup, than they had been in any election year since 2008; by dismissing economic concerns and focusing on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy, Democrats grossly miscalculated. It seems clear, in retrospect, that “Bidenomics” did little to win over American voters. But what about those who don’t get to participate in a referendum on Biden’s economic policies, yet are still impacted by them? With all the intense attention on domestic economic discontent, what are we missing in the rest of the world? What are the downstream effects of the U.S.’s turn toward protectionism? And what are the next steps for a left interested in global economic justice? 

In search of a broader view beyond the hysterically domestic, the longue durée rather than the horse race, we spoke to economics professor Jayati Ghosh on Zoom. Ghosh is an acclaimed development economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a prolific scholar of inequality, debt, international trade finance, women’s labor, and more. She has written and edited twenty books, including When Governments Fail: A Pandemic and Its Aftermath and Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India. She’s also intimately familiar with how the right comes to power, and how brittle ivory towers and other liberal bastions can be: Ghosh taught at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s premier left-leaning institutions, for over thirty years, where she witnessed an administrative takeover by Hindu nationalists. On the eve of a second Trump presidency, we asked her about the real forces behind inflation, the fate of the U.N., and what she would do if she were appointed global economic czar.

So what has changed since Election Day?

The good or the bad? 

Let’s start with good. 

There’s less hypocrisy. For most of the rest of the world, it was almost unbearable to see the devastation, the destruction, the carnage being inflicted on Palestine while members of the U.S. government wrung their hands, talked about humanitarian aid, and simultaneously gave Israel more arms and more bombs. They allowed Israel to bomb Palestinians, and then they dropped food packets afterwards. Let’s face it, it’s been hard to see the U.S. as a moral force in the world for a while. In a peculiar way, you could argue that Trump is going to be to the U.S. what the U.S. has been to the rest of the world — completely amoral. 

The U.S. has pretended to be this beacon of democracy that can tell other countries how to be democratic. But it has also allowed all kinds of terrible autocracies, including Modi’s in my own country, because of their geostrategic significance. That moral authority doesn’t exist anymore. 

And how about the bad? 

Where to begin? Trump is going to break up pretty much every institution that exists within the U.S., and what is really scary is that he’s untrammeled. He will force every institution of the government to bend to his will. In India, we know what that means, because we are experiencing it. It means all the investigative agencies, all the regulatory agencies, will do what he wants and what Elon Musk and his other plutocrat friends want. It means a massive suppression of democracy within the United States. I think you have to be prepared for that. I’ve seen it happen in my own country, and it’s really striking how quickly all of these institutions just collapse and crumble, and how many people give in. 

Meanwhile, I don’t know if the U.N. will recover. It will stagger on, but it will be bled dry. There will be no money for doing anything meaningful. The Peacebuilding Commission’s fund, for instance, is massively under-resourced, and it will now be zero funded.

Do you know about the Peacebuilding Commission? Countries approach it when they can’t handle internal conflict. U.N. peacekeeping forces do not always have great success, and many countries, in fact, are not really interested in having them anymore, because different soldiers from different parts of the world are brought into contexts they don’t know how to deal with. But the Peacebuilding Commission is seen as an external body that can be an arbitrator and consult both sides. And for a lot of continuing conflicts and civil wars, it’s been very, very important. 

That’s just one example. Think of the relief work that the U.N. does. Why did Israel go after the UNRWA? Because it actually gives relief. Think of the food supplies that the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the Food and Agriculture Organization are providing to countries in deep distress and famine. We all think of the U.N. as the General Assembly in New York, which tends to do nothing. But in fact, on the ground, there are many critical areas where U.N. agencies play a huge role. And I can see the administration under Trump basically saying, to hell with it all. 

You described Trump as analogous, in some sense, to Modi. Tell us about the Indian economy since he came to power in 2014.

The Modi government is really focused on perception management. P.R. is what they’re good at, and P.R. is all they do. They are not concerned with governing. Because if you were concerned with governing, you would need to know about your economy. This is a government that hasn’t had a census since 2011. We don’t even know how many people there are in India. Can you imagine? The government won’t do a census because it would reveal too much. For decades, we had periodic consumption surveys every five years that our poverty data was based on. In 2017 and 2018, the survey showed that poverty had increased in rural areas. So they junked it. They said, No, no, it’s not a good survey. They wouldn’t allow it to be publicly released. They didn’t do another survey until 2022-2023, so we had no idea about poverty, consumption, or anything. And we still haven’t got the full results, because guess what? They’ve changed the methodology, so we cannot compare the new survey to earlier ones. They have released a fact sheet that says that poverty is down to below five percent in India. Anybody in India will just laugh at you if you tell them that. 

We’ve had ten, going on eleven, years of perception management. The purpose of it is to make everybody think, Okay, my life is terrible, my son can’t get a job, my daughter doesn’t have enough to eat, but that’s my bad luck. The economy is doing really well because they’re saying so. At some point, that doesn’t fly anymore. And I think that shift is beginning to happen. There is real fatigue. But it took a long time. You can manage perceptions for a very, very long time. 

I’m not saying India was a great success before — a lot of the GDP growth was very unequally distributed. I suppose this is what you’ll be saying in the U.S. soon. But if you thought that was unequal, wait, because what you have now in India is an economy that is growing at, I don’t know — let’s say it’s five percent. But it’s all going to the top ten percent of the population, and real wages are stagnant or falling. Can you imagine, for ten years, an economy growing at seven percent while real wages are falling? 

It’s unbelievable the extent to which the majority of the population is experiencing a really fragile, insecure, desperate economy, but the ten percent is doing really well. You can go into any one of the malls in any one of the big cities, and you can pretend you’re in Paris. People are drinking champagne. They’re buying Louis Vuitton. The Chanel shop is running out of stock.

The discrepancy between the official story about the state of the economy and ordinary people’s perception has been a big story in Biden’s America as well, especially in light of the election outcome, which many have blamed on inflation. It’s been said that Democrats didn’t have an accurate read on how much high prices mattered to voters, especially given that inflation has helped drive out incumbents around the world. How should we be thinking about inflation? Was it the inevitable result of the pandemic? What mistakes were made in addressing it? 

It’s very unfortunate that it was addressed as if it were just normal inflation — and it wasn’t. There is an attitude, especially in the advanced economies, that inflation is the result of higher wages. Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership fell for that and allowed the U.S. Federal Reserve to treat it as such. But you have to deal with different kinds of inflation in different ways. This kind was led, to begin with, by the pandemic-era supply shortage of things like automobile parts and electronic parts. Inflation was also driven after the pandemic by a significant manipulation of markets. There’s no other term for it, because the big prices that went up were for food and fuel, from January 2022 onwards. And everybody said, Oh, it’s because of the Russia-Ukraine war: Russia and Ukraine are big wheat exporters, Russia is a fertilizer exporter. So supplies are hit, and that’s why prices are going up. 

It turns out, actually, supplies were not hit. That was a mirage created by the big agribusinesses. And there was a significant increase in financial speculation in the commodities markets — basically financial players going long on wheat. Now, why should a financial player be buying wheat in the first place? It’s not an asset class. This kind of practice was supposed to have been banned by Dodd-Frank after the global financial crisis, but financiers managed to get around, and even weaken, the regulations. Then more and more hedge funds, pension funds, and others entered the commodities market and caused prices to go up massively. Eventually commodity prices came down, because supply hadn’t actually decreased, but retail prices stayed high. 

The Democrats didn’t see this mirage for what it was. The Biden administration also allowed the price of gasoline to go up when, in fact, the U.S. is not a net importer of petroleum — it is not beholden to the world price. All Biden officials did was wring their hands and say, Oh, please don’t do this, please keep the prices down. It’s like the way they tell Netanyahu, Please don’t bomb everybody out of sight, please don’t kill every Palestinian you see — while giving him the wherewithal to do it. 

What should policymakers have done? 

They could have simply had price controls. They could have said, Look, just as the U.S. has got strategic oil reserves, we are going to have strategic grain reserves, so that the price can’t be raised arbitrarily. They could have taxed excess profit — any profits above the norm of the previous three years — so that it wouldn’t have been worth companies’ while to raise rates. All of these measures would have brought prices down very quickly. It was those critical prices that were causing inflation. About thirty percent of the inflation came from other stuff that was hard to do anything about — cars and electronic goods. But that was a temporary supply shortage which got fixed, and I don’t think people would be as resentful if it was just that you couldn’t buy your computer on time. 

It seems clear now that the Democrats have not presented a compelling economic alternative to the broken status quo. How should the left take advantage of this moment, and what vision should we offer?

I think it’s very clear. The vision should be to reduce insecurity; to ensure a decent health care system — which, frankly, everybody else in the rich world has, except the U.S. — to which everyone has access, with controlled drug prices and proper medical care; to ensure that the fragility of jobs and the absolutely crazy working hours are reduced through regulation. And it can be done. It has been done in the past, even in the United States. A lot that people take for granted — like the appallingly short leave after childbirth — is unheard of in any other rich country and in most middle income countries. When I came here, the medical system was the biggest shocker for me. That you can have this really terrible medical system that is exclusionary, and, even if you’re included, it’s still insecure, and you wait nine months for an appointment — it makes no sense. 

To the extent that the Biden administration had a coherent economic philosophy, it seemed to focus on outcompeting China and bringing jobs home. That’s become something of a bipartisan consensus — from JD Vance’s talk of revitalizing manufacturing to Bernie’s protectionist sympathies to Biden’s decision to keep many of Trump’s tariffs. What do you make of all of this? Is it possible to roll back ’90s globalization? 

It’s always possible to roll back liberalization. These policies and institutions are all creations of human minds, so they can be unmade by human minds as well. Under Trump, we know that industrial policy is not going to remain exactly the same. And that’s funny, because Biden basically continued the Trump administration’s approach, in terms of trade policy and industrial policy. We were all furious about what Trump was doing, but Biden continued many of his policies. 

I think Biden in fact intensified the treatment of China as a threat. Since Trump is so unpredictable, it’s very hard to know exactly what he will do next. He may decide to just make deals, rather than to go blowing up everything. Elon Musk has very strong business interests in China, so I don’t think he’s going to let Trump do exactly the same kind of protectionist thing that Biden was doing in China.

Treating other countries the way Biden has also reduces the legitimacy of the U.S. dollar. You can freeze the assets of Venezuela or Syria or Iran, but if you do it to Russia, then all the other countries start thinking, Hmm, maybe we don’t keep everything in dollars, maybe we think of other currency and trading arrangements. And if you say, I’m going to disallow you from using the SWIFT payment messaging system, then they say, Oh, we have to have financial infrastructure of our own. There’s already BRICS Clear, which is being developed as an alternative to SWIFT. In other words, by simultaneously taking on all these different things, essentially to make America great again — let’s not kid ourselves, that’s exactly what Biden was trying to do — you are, in a way, undermining the sources of U.S. hegemony. 

You’ve written about “neoliberalism as neocolonialism.” How should leftists, domestically and abroad, think about pushing back against neoliberalism? How can developing economies extricate themselves from the stranglehold of international financial institutions?

Why are so many countries in debt? Two reasons. One, after the global financial crisis, there was all this money sloshing around the globe, because central banks in the U.S., Europe, and Japan put so much money out there. These banks have all this money and they’re looking for places to lend. And suddenly they find emerging markets. Oh, yay, a new thing. And then you have frontier markets, or low income countries that would never have received loans before, being given loans. And this is encouraged by the IMF. It’s encouraged by the World Economic Forum in Davos. Everybody is singing the praises of bond markets, saying, Look, finally these poor countries get access to capital. But bond markets are fickle. They can move anytime — and that’s precisely what happens. A whole bunch of developing countries issue bonds because they have really low interest rates — below the rate of inflation. It makes no sense not to take this money. But at the slightest hint of market turbulence, that money goes. Bond prices collapse, and it becomes really expensive to try and refinance. During the pandemic, exports fell, remittances fell, developing economies were down the tube and couldn’t do a big fiscal expansion like the U.S. or Europe did, because even more capital would fly out.

These countries were given a nearly two-year moratorium and didn’t have to pay interest during that time. But a moratorium doesn’t mean that the interest doesn’t keep growing — that’s the problem. Unpaid interest continued to be added to the principal, so that at the end of almost two years, the amount they owed was the same as it would have been without the pause. About seventy percent of the world population lives in countries that are struggling because of this, but global finance leaders can’t be bothered. And let’s face it, the G7 can’t be bothered. Why? Because these countries are not systemically important. Their default would not dramatically alter the system. Which is unlike the powerful financial institutions’ reaction when, let’s say, Silicon Valley Bank had a problem, or Syndicate Bank had a problem. Then you pull out all the stops, you work over the weekend, you do everything possible, you guarantee all the deposits against your own rules. It’s done.

Credit Suisse in Geneva has a problem? Same thing. The famously strict Swiss with all their rigid rules? They broke every rule in their book to get that merger of Credit Suisse with UBS. They had to use emergency authorization to push it through and retroactively make it legal. Why? Because that’s systemically important. You know, Ghana, Chad, Sri Lanka — yeah, they’re not systemically important. Let them suffer for years and years. 

It’s hard to keep low blood pressure when you look at the international economy.

What about the other organizations and frameworks for international economic governance? Are they as useless as the IMF, when it comes to global justice?

I wouldn’t say that the IMF and the World Bank have been useless; they have been negative. The IMF has so blatantly defended the interests of big finance, and the World Bank has been pushing governments to reform in ways that boomerang and end up causing misery and suffering. And there’s zero accountability. 

Everybody says that Trump is the one who took a sledgehammer to the WTO. He didn’t like the fact that the U.S. had to be party to the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism, even though the U.S. often doesn’t comply anyway. He vetoed possible new appointees to the Appellate Body for the WTO’s dispute settlement system. And then Biden came to town and everyone thought he would allow new appointments. But he didn’t, so now there are zero members of the Appellate Body. 

In fact, this is a glass-half-full situation, maybe even three-quarters full, for the rest of the world. The dispute mechanism is so skewed against developing countries that not having the ability to settle disputes has been liberating for them. For example, India enacted a National Food Security Act, which allowed the government to provide grain, rice, and wheat cheaply to the poorest populations. But the U.S. brought a case against India saying, You can’t do that because the WTO bans crop-specific price fixing. With great difficulty, India managed to negotiate what is called a peace clause, which means that until the matter was discussed again and settled, it wouldn’t be immediately hit by sanctions. But since then, the dispute has just lingered, because there is no functioning dispute settlement body anymore, which is not a bad thing for India. We can actually continue providing cheap grain to the poor and hungry.

Say you’re appointed global economic czar, and you can put in place laws or regulations around the world. What do you do first? 

I would begin by regulating the hell out of finance. I would enable countries to strictly regulate cross border financial flows, and I would bring in much more financial regulation within countries. I wouldn’t let commodity markets be subject to the whims of bankers who want to make a quick buck. In food and fuel markets, there would be very strict regulations on commodity futures. 

I would enable a proper global tax system. We don’t have a tax system that knows that there are multinational companies, or that rich people can store money abroad. Apple is not treated as one company. Apple India is treated as different from Apple France, which is different from Apple U.S., which is different from Apple Germany. And so what does Apple do? It shifts the profits to the jurisdictions that impose the fewest taxes: places like the Netherlands and Ireland in Europe, and Biden’s home state of Delaware. In a proper system, Apple would be treated as one company globally, and every country would get to tax its share of the profits at its own tax rate. That share would be determined by the share of sales and employment — maybe sixty percent sales, forty percent employment. We would figure out a formula. I would set a minimum tax rate, agreed to by the OECD, so that countries wouldn’t be able to set up tax havens to attract corporations. All of this is just to make sure multinationals pay the same tax rate as domestic companies. That’s all. I’m not giving them a harder time; I’m simply saying that if domestic companies pay this tax rate, you should also pay this tax rate. Similarly for rich individuals: their wealth should be taxed wherever they are. We need national wealth registers shared across tax jurisdictions, so that every country knows where people are storing their wealth. 

Outside of financial regulation, what else would you tackle? 

Intellectual property. I would get rid of the whole idea that knowledge can be privatized, commercialized, and controlled. IP is really only thirty years old. The idea that you have to have these very strong intellectual-property-rights regimes is something that took hold in the WTO process in 1989. There’s a really fascinating book by Susan Sell called Private Power, Public Law that talks about this. Twelve executives successfully lobbied the U.S. government to insert into the WTO negotiations a completely new scale of protection for intellectual property, which other countries had not for a moment considered. TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), instituted in 1994, forced every country in the world to put in place a legal system that follows the U.S. patent regime, one of the strictest in the world. This has meant that basically a huge percentage of patents globally are controlled by multinational corporations — even when they haven’t done the research themselves. They’ve bought up the little company or the scientist that has done it. They control many patents globally, including for green technology. You want a green transition? You will not get it, because these big companies control the technology and will not share it. The developing countries being pressured to go green cannot access that technology.

Would you take action on climate?

Look, international action on climate would require trust. At the moment, there is zero trust, and the G7 has zero legitimacy. The rest of the world is saying to the rich countries, If you guys are not going to do anything, we’re not going to do anything. It’s completely counterproductive, but that’s the way it’s going — other than in China, which saw decarbonization as the future, and therefore invested heavily in it. 

If I were ruler of the world, I would force the advanced economies that account for fifteen percent of the global population, but 85 percent of excess carbon emissions historically, to pay reparations. The reparations could come in many forms. It wouldn’t have to mean you hand cash over. It could mean that you have to forgive all the debt you are owed by the less advanced economies; it could mean that you have to pay higher prices for the minerals you’re extracting from them. 

After that, we can think of a way to all move together toward a mitigation strategy, and make sure that we have sufficient money set aside for adaptation that goes to anyone who needs it. And that will be easy to do, because I’m the ruler of the world, right? 

Are there reparations we should have for other extractive practices? 

Oh, sure. Labor overseas, definitely. Mineral extraction. Slavery. There are many, many things. But I would say right now the most pressing one is carbon and climate. So let’s begin with that. Then we can move on to the next thing.