For the first time since the Great Depression, labour productivity is falling in Canada. The Bank of Canada has called this “an emergency” and various bourgeois commentators are scrambling for an explanation. However, all of these analysts blame secondary factors and miss the elephant in the room: the system itself. 

The Bank of Canada raised its overnight lending rate for two consecutive months, after pausing its hikes earlier this year. These increases risk throwing workers into bankruptcy and triggering a painful recession.

The latest news shows that the economy is once again taking a turn for the worse. The Eurozone is in recession. China is slowing down sharply. The US is teetering on the brink. Another economic crisis is on the way.

A bankruptcy crisis is looming over the world. The New York Times has called it “a debt crisis unlike anything we have seen”. This isn’t the threat of a handful of banking behemoths going under, however, but rather of entire national economies. Some 54 low and middle-income countries are today teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

As the rate of inflation continues to cut into the living standards of workers, some businesses are posting record profits. Some have pointed the finger at price gouging and the excess profits of big business as the cause. This phenomenon has been dubbed by trade unions and commentators as “greedflation”.

In Canada, misery and disillusionment abound. Nobody is happy. The 2020 wave of national unity seen during the first stages of the pandemic has been replaced by cynicism, anger, and polarization. Institutions, parties, and bureaucracies stand, but only because there hasn’t yet been the organized force to push them over. Beneath the surface their foundations are crumbling. There is a widespread feeling of malaise, but this distress is merely the precursor to an explosive outburst. Dissatisfaction cannot last forever without inevitably finding an outlet. This document aims to track these processes in order to ideologically arm socialist workers and young revolutionaries so that we can prepare for the coming storm.

The situation has gone from bad to worse for the world’s financial markets. After three bank collapses in the U.S. and one in Switzerland, the markets are looking for the next weak link.

This morning, banking shares fell rapidly – not only in the US and not just regional banks, but all over the world – in the aftermath of the collapse of US regional banks, SVB Financial and Signature over the weekend. What caused their collapse and are there wider implications?

Over the past year there has been a torrent of attempts by the bourgeois media to push the blame for inflation onto the working class. The latest claim is that petty shoplifting is driving up inflation. This is nothing more than a thinly veiled attack on the poor that only serves to highlight the much deeper crisis of capitalism.

The global elites gathered in Davos last week, to discuss the fate and future of capitalism. With the world economy wracked by inflation and instability, a mood of pessimism prevailed. We need a revolution to put them out of their misery.