Beginning in 2013, representatives of the United States, the European Union on behalf of its 28 member states, along with more than 20 other countries have been regularly meeting in Geneva to secretly negotiate a future treaty for the liberalization of the international services market, called the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). By far the largest single sector of this market is that of financial services, which the treaty plans to deregulate on despite all the evidence provided by the global financial crisis of the folly of such a move. The details of the treaty have until now been kept secret from public scrutiny, but for the recent revelation by WikiLeaks of the draft text of the treaty’s Financial Services Annex. To understand the full implications of the opaque dealings in Geneva, Martine Orange turned to Dominique Plihon, a former advisor to the French government on economic issues, alter-globalization militant and a professor with Paris-XIII university specialized in the financial economy.
Over the past few days, the money markets of the emerging countries have been struck by a major movement of capital withdrawals. As Martine Orange reports, the flight of capital has alarmed international monetary authorities who fear a potential destabilization of the whole of the world’s monetary system.
