Reducing financial inequality
Caribbean Life, February 7-13, 2020 11
understand the impact their communities
have in driving choices for health
and well-being.”
I want everyone of all ages and backgrounds
to be healthy and experience
every simple joy, make every heartfelt
memory and celebrate every special
occasion. To accomplish this goal, we’ll
be inviting more people to the table,
but even more importantly, we’re asking
likeminded stakeholders to invite
us in — let us help be a catalyst bringing
together elements that can create a
healthier city for everyone.
I would like to thank Schneps Media
for their continued commitment to
fighting cardiovascular disease and
improving the health of the communities
they serve. I look forward with
great anticipation to the year ahead,
meeting and working with volunteers
and supporters old and new. Happy
Heart Month!
Meg Gilmartin is the executive director
of the American Heart Association
in New York City
Continued from Page 10
acy’ effectively deter predatory financial
practices.
With real wages for many not rising
for decades, increased financial inclusion
has meant greater indebtedness for
many of them.
Some national financial authorities
have tried to make financialization
more inclusive through initiatives to
reach the ‘unbanked’, e.g., via microfinance
schemes and ‘agent banking’,
with technological innovation and Fin-
Tech showing potential in this regard.
Such technological innovations in
finance have had mixed distributional
consequences. Higher computing
capacity has enabled financial innovations
that enrich investors, with economies
of scale, at the expense of the less
tech savvy and less well informed. But
innovations can also serve those with
less means.
Vicious cycle
If inequality contributed to the 2008
Global Financial Crisis, ‘unconventional’
monetary policy responses to the crisis,
especially quantitative easing (QE),
have also exacerbated inequality as QE
works by raising financial asset prices.
With the earliest hints of recovery
after 2008 and the bailouts, the ‘masters
of the universe’ who had been pleading
for them, claiming they were ‘too big to
fail’, changed their tune, condemning
fiscal efforts as irresponsible.
Financial crises thus offer opportunities
for those with power and influence
to secure reforms to their advantage.
This also happened following the 1997-
1998 Asian financial crises, after a decade
of financial liberalization following
military rule in South Korea.
The International Monetary Fund
(IMF) provided emergency credit,
requiring major structural changes,
including greater ‘labour market flexibility’,
reducing workers’ bargaining
power and reversing the rising wage
shares and low inequality of growth
before 1998.
Continued from Page 10
Living longer healthy lives Jomo Kwame Sundaram.
Inter Press service
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