“Free trade” agreements contribute to financial and other crises
While the financial crisis and its consequences spreads around the world and even the most erstwhile ‘free market’ governments discuss how to re-regulate the financial sector, ‘free trade’ agreements continue the extreme deregulation of the financial industry.
Terms of these agreements prohibit countries from reforming their financial sector so as to remedy the financial, economic, environmental, food and social crises now growing, and to ensure finance is directed to the transformation into sustainable societies. Our world is not for sale network in the World Social Forum (Belem) distributed a paper which shows how deregulation and liberalisation of financial services is part of the many bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) that are currently being negotiated or have been implemented over the last years. For instance, the EU-Caribbean Economic Partnership agreement (EPA) exemplifies the model that the EU seeks to impose during all current FTA and EPA negotiations. Some FTAs include a ‘review clause’ which is a commitment to (further) deregulate and liberalise (financial) services through new negotiations at a certain point in time, without public or parliamentary scrutiny.
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