THE CRASH on the global stock markets carried on yesterday as the world financial markets reeled from the shock realisation that the once mighty US economy is diving headlong into a recession.
Hardest hit has been the share price of the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’, the high tech US companies whose meteoric rise in share price has fuelled the massive increase in the value of stocks on the back of investors gambling that promised advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) would reap them untold billions in profit.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index, where the shares of these companies are listed, was hammered on Monday falling by over 4% – any fall above 2% is reckoned to be a catastrophic collapse.
The biggest hit was to the Tesla car company, owned by president Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk, which has suffered 50% wiped off its value in the past weeks.
Analysis carried out by the investment platform AJ Bell found that £1.2 trillion has been wiped off the value of the seven tech giants so far this year.
The crash has only just started, and even Trump admitted on Sunday that he couldn’t ‘rule out’ the US heading into recession.
The financial markets experienced a massive ‘bump’ on Trump’s election with his pledge to rescue the US from drowning under the weight of a national debt of over $33.1 trillion by crushing America’s weaker capitalist rivals with a trade war, while Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) sacked hundreds of thousands of US government employees and closed down entire government departments.
The Trump bump has now turned into a recession that is driving the economic collapse of the entire world capitalist system.
In Britain, the Labour government under Keir Starmer is following exactly the same path as Trump.
On Monday evening, Starmer, addressing a meeting of Labour MPs, openly declared his intention to slash benefits, calling the current benefit system unsustainable, indefensible and unfair – ‘the worst of all worlds’.
Labour is targeting the unemployed, the sick and disabled for massive cuts to benefits in order to drive them into low-paid menial jobs or into destitution.
For Labour, as it was for the Tories, those out of work and in receipt of benefits are a drag on capitalism, just ‘scroungers’ on the state.
Following in the footsteps of Trump and Musk, Starmer wrote to half a million civil servants promising ‘reforms’ that will lead to massive job cuts by ‘incentivising’ workers to leave by a vicious campaign of continual work assessment designed solely to drive them out or provide grounds for instant dismissal.
In the NHS, Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting is wielding his own chainsaw with the demand that NHS England immediately cut thousands of jobs, while backing private investment in public health to usher in ‘a new era for the NHS’.
In an interview with the BBC on Sunday, Labour minister Pat McFadden denied that Labour was ‘mimicking Elon Musk’ but that is precisely what Starmer and the Labour government are doing driven by the same economic crisis that is engulfing world capitalism.
In this crisis, the ruling class see the only way to survive is to make the working class pay by driving them back to conditions of the 19th century when there was no welfare state or benefits and when the poor and sick were confined to workhouses.
While the Labour government is preparing to carry through a campaign of super-austerity to destroy jobs and the welfare state, all the TUC leader Paul Nowak could say was that the language being used by Starmer was ‘unhelpful’.
Unhelpful to the TUC leaders desperate to hold back the working class from dealing with a Labour government whose only priority is rescuing British capitalism that is dragging the working class down as it collapses into bankruptcy.
TUC leaders who refuse to fight must be sacked.
Workers must force the TUC to call an emergency Congress to remove them and replace them with a leadership that will immediately call a general strike to bring down the Starmer government and bring in a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
Socialist revolution is the only way forward!
