 Hello and welcome to Daily Debrief brought to you by People's Dispatch, I am Shriya. In today's episode, we talk about the latest update on the US banking crisis as the Biden government launched a series of rescue operations to salvage trust in the country's banking sector. In France, the government has skipped the parliamentary vote on the notorious pension reform bill by invoking emergency provisions and finally, a third term awaits FIFA's president Gianni Infantino, who was re-elected to the position at the 73rd FIFA Congress in Kigali. The March 10 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent shockwaves throughout the world economy. Since then, the US government moved quickly and decisively to bail out the bank's depositors to the tune of US$151 billion. The collapse of SVB, a bank utilised heavily by the tech industry and venture capitalists, is the second largest bank failure in US history. Signature Bank, based out of New York, also failed quickly afterwards as SVB's crash triggered distrust in the banking system across the nation. The US government also bailed out Signature, spending US$70 billion to ensure that the bank's depositors had access to all of their money. Many are outraged at the amount of money being thrown at banks and venture capitalists and are calling for a bailout of the people not the rich. We go to Bapa Sinha, who joins us in studio with latest updates on the story. Thank you for joining us for this episode. So the US government and the Fed have announced a number of schemes since the collapse of SVB. Can you take us through what are these and how are they likely to follow up since the collapse? So as you know that last week, the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and this is the second largest US bank collapse in US history. The largest one was Washington Mutual, which collapsed in 2008. So it caused quite a panic in the financial markets. And so then once the bank collapsed, the FDIC took over the bank, I think last Friday. So over the weekend, what they announced was, one of the first announcements they made was that all depositors in the bank, their deposits are going to be fully covered. So as you know that under normal circumstances, in the US, deposits up to $250,000 are insured by the FDIC. So if a bank goes down, deposits above $250,000 are not covered. But this is a peculiar bank as in this is not a bank where regular people bank. This is like in Silicon Valley, lot of the Silicon Valley startups, their money is parked here as in the companies. And then there are founders and all that. So a large portion of the deposits in this bank were more than $250,000. So they said that every depositor is going to be, their money is secure. Now so that and this cannot be done under normal circumstances. So the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, she invoked a systemic risk exception to push this through. And the second thing was, they said that the banks can now put their assets as in treasury bonds. And I think the Federal Reserve Agency mortgage back securities right there. So they can now park those, they can use those as collateral to the Federal Reserve and get loans against that. But what is interesting is that you can pledge these collateral at their face value and not at their market value. Now one of the reasons by Silicon Valley Bank collapse was these bonds which they had bought, the treasury bonds which the bank had bought, their price had fallen since the time they had bought them because the Federal Reserve had increased the interest rate. And so they are now trading below par. So it's kind of, this is a discount which has been given to the banks. So that was what the bailout was. Well, that was what the measures were about. Right. And on that note, so the question that arises that there is no official use of the term bailout, but is this really a bailout? Look, so it is a bailout according to you. Right. Now, but what the Federal Reserve as well as Janet Yellen are saying is that it is not a bailout. Now, why are they saying it's not a bailout? What they're saying is that because the bank has been taken over by the FDIC, the investors in the bank, right, the both the equity investors as well as the people who invested in the in the bonds of the bank, they are going to be wiped out. Right. And so in a sense, it is better than the bailout which happened after 2008, where even the investors were not wiped out and they didn't take a haircut. So the investors were made whole. So in that sense, it is not a bailout. But the fact is that depositors over 250,000 dollars, they are being their deposits have been covered by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. So it is a bailout. Right. And actually, if you look at because the Federal Reserve publishes these figures, since that announcement has been made already 300 billion dollars, it's a huge amount, 300 billion dollars have in one way or the other been already been spent on this non-bailout bailout. Right. So how do you how you break it up is that the because of this like since this week, right, because these announcements were made, I think Sunday night. So the banks, I mean, not just Silicon Valley Bank, but banks across the US, they have already taken loans of 160 billion dollars from the Federal Reserve pledging their Treasury bonds as collateral. Right. And another 140 billion dollars have been taken in order to make the deposits of the to protect everybody's deposit in the Silicon Valley Bank. Right. So that's 300 billion dollars in less than a week. That's a huge amount. So it is a bailout. Now it is true that over time, once the FDIC gets together, they are going to look at the books of the Silicon Valley Bank, they're going to sell out their assets. And they are hoping that this money will get recovered. But as of now, as of this week, 300 billion dollars have been spent to stabilize this bank and the US banking sector in general. So whether there is an official acceptance of bailout or not, we do know that like you're saying 300 billion dollars have been spent and the progressive in the United States, they are also criticizing this move. There's a whole deal made about this bailout. The criticism is widespread. Why? See the thing is, well, for historical reasons, the bailouts in 2008 were highly unpopular with the people, because there is a politics behind the bailout. The politics is that in 2008, when people were losing their homes, the government and the Federal Reserve didn't prevent that. People were losing their homes. However, it's only when the banks got into trouble, then the Federal Reserve moved heaven and earth to protect the banks, the bank management and the investors in the bank. And if you look at it, the same thing is repeating itself now. So over the last 10 years, since or more than 10 years, last 15 years, since the 2008 financial crisis, the monetary policy has been ultra loose and interest rates have been kept near zero. There have been many rounds of quantitative easing. First, there was a huge quantity of easing from 2008 till over 2020. And then post-pandemic, more quantitative easing was done in the six months after the pandemic. Dan was done in the entire 12 years before that, which resulted in the inflation that the U.S. is now seeing. In order to tackle that inflation, now who benefited from all this money printing and easy money policy? It is the rich. The wealth inequality during this time went like astronomical. The bulk of the population was basically the wages, the unemployment rates, those didn't move that much while the rich, the top 0.1% became astronomically rich. So once the inflation takes place, the Federal Reserve says that the way to tackle it is we are going to increase rates very rapidly from 0% in 2022. It's now to 5%. This is like the fastest increase in rates. And who does it impact? The unemployment rate in the U.S. has moved from 3.5% to 4.5%. And this was asked in the Senate of Chairman Powell. And he struck that it this is normal business. Okay, fine, inflation is up. People are going to do it. The way it has to come down is you need to make the labor conditions weaker. People need to lose their jobs so that the economy cools down. However, the moment one bank which caters to the rich goes down and rich people's money get impacted, immediately they move to pump $300 billion back into the banks. So it shows the the politics and the priorities of the Federal Reserve, these supposedly technocratic institutions, they are not working on some, it's not like they're number crunching and they're purely working on the numbers. There is a clear politics where the rich are to be protected and the poor are collateral damage. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. On March 16, the French government invoked an emergency provision of the Constitution in the Parliament and passed the controversial pension reform by passing the parliamentary vote. The decision announced by the Prime Minister to avoid voting on the pension reforms envisaged in the law of amending financing of social security for 2023 provoked aya from progressive legislators of the new ecological and social people's union coalition as well as large sections of civil society. Protests have already broken out across the country condemning the forced approval of the bill. We joined by Prashant from People's Dispatch with the latest updates on this issue. Thanks for joining this episode Prashant. So what has happened in France and why has the government invoked in emergency provisions? Right, so it's like I said it's a tale as old as time. Basically the government was not sure of getting a majority in the lower house of parliament on these very controversial pension reforms. So at the last after a lot of discussions with various sections you know Macron and Elizabeth Bourne got spooked as they say and then decided to sort of invoke this provision to pass this very unpopular bit of legislation. Now this actually goes on to show you know to what extent this pension reform you know people are extremely unhappy with this pension reform the fact that despite there being a majority of the right wing of various kinds in the National Assembly still there's been so much of division on this issue that they was not even sure about getting a majority. Now it's important to remember that the last time it came to the National Assembly which is a lower house of parliament it was not passed it was basically taken to the Senate you know in another one of those measures. Now the Senate where the right wing has a strong majority as in Macron and the centrists have a strong majority that passed this bill and it came back once again to the National Assembly but like I said there was the government was not confident about it and the background to this is the fact that France has been seeing some of the biggest protests in recent history over this issue. So I think the number of people who have taken to the streets are numbering close to 3.5 to 4 million in a very short span of time maybe less than a month or so right and they have been wave after wave of protests. We saw there was one round of protests on March 15th, March 7th and 8th there was a historic two-day strike that took place and almost every week there's been one major round hundreds of cities across the country. So it's not just a urban issue it's not just an issue of a specific section of workers it has mobilized people throughout France it has mobilized obviously the entire left in France and even the far right national rally party itself is very divided on this issue. So all said and done you know this kind of shows the desperation of the French government to push these reforms and the reason they are so desperate is because it's it's a great clearly anti worker there's no disguising it there's no way to sort of you know whitewash this and make it seem like it's somehow good for the workers it is clearly very bad for the workers. Right and like you mentioned massive protests have taken place why what are the reasons why is this bill so unpopular? Right so the basic reason is that first of all it increases the retirement age by two years which means two more years of work you know you had to work 40 years to get a full pension now you know let's take a larger picture look at this I mean one of the promises of capitalism in general has always been that you know as technology improves you know there'll be more you know people will ideally have to work less right the fact that and if you look at traditionally the history of the working class movements of labor movements it has always been in some senses a movement towards what the one hand increased wages but also increased amounts of leisure time and the reason leisure time is possible which is a request reason for the fight demand for the Friday week as well as because technology allows that amount of leisure time right right so now the question is what have why then why is it that at this point of time in the year 2023 we have a government which is saying that we need to increase the retirement age you need to spend more years working and that's a basic question that the French workers are asking and a big part of that reason is because of course of austerity policies have prevented you know the recruitment of new people there is you know complete de-investment by the state in key sectors all of which means basically that the workforce is you know not in a position there's not enough investment in technology in research so overall the state is withdrawn to such an extent that it is basically starved then are the idea of production itself a lot of production has been outsourced so this is actually decades of economic policy which has brought the country so you know Macron may say that we need to bring you know the France is in a financial crisis so we need to increase the retirement age but the larger question is why systemically why has this financial crisis come about and I think if you look at people's dispatch coverage over the past few weeks we have focused on various aspects of this on health workers for instance we joined these protests in large numbers because of how their sector vital sector has been starved of resources how they're all you know working excessively you know long hours for instance on March 7th and 8th a lot of focuses on women workers on some of their invisible labor as well the fact that this is going to affect them in so many other ways so like I said you know there's no section of workers which is not going to be affected by this and at this point of time that's really what has brought all these people together and this emergency procedure is really the heights of desperation as far as Macron is Macron and the French government are concerned to push this reform right and as you mentioned a lot of protests have already broken out so this is not the end absolutely this bill and we'll keep following the story with people's dispatch thank you for joining us Gianni Infantino has been elected for what looks like a third term as FIFA president in 2016 he was elected as president amidst a crisis that emerged after a wide ranging corruption investigation by the United States federal authorities that resulted in the removal of numerous soccer officials in the Americas speaking at the congress in Kigali he made some key announcements and outlining the vision of his latest presidential term we are joined by Siddhant Annie who has more on this story welcome to this episode Siddhant so another term for Infantino can you tell us about what happened at this particular election? Yeah Shreya thanks for having me it wasn't an election really because Gianni Infantino the incumbent president stood unopposed for the position at the head of FIFA which is of course the governing body for football in the world this is kind of his third stint but officially second because he first came into the position when Seb Blatter the previous president resigned from his position there was then an extraordinary congress of FIFA held and so that term technically doesn't count which means Infantino is potentially going to be the head of FIFA up until not just 2026 but 2031 which should be after so two more men's World Cup cycles and a couple of women's World Cups as well so in that sense I think Infantino cementing his place as one of the longest running or potentially longest running football administrators at this level establishing also by his unopposed election how much support he has within FIFA's 211 member countries and it's interesting because a lot of the support UEFA the European body that represents the 50 plus European member nations of FIFA they are not essentially Infantino's biggest supporters the support base has come from what I suppose we could refer to in a way as the global south from countries in Africa in Asia as well as Latin America and the Caribbean and to some extent Oceania as well these smaller countries where football is less developed they benefit more from FIFA funded programs you know and things like that in India for example over during Infantino's reign as a king of FIFA we've seen the boys under 17 World Cup and the women girls under 17 World Cups happen in a country that before that had no history of participation in FIFA World Cup final tournaments so these are the kind of I suppose sops or sort of carrots that are offered to developing football nations right and Siddhanta right after his election there were some announcements that Infantino made one of them was about increase in prize money for women's players something that we talked about in the previous episode also so how is this new term going to look like for him yeah it's something that he has to do and has to be done he's announced an increased prize money pool for the World Cup the upcoming World Cup which we were talking about on that previous episode that you mentioned so it it goes up from around 15 million US dollars it's a significant sorry well it's up about three times to a total of close to 150 million US dollars which is not a bad amount of money for sure but there's still a big gap between the men's World Cup which is probably the largest this kind of sporting tournament anywhere in the world and it's said to become larger we'll get to that in a minute but the pool for the men's tournament is close to 450 million dollars so there's still a massive massive gap we've discussed also the gaps overall in terms of club football financing that exists between men's and women's football but Infantino I think recognizes that it is equal if not more important to focus on these aspects of developing women's football because that's where essentially I think those who have sort of longer-term vision imagine the future of large parts of the game lying so it's a positive indication there's lots of negotiations and things to be worked out for individual countries before that World Cup happens and there was also a bit of talk and Infantino again made it a point to say that it's hypocritical of western countries to come out and protest they were talking about potential sponsorship deal with visit Saudi Arabia essentially the Saudi state-run program to promote tourism and other soft power sort of initiatives into Saudi Arabia we've seen Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo two of the biggest names in world football associate themselves very directly with Saudi Arabia in the recent past so the women are standing up and saying that this doesn't kind of suit our collective conscience or whatever it is given specifically I suppose the Saudi record of women's rights and this is also in a way these discussions should happen it possibly shouldn't be like anyone who with money can come in and sponsor a tournament so it's positive that these discussions are happening the other major change that will happen actually and this will impact millions of people outside of the actual football environment which is that the franchise that electronic arts the video game studio had with FIFA to exclusively produce the video game FIFA video game which I think millions and millions of kids play around the world FIFA will now take back control of that and they will sort of launch their own e-sports division hoping to increase their own share of the money that exists in the e-sports environment and kind of benefit from the kind of exclusive licensing that only FIFA can afford so a lot of money spinning likely in Infantino's forthcoming tenure but we will see it couched and kind of covered up with these kind of carrots and another kind of handouts to two member nations as well and you'll see a narrative of at least wanting to support the smaller countries in world football versus those who are already established in Europe. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode Siddharth and that's all for today's episode for more such stories keep following peoplesdispatch.org you can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram