The vampire squid: Value, crisis and the power of finance

Over the last five decades the power and global reach of financial institutions and finance capital to organize economic, social and political life has grown seemingly unchecked. This is manifested in the ability of international markets to limit the economic sovereignty of states; the power of activist shareholders to dictate policy to company management, often at the expense of long‐term strategy and employment creation; and the advantages offered by returns to investments in financial assets over those in manufacturing and services. All of these developments have contributed to the apparently inescapable triumph of neoliberalism and the deepening of global inequality. They have also led to the economic havoc of the 2008 financial crisis, which plunged the global economy into a period of austerity from which it has not yet emerged (Thompson, 2017). It is no wonder, then, that money markets and financial institutions have fallen from being the vaunted legislators of the world to become, for some, its new pariahs. A new consensus is emerging that many of our economic ills stem from the fact that banks and financiers, instead of merely facilitating the production of ‘real’ wealth in the form of services and goods, have slipped their bonds to become independent players in their own right. They are now seen at best as the tail wagging the dog and at worst as outright parasites: ‘a great vampire squid’, as one journalist described Goldman Sachs, ‘wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’ (Taibbi, 2010)

<b>Some chemical characteristics of the River Pra Estuary in the Western region of Ghana</b>

This paper discusses the nutrients budget and transfers of mineral nutrients from land to the sea that influence significantly the biogeochemical process operating in the coastal ecosystem. Water samples were collected fortnightly from six sites in the estuary and analysed using standard methods of analyses. It was observed that the estuary is alkaline in nature and the alkalinity increases, in the lower reach of the river as it flowed into the sea. The estuary could be classified as a well-mixed estuary due to the vertical homogenous distribution of salinity. The inorganic nitrogen in the water body exists predominately in the form of nitrate (NO3-), as compared to concentrations of ammonium (NH4+) and nitrite (NO2-). The ranges of NO3-, NH4+ and NO2- concentrations are (4.98-8.27), (0.11-0.46) and (0.005-10.95) x 10-3 mg/L. The concentrations of nitrate, nitrite, ammonium and phosphate were found to be within WHO specification. The calculated residual flow (VR) for both November and December are -2.7 x 107 m3 day-1 and -1.01 x 107 m3 day-1, respectively. The negative value of VR implies that water flows from the system. The corresponding residence and flush times are 324 and 109 seconds and 828 and 595.2 seconds for November and December, respectively