The Great Financial Crisis¶
Metadata¶
- Author: [[John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff]]
- ASIN: B00ARF25I8
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ARF25I8
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
that long-run development is not inherent in the capitalist economy. — location: 169 ^ref-5559
The development of the modern corporation was inseparable from the development of modern finance, — location: 199 ^ref-64438
The result was an acceleration of the process of debt buildup—going beyond mere speculative orgies that historically came at the peak of business cycles, becoming instead a permanent, institutionalized feature of the economy. — location: 244 ^ref-50959
There is a temptation of some analysts, particularly on the left, to see finance as simply a parasitic phenomenon—and that all could be put right simply by rechanneling these funds to productive investment.21 However, the argument presented in this book, as the foregoing suggests, is different. The financial explosion in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist economies since the 1960s, we argue, is symptomatic of the underlying stagnation tendency that has its roots in the whole pattern of accumulation under monopoly-finance capital. It is this and not the financialization (or even today’s crisis of financialization) that is the real problem. — location: 266 ^ref-45097
Under the stimulus of wartime demand, the U.S. economy increased in size by 70 percent in only six years. — location: 313 ^ref-52446
It is true that investment in the periphery has created new outlets for investment-seeking capital. However, for a variety of reasons, such as the worldwide competition for markets, global stagnation (evident in the growth of worldwide excess capacity) and the soaring surplus obtained from exploitation of third world markets, which adds to the capital looking for outlets, such external expansion has not seriously alleviated the tendency toward an overaccumulation of capital on either a U.S. or world scale. — location: 542 ^ref-44983
although the system has changed as a result of financialization, this falls short of a whole new stage of capitalism, since the basic problem of accumulation within production remains the same. Instead, financialization has resulted in a new hybrid phase of the monopoly stage of capitalism that might be termed “monopoly-finance capital.” — location: 1110 ^ref-52512
financialization was functional for capitalism in the context of a tendency to stagnation: — location: 1168 ^ref-12595
There is no necessary direct connection between productive investment and the amassing of financial assets. — location: 1190 ^ref-45487
emphasized the way in which the state (civilian and military spending), the sales effort, a second great wave of automobilization, and other factors had buoyed the capitalist economy in the golden age of the 1960s, absorbing surplus and lifting the system out of stagnation. — location: 1204 ^ref-52509
The stagnation of the underlying economy meant that capitalists were increasingly dependent on the growth of finance to preserve and enlarge their money capital. (2) The financial superstructure of the capitalist economy could not expand entirely independently of its base in the underlying productive economy—hence the bursting of speculative bubbles was a recurrent and growing problem.15 (3) Financialization, no matter how far it extended, could never overcome stagnation within production. — location: 1216 ^ref-33702
calling “monopoly-finance capital” in which financialization has become a permanent structural necessity of the stagnation-prone economy. — location: 1223 ^ref-1952
nonfinancial corporations are also heavily involved in capital and money markets. — location: 1238 ^ref-8678
Yet, the coalescence of nonfinancial and financial corporations makes it difficult to see this as constituting a division within capital itself. — location: 1241 ^ref-39189
While the financialization of the world economy is undeniable, to see this as the creation of a new international of capital is to make a huge leap in logic. Global monopoly-finance capitalism remains an unstable and divided system. — location: 1273 ^ref-18019
As ever, it remains true today, as Marx said, that “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.” — location: 1314 ^ref-9603
stagnation made its presence felt most dramatically in the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was interrupted by the economic stimulus provided by the Second World War and by the exceptionally favorable conditions immediately after the war in the so-called “Golden Age.” But as the favorable conditions waned stagnation resurfaced in the 1970s. — location: 1490 ^ref-8068
even the stimulus offered by such gargantuan military spending is not enough today to lift U.S. capitalism out of stagnation. Hence, the economy has become more and more dependent on financialization as the key vehicle of growth. — location: 1527 ^ref-32446
The foregoing argument leads to the conclusion that stagnation generates financialization, which is the main means by which the system continues to limp along at present. — location: 1545 ^ref-3810
Yet, the idea of the “crowding out” of investment by financial speculation makes little sense, in our view, when placed in the present context of an economy characterized by rising excess capacity and vanishing net investment opportunities. — location: 1571 ^ref-10766
as important as financialization has become in the contemporary economy, this should not blind us to the fact that the real problem lies elsewhere: in the whole system of class exploitation rooted in production. — location: 1580 ^ref-44764
Marx wrote in Capital, “The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alterations of the industrial cycle, while it is a mere symptom of them.” — location: 1582 ^ref-22996
the real barrier to capital is capital itself: manifested in the tendency toward overaccumulation of capital. — location: 1584 ^ref-15317
The only things that could conceivably be done within the system to stabilize the economy, Sweezy stated at Harvard in 1994, would be greatly to expand civilian state spending in ways that genuinely benefited the population; and to carry out a truly radical redistribution of income and wealth — location: 1590 ^ref-19850
The hard truth of the matter is that the regime of monopoly-finance capital is designed to benefit a tiny group of oligopolists who dominate both production and finance. A relatively small number of individuals and corporations control huge pools of capital and find no other way to continue to make money on the required scale than through a heavy reliance on finance and speculation. This is a deep-seated contradiction intrinsic to the development of capitalism itself. — location: 1596 ^ref-39808
The chief worry is a massive “debt-deflation” — location: 1689 ^ref-14091
The very thought of such events recurring in the U.S. economy today was supposed to be blocked by the lender of last resort function, based on the view that the problem was primarily monetary and could always be solved by monetary means by flooding the economy with liquidity at the least hint of danger. — location: 1700 ^ref-37694
Our argument in a nutshell is that both the financial explosion in recent decades and the financial implosion now taking place are to be explained mainly in reference to stagnation tendencies within the underlying economy. — location: 1765 ^ref-58629
Nevertheless, the root problem went much deeper, and was to be found in a real economy experiencing slower growth, giving rise to financial explosion as capital sought to “leverage” its way out of the problem by expanding debt and gaining speculative profits. — location: 1776 ^ref-55936
It was financialization—and the growth of debt that it actively promoted—which was to emerge as the quantitatively most important stimulus to demand. But it pointed unavoidably to a day of financial reckoning and cascading defaults. — location: 1850 ^ref-27240
that the autonomy of finance from the underlying economy, associated with the financialization process, was more relative than absolute, and that ultimately a major economic downturn—more than the mere bursting of one bubble and the inflating of another—was necessary. — location: 1872 ^ref-60652
barring special historical factors. — location: 1878 ^ref-34181
What about imperialism?
The prosperity that characterized the economy in the 1950s and ’60s, they insisted, was attributable to such temporary historical factors as: (1) the buildup of consumer savings during the war; (2) a second great wave of automobilization in the United States (including the expansion of the glass, steel, and rubber industries, the construction of the interstate highway system, and the development of suburbia); (3) the rebuilding of the European and the Japanese economies devastated by the war; (4) the Cold War arms race (and two regional wars in Asia); (5) the growth of the sales effort marked by the rise of Madison Avenue; (6) the expansion of FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate); and (7) the preeminence of the dollar as the hegemonic currency. — location: 1879 ^ref-20966
Stagnation in the 1970s led capital to launch an accelerated class war against workers to raise profits by pushing labor costs down. — location: 1913 ^ref-3934
that household consumption continued to rise from a little over 60 percent of GDP in the early 1960s to around 70 percent in 2007. This was only possible because of more two-earner households (as women entered the labor force in greater numbers), people working longer hours and filling multiple jobs, and a constant ratcheting up of consumer debt. — location: 1929 ^ref-60929
household debt increased from about 40 percent of GDP in 1960 to 100 percent of GDP in 2007, — location: 1934 ^ref-45170
corporations unable to find the demand for their output—a reality reflected in the long-run decline of capacity utilization in industry — location: 1944 ^ref-32453
the process of net capital formation became more and more problematic. — location: 1946 ^ref-17177
Hence, profits were increasingly directed away from investment in the expansion of productive capacity and toward financial speculation, — location: 1949 ^ref-53452
Since financialization can be viewed as the response of capital to the stagnation tendency in the real economy, a crisis of financialization inevitably means a resurfacing of the underlying stagnation endemic to the advanced capitalist economy. — location: 1958 ^ref-17275
The state also was said to have nothing directly to do with economics and was taken up by the new field of political science.41 Economics was thus “purified” of all class and political elements, and increasingly presented as a “neutral” science, addressing universal/transhistorical principles of capital and market relations. — location: 1990 ^ref-20372
Having lost any meaningful roots in society, orthodox neoclassical economics, which presented itself as a single paradigm, became a discipline dominated by largely meaningless abstractions, mechanical models, formal methodologies, and mathematical language, divorced from historical developments. — location: 1993 ^ref-46499
the contrary view, emphasizing the socioeconomic contradictions of the system, to which it is now necessary to turn. — location: 2006 ^ref-53668
Economics lost its explicit political-economic cast, and the world was led back once again to the mythology of self-regulating, self-equilibrating markets free of issues of class and power. Anyone who questioned this, was characterized as political rather than economic, and thus largely excluded from the mainstream economic discussion. — location: 2013 ^ref-49107
The capacity of the larger public to see through this deception in the months and years ahead will of course depend on an enormous amount of education by trade union and social movement activists, and the degree to which the empire of capital is stripped naked by the crisis. — location: 2026 ^ref-50444
Some liberal economists and commentators argue that, given the present economic crisis, nothing short of a major public works program aimed at promoting employment, a kind of new New Deal, will do. — location: 2043 ^ref-34260
The class forces blocking a major increase in nondefense governmental spending even in a severe stagnation should therefore not be underestimated. Any major advances in this direction will require a massive class struggle. — location: 2052 ^ref-55667
If such elementary prerequisites of any decent future look impossible under the present system, then the people should take it into their own hands to create a new society that will deliver these genuine goods. — location: 2059 ^ref-27781
it is necessary “to insist that morality and economics alike support the intuitive sense of the masses that society’s human and natural resources can and should be used for all the people and not for a privileged minority.” — location: 2061 ^ref-61185
financialization is so essential to the monopoly-finance capital of today, that such a “euthanasia of the rentier” cannot be achieved—in contravention of Keynes’s dream of a more rational capitalism—without moving beyond the system itself. — location: 2065 ^ref-28438
Thus framing "financial" capitalism in opposition to "industrial" implies a return to "industrial" is possible, but it isn't
it is necessary for the population to seize control of their political economy, replacing the present system of capitalism with something amounting to a real political and economic democracy; — location: 2070 ^ref-65292
what the present rulers of the world fear and decry most—as “socialism.” — location: 2071 ^ref-44468