Another thing. In a previous post, I suggested a typical bourgeois apology of stock market-driven investment. Now of course Doug's whole book is a refutation of that lie. For example, far from obsolescent firms being driven under by firms undertaking investments in superior technologies financed by the issue of new equity, Wall Street is helping more powerful firms buy up and thus preserve antiquated enterprises.
Now I think this creates a very ominous situation, which was explored by E. A. Preobrazhensky, the Soviet Marxist economist whose Decline of Capitalism (1931) was the last serious piece of Soviet Marxist economics, according to Richard B Day in The Crisis and the Crash (Verso, 1981).
If monopolies have absorbed so much reserve capacity, then the classic escape route from crisis conditions has been foreclosed. That is, if in classic free crisis conditions, the most powerful firms purchase new advanced fixed capital with which their unit costs can be reduced and profit rates restored and by just such orders create the demand which can lift the economy as a whole out of depressed conditions; then monopolies with no competition to beat off and in possession of substantial reserve capacity (purchased with equity during the stock market boom) may not undertake such new investments by which the economy is lifted out of crisis conditions with even greater productive power. Instead monopolies may attempt to amortize their entire capital stock (including all that antiquated equipment) through (what else?) monopoly pricing. This could protract the next downturn to the point where it would be truly catastrophic. Preobrazhensky referred to as a thrombosis in production.
Best, Rakesh