This is just impressionism, Doug. The issue is not financial crisis, but economic crisis which the stock markets only indirectly reflect. The more interesting and revealing numbers are contained in Harry Shutt's "The Trouble With Capitalism", Zed Books, 1998, p. 38.
--- OECD: variations in rate of change in output, private consumption, fixed investment and consumer prices (annual % change)
1953-60 60-65 65-73 73-79 79-85 85-89 89-95 50-73 73-95 Gross domestic product 2.9 5.3 5.0 2.7 2.1 3.4 1.8 4.3 2.4 Private Consumption 2.9 5.1 5.1 3.0 2.1 3.5 2.0 4.3 2.6 Fixed Capital Formation 4.4 7.1 5.9 1.2 1.1 5.3 1.8 5.7 2.1 Consumer Prices 2.5 2.6 4.8 10.3 7.5 3.5 3.4 3.4 6.4 ---
The brute fact is that capitalist growth slowed down in the early '70s and neither neo-Keynsianism, nor monetarism has worked to change that. The reason for a slowdown in growth is that there is a slowdown in demand, which government policy under capitalism can not change. During the 1930s, there was a severe downturn in the economy in 1937, as Harry Magdoff explains in an interesting MR article from earlier in the year. It is written as a long letter to somebody named "Chris" explaining why his article submitted to MR had one serious mistake in it: it gave credence to Keynsianism.
Shutt's book is really an eye-opener and I recommend it strongly, especially the chapter "The End of the Boom and the Neo-classical Reaction," from which the above chart is found. He describes a problem of "market saturation" in which the "increasing maturity of most consumer markets in the industrialized countries was becoming a noticeable constraint to economic growth in the industrialized world by the end of the 1960s. This meant that in addition to static demand for non-durable goods (food, drink and clothing) the markets for most durable goods (automobiles, televisions sets, etc.) tended more and more to be governed mainly by replacement demand rather than by the continuous opening up of new groups of first-time buyers, which had been possible throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Hence demand for goods generally began to grow more in line with population--which was in any case increasing more slowly than in the immediate postwar period--rather than at the rapid rates recorded up to the mid-1960s. This is a rather intractable problem for a system based on profit.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)