[lbo-talk] Marx on Wall Street

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Jun 30 13:04:23 PDT 2004


[from an interview with Paul McCulley, chief Fed watcher at the giant bond management fund PIMCO <http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Late+Breaking+Commentary/FF/2004/FF_07_04.htm>}

Inducing a recession usually isn't a big vote-getter?

Nor is opportunistically embracing them when they happen. Democracy is founded on the notion of one person, one vote and ergo must be inflation-prone. There is nothing wrong with that. As Churchill said, it's the best of the worst forms of government. The thing is, capitalism is inherently prone toward the opposite because of its cumulative voting system of one dollar, one vote. It's that inherent tension that I write about all the time. Fighting inflation involves having slack in men or machines, or as Marx said a long time ago, a reserve army of the unemployed. But it's very difficult for a central bank to say , "Your brother-in-law is unemployed because we have to fight a war against inflation."



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