The title Profit Without End is meant to indicate that a shortage of surplus value could never throttle production.
A few questions about this piece.
1. Heinrich does not explain why the absolute level of industrial employment in China seems to be stagnant!
2. He's not very clear on what exactly has improved not profitability (to which centralization and redistribution of profits via commodity chains can make a mighty contribution for the most powerful capitals at the expense of weaker or annihilated ones) but the conditions of valorization themselves. How much have they improved? Then why anemic net investment in say the United States or what Doug most interestingly refers to as the punishment of investment by rentiers? What is responsible for putative improvement and to what extent is each factor responsible--higher rate of surplus value, reduced turnover time, capital saving innovation, privatization of state assets, opening up of low organic composition capital branches?
3. This sentence is puzzling: " Crisis and unemployment are in no way a sign of capitalist decline; they are capitalist normality." Well no they were not supposed to be capitalist normality after the innovation of the mixed economy. What happened? Is Brad DeLong still on this list?
4. I would like to believe the importance of dollar pricing of oil to status of dollar vis a vis euro (do remember the noise I made about this in 1999 on lbo-talk by talking up a book on petro dollars by David Spiro whom Doug later interviewed on his show). And I would like to believe that the intl role of the dollar as transactional currency and insurance fund allows the US to finance deficits and print money via open market operations and that this has all played a huge role in the stability of the ever more uncompetitive US economy (I was making noise about that too many years ago, and Franklin Serrano and others actually developed some real arguments). But Krugman and others have said this seignorage argument just does not add up (Krugman also thought it fantastic that anyone in the Bush administration could even understand why the dollar's international role is worth maintaining, and perhaps Bush will have done more than anyone to encourage the dumping of dollars!) At the time I was making noise I think Max also expressed very reasonable skepticism as well.
Rakesh