Then James, surprisingly, you've forgotten Marx-Lenin-Grossman-Mattick on the logic of capital accumulation, in spite of your excellent review of Phil Kuhn's book recently.
> The welfare-warfare state is just such an intervention.
Hmm, no and yes. To the extent the warfare state devalorises (Iraq!) it is not such an intervention, because devalorisation is the opposite of the logic of accumulation. To the extent the welfare state does Keynesian pump-priming, it is consistent with ongoing valorisation.
> Will the current subprime collapse lead to a generalised market failure?
> We
> will see, but it does not seem likely.
That may be (I'd agree - there's lots more financial slack in the system), but the word 'crisis' is useful because it suggests that the correction ahead will entail either serious displacement efforts (Fed bailouts along the lines of 9/98) or moving the cost to those least able to pay (the low/medium-income homeowners - especially African-Americans - who are going to be on the streets very soon).
The more serious problem, it seems, is the durable US current account deficit, a geographical and temporal displacement that may be untenable.