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The US sub-prime mortgage crisis and credit crunch, and the resultant US slowdown and potential recession, has acutely posed the nature of the current period. Over the last 12 months, the IMF has raised its estimate of financial losses from approximately $50 billion in the summer of 2007, to $945 billion in April 2008. US growth is expected to hover around 0% for at least the first half of 2008 and the knock-on effects on the world economy have still to unravel.
As a result certain Marxists, including Peter Taaffe, Lynn Walsh, Robert Brenner - and now Hillel Ticktin in the Weekly Worker - have asserted that this is the deepest crisis that capitalism has faced in decades, one that poses the potential possibility of a repeat of the 1930s great depression. Ticktin says: "The question at the moment is not really whether there is a downturn. It is clear that is the case. The question is whether there is a depression - and I think there is." And he adds, apocalyptically, that the "system itself could disintegrate".
Full: <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/717/financial.html>