"Well, the Doug I know and love keeps intervening with sanguine snarky sentiments whenever the talk turns to the bad 'c' word, crisis."
The problem I have with Patrick's arguments is that since he seems to have been announcing a pending crisis for the last fifteen years, he was bound to be right sooner or later.
Compelling to me, anyway, is how *little* this current credit crunch looks like a typical Marxist over-accumulation crisis. Marx's precondition was a rising organic composition of capital (roughly, capital intensive growth) but in Europe, and I believe in the US for around ten to fifteen years, most growth has been 'job-rich' growth, predicated on low wages, while investment in new technology has been low.