> Because the subprime mortgages, current account deficit, public debt,
> relatively stagnant GDP etc etc are symptoms of a deeper problem.
What, the crisis of capitalism? Trotsky's death agony? Financial panics and recessions/depressions have been regular features of capitalism since forever. Has the deeper problem always been there - for all 700 of O'Connor's years?
>> How can this story not be told without noting international financial
> contagion, financial imperialism, the spatial fix, globalisation...
You didn't answer my objection the other day that the use of "fix" implies something of a dirty trick and one that isn't going to last. But geography has been part of capitalism since forever too - regions rise and fall, sectors rise and fall, the whole thing is a dizzying and brutal show.
There's nothing in this paper that's incompatible with a broader systemic analysis either. It's an empirical study of how some crucial economic measures behave in a bubble and a bust. They look at the c/a deficit as a number; we could just as easily look at it as a measure of the state of the American empire.
>> Not at all. The crisis comes, as Cox defined it most usefully, when a
> system's reproduction is not automatically perpetuated by
> self-correcting features but instead needs an exogenous shock whose
> logic is contrary to the system's laws of motion. There was not a
> 'crisis' in that sense from the 1940s-60s, but by the late 1960s
> systemic overaccumulation and crisis displacement processes began
> to be
> evident.
Ok, so the crisis is now almost 40 years old? That's a lot shorter than 700 years, but really, Patrick, that's an awfully long crisis.
I like Sam Gindin's point that neoliberalism is a coherent form of organizing a society, and quite successful on its own terms. It's possible that the subprime thing could be the death agony of neoliberalism, but you seem to think that capital won't be successful at coming up with another model. The U.S. could, under the Dems, go into some bastard Progressive Era.
> Savvy means an earlier bailout? Isn't that always the strategy of the
> ruling lads: move the devalorisation elsewhere?
Yeah sure why not? Works for them, doesn't it?
And what about, say the, systemic distribution of the costs of the S&L bailout? The masses paid, but a total collapse would have cost them more.
> In which case Doug's
> mistake in downplaying the economic problems until they bit him in the
> ass
I've said the housing bubble was waiting to burst since 2005.
> is a function of not recognising the potentials for the internal
> crisis (overaccumulation and financial speculation) to grow to such
> large proportions from early on, and not recognising the scope of
> capital's collateral damage and in some cases (e.g. Iraq) the
> resistance.
I don't get what Iraq has to do with subprime. I never really got how David Harvey knows that the Bush admin was trying to compensate in politics for a decline in U.S. economic power; there's no evidence that the Bush admin ever thought that the U.S. was in decline.
>> They were humble for a few months in 1998 too. Some even tried a
> post-Washington gambit. That's why comrade Doug and others with
> market-watching skills who see the mess unfold now should have been
> more
> like Chicken Little, instead of being so damn sanguine. A good model,
> I'd say, was Dean Baker at www.cepr.net, who called the real estate
> bubble a bubble long before anyone else awoke.
He wasn't the only one.
Doug