MBeggs:
I was at the Historical Materialism conference in London back in November, and this point was heavily debated. It came to a climax at the plenary session on the crisis, with Brenner, Gerard Dumenil, David McNally and Costas Lapvitsas...
JGulick:
Here is a longer version of the paper from which McNally's Historical Materialism talk was derived.
The vagaries of the profit rate enter into his analysis, but it's much more nuanced and less one-note than Brenner's. He seems to have a better appreciation of the historical/institutional (if that's the right phrase) aspects linking together East Asian production/savings and US consumption/borrowing and how this trans-Pacific regime restored the robustness of the accumulation process from the 1970's until the East Asian flu of 97-98.
There's also a really interesting take on how the dissolution of Bretton Woods (I) led to a demand for derivatives that at first actually aided transnational investment, but later became a M-M' circuit in its own right once purely speculative bets could be made in that field.
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