[lbo-talk] it's over

Matthias Wasser matthias.wasser at gmail.com
Sun Mar 8 19:35:15 PDT 2009


On 3/8/09, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> Oh yeah. After we get through this they'll start up again, unless we
> stop them. That's the great flaw of crisis-o-philia: a problem, even a
> serious one, is taken as something truly transformative. It's probably
> not.
>
> Financial crises, ponzi schemes, massive defaults - they've been an
> intimate part of American history from the beginning.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

Well, the timing seems right, but that just might be numerological nonsense.

I think there's reason to believe this is more than the pop of a speculative bubble; the development of pass-through mortgage securities and some of its sibling instruments allowed household debt volumes to grow at a volume that really structured labor relations, investment flows, et cetera in the Age of Reagan. I certainly wouldn't expect this to be the death throes of capitalism; it's certainly less vulnerable than it was in the 30s, even the 20s, but I do think we're in for another capitalist regime. There seems to be a consensus view of what it will look like, even - the Wolf article looks like a summation of the emerging common wisdom on the whole matter - but who knows if that's accurate.

Alternatively: this is probably on the severity level that we associate with genuine crises; no important restructuring occurred in the wake of the dot-com burst, but then, that was much smaller than stagflation or today (much less the Great Depression.)



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