Monthly Review strongStagnationstrong and Financialization The Nature.pdfVIP

/2014/05/01/stagnation-and-financialization Monthly Review | Stagnation and Financialization: The Nature of the Contradiction by red Magdoff and John Bellamy oster topics: Global Economic Crisis , Political Economy , Stagnation places: Americas , United States red Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and a long-time commentator on political-economic topics. John Bellamy oster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.They are coauthors of The Great Financial Crisis (2009) and What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (2011)—both published by Monthly Review Press. But in a period like the present when trade is chronically stagnant what can we say of the worker’s hope if he can see no further than a continuance of the present relations of employer and employed; if the system of capital and wage- earning is to go on? —William Morris 1 More than six years after the beginning of the Great Recession in the United States, and nearly five years since it was officially declared over in this country, the core economies of the capitalist world system remain crisis-ridden. The jobs lost in the downturn in the United States have not yet been fully recovered and the economy remains sluggish. In Europe the crisis has hardly abated at all and a number of the peripheral European Union countries are in what can only be called a depression—especially Greece, Spain, and Portugal.2 The last member of the triad of advanced capitalist centers, Japan, has gone through what have been called two “lost decades” of slow growth and deflation and is attempting once again to j ump-start the economy through a combination of devaluation of the yen and deficit spending. Given these dire conditions it is not surprising that even some of the leading orthodox economists are beginning to talk about the cur