Financial crisis of 2000 => 2012 (Help)

[Valdemar]

Hey Valdemar is still here! He was not sweept by BanHamer which happen some time ago! Nope, i was just busy spreading Communism!

Help, i need Marxis perspective on this Crisis.
Thank you very much in Advance.

[daft punk]

"It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto


see also here

http://www.socialistworld.net/view/3

articles on the world economy going back to about 1998

Plenty around 2008 explaining the crisis and some a few years earlier predicting it to some extent.


here is a crucial aspect:

2005:

"But there is another side to the piling up of profits by big business. By cutting the share that the working class receives, and massively so as these figures show, ultimately this cuts the market. The ability of working people to buy back the goods that they produce is therefore undermined by the threat of an economic recession or slump. Capitalism can overcome this problem, as it has done in the past period, by an enormous extension of credit, what Karl Marx called ‘fictitious capital’, and a drive by the major industrial powers towards the world market to sell their goods rather than at home. Germany, for instance, overtook America as the world’s largest exporter last year and yet in the fourth quarter of 2004 its economy shrank by 0.2 per cent, wages fell by 1.5 per cent and the jobless total surged to a record 5.2 million. "
(my emphasis)


http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/1703

[RGacky3]

David harvey and Richard Wolff both do great analysis of the crisis, look them up.

[bugsbunny]

To me the financial crisis is caused by Socialism. The over-spending to create unaffordablee welfare states is the root cause of the sovereign debt crisis.

I am glad the French Socialists are seeing the light (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-19/france-s-socialists-are-getting-realistic-on-europe-economic-crisis-view.htm)and moving towards the right.

Excerpt:



Hollande ran on a platform that was largely free of the demagoguery that has characterized the French left’s electoral message in the past. Given an electorate beset by anxiety over a debt and banking crisis, it would have been easy for Hollande or his principal rival for the nomination, Martine Aubry (http://topics.bloomberg.com/martine-aubry/), to appeal to class resentment or reduce their nation’s troubles to the supposed domination of the all-purpose foreign boogeyman, the“Anglo-Saxon” economic model that values profit more than people.

Instead, Hollande focused (http://francoishollande.fr/la-france-en-avant) on the correct big issue: the need for France (http://topics.bloomberg.com/france/) to shrink its ballooning budget deficit. In many regards, his approach is almost indistinguishable from that of his expected adversary in the election, France’s center-right president, Nicolas Sarkozy (http://topics.bloomberg.com/nicolas-sarkozy/). Both vow to narrow the deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product in 2013, from about 7 percent now. Hollande, however, goes further, by promising a balanced budget by 2017.

Most surprising, perhaps, the Socialist agenda calls for capping government-spending increases at 1.7 percent a year (a little less than the latest inflation rate of 2.2 percent). Sarkozy’s recently introduced austerity measures would limit spending growth at 1 percent.

To be sure, Hollande does lean on some old-fashioned and impractical thinking. He wants to restore the retirement age (http://topics.bloomberg.com/retirement-age/) to 60 for some workers, rolling back a sensible move by Sarkozy to bring it up to 62, still far lower than in other comparable economies with aging populations.

Hollande has declined to endorse a call for higher taxes on the wealthy, but proposes instead to do away with a series of tax exemptions enacted by Sarkozy that he says favor the highest incomes. Corporate taxes, currently at 33 percent, would be lowered to 20 percent for companies that reinvest their profit and would be raised as high as 40 percent for firms that don’t do so or pay out dividends deemed excessive.


Mises would approve of most of it.

[RGacky3]

To me the financial crisis is caused by Socialism. The over-spending to create unaffordablee welfare states is the root cause of the sovereign debt crisis.

I am glad the French Socialists are seeing the light (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-19/france-s-socialists-are-getting-realistic-on-europe-economic-crisis-view.htm)and moving towards the right.


From the 40s-70s you basically had the free reign of social democracy in europe and relative progressivism in the US, then in the 1980s you had liberalization across the board, and then worsening crisis every year.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, you had even more liberalization especially in the financial sector, and now you have this.

blaming it on some mysterious "socialist" boogyman is being totally ignorant of history.

[Per Levy]

To me the financial crisis is caused by Socialism. The over-spending to create unaffordablee welfare states is the root cause of the sovereign debt crisis.

this is funny in several was, first of all there is no socialism in the world, so its funny that you blame socialism for the crisis. second, you lump welfare and socialism together as when they were one thing. third, how was/is the crisis of the banks related to the welfare state? you remember that the goverments of the world had in acouple of days over 3 trillion $ together to save those.

[Per Levy]

blaming it on some mysterious "socialist" boogyman is being totally ignorant of history.

he is a libertarian what do you expect?

[Thirsty Crow]

To me the financial crisis is caused by Socialism. The over-spending to create unaffordablee welfare states is the root cause of the sovereign debt crisis.
It's impossible to argue with people such as yourself starting from the basic theoretical issues such as the nature of the crisis, especially in relation to the state's economic function, let alone from the concept of causality which you people can't really handle.
So I'll ask a very specific question.
How come the Triad of the credit rating agencies (S&P, Moody, and that third one) haven't downgraded UK bonds, given the fact that British national debt stands just some percentage points (ok, it might be dozenish percentage points) below that of the most indebted nation in the world, the US? (of course this only makes sense when we figure out that this percentage relates to the ratio of debt to GDP).

EDIT: I made a mistake, it seems that Moody's did in fact cut on UK in the recent round of downgrading. Though, the question stands equally, given the fact that this downgrading was very late in relation to the austerity measures which were brought up earlier.

EDIT2: And once again, I fucked up. It seems that Moody's only changed the perception of "outlook" on UK, so in fact they stll do hold AAA status. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/30/credit-ratings-country-fitch-moodys-standard

So my original question stands.