NOTES
[1] Thomas Edsall, “Alan Greenspan: The Oracle or the Master of Disaster?” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/19/alan-greenspan-the-oracle_n_168168. html.
[2]Ben S Bernanke, “Four Questions about the Financial Crisis,” speech at Morehouse College, April 14, 2009, http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20090414a.htm.
[3]Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (London: Verso, 2009) vii, x.
[4] Rick Wolff has particularly analyzed this aspect of the crisis on MRZINE. See, for example, “Class War,” September 16, 2009; “Capitalism’s Crisis Through a Marxian Lens,” December 14, 2008.
[5] The theme of capitalist decay can in fact be dated back to Karl Kautsky’s drafting of The Erfurt Programme in the late 19th century and V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century. It was a theme then applied to American capitalism in the writings of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966) and Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (London: Merlin Press, 1962).
[6] Most notably in this respect have been Michael Perelman, The Pathology of the U.S. Economy (1993); Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994); David Harvey’s The New Imperialism (2003): Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent (2003), and Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (2006).
[7] A debate particularly carried on in the pages of The Nation and American Prospect over the last two years. More critical stances can be found in the pages of Monthly Review,Against the Current and International Socialist Review.
[8] The foremost examples of this contention being: Sam Bowles, David Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf, After the Wasteland: A Democratic Economy for the Year 2000 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990); Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Knopf, 1991). An updated version of this theme is Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2009).
[9] Krishna Guha, “Ten Years of Cuts and Tax Rises Lie Ahead, IMF Says,” Financial Times, November 4, 2009.
[10] These struggles have been covered at the following websites: Reclaiming Spaces at www.reclaiming-spaces.org/crisis/archives/category/housing-the-crisis ; Socialist Project at www.socialistproject.ca ; and Labor Notes at www. labornotes.org.
[11] The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 86–7.
[12] Ibid., 86–7.
[13] The best of these is Kevin Phillips, Bad Money (New York: Penguin, 2009).
[14]For defenses see: Daniel Yergin, “A Crisis in Search of a Narrative,” Financial Times, October 21, 2009; Institute of International Finance, Reform in the Financial Services Industry: Strengthening Practices for a More Stable System (Washington: IIF, 2009). For a critique see: James Crotty, “Structural Causes of the Global Financial Crisis,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 33 (2009).
[15] Karl Marx, The Grundrisse (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 623.
[16] Irving Fisher, “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions,” Econometrica 1 (October 1933).
[17] Niall Ferguson, Too Big to Live: Why We Must Stamp Out State Monopoly Capitalism (Surrey: Centre for Policy Studies, 2009), 16.
[18] See Hyman Minsky’s Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986) and Doug Henwood, Wall Street (New York: Verso, 1997).
[19] Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
[20] Paul Mason, Meltdown (London: Verso, 2009); Robert Wade, “From Global Imbalances to Global Reorganizations,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 33 (2009).
[21] J.B. Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization and Welfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (London: Verso, 2007); Robert Brenner, The Boom and Bubble (London: Verso, 2002).
[22]Peter Gowan, “Crisis in the Heartland,” New Left Review 55 (2009); David Harvey, Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), Chapters 9–10.
[23] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) (London: Verso, 1998), 41–2.
[24] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (1894) (London: Penguin, 1981), 357.
[25] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1(1867) (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 592.
[26] Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “Superintending Global Capital,” New Left Review 35 (2005); Simon Clarke, “Class Struggle and Global Overaccumulation” in Phases of Capitalist Development, ed. Robert Albritton, et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
[27] Among the various significant analyses of the financial crisis of 2007–09, see L. Panitch et al., “The Political Economy of the Subprime Crisis” in American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance, 2nd ed., eds. Panitch and Martijn Konings (London: Palgrave, 2009); David McNally, “From Financial Crisis to World Slump,” Historical Materialism 17 no. 2 (2009); Robin Blackburn, “The Subprime Crisis,” New Left Review 50 (2008); Julie Guard and Wayne Antony, eds., Bankruptcies and Bailouts (Halifax: Fernwood Books, 2009); Graham Turner, The Credit Crunch (London: Pluto, 2008).
[28] Robert Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Washington to Wall Street (New York, Random House: 2003), 297.
[29] Willem Buiter, “The Fed as the Market Maker of Last Resort: Better Late Than Never,” Financial Times, March 12, 2008.
[30] Peter Baker, “A Professor and a Banker Bury Old Dogma on Markets,” New...
