Recession

Drawing on Gramsci's Marxist Political Economy, Mike Davis situates the War in Ukraine within the general condition of a crisis of capitalist hegemony. The key argument is that the pathological and violent situation that we are finding ourselves in today is an expression of the inability of both global ruling …

This content submission has two parts: (1) a link to the post by Wolf Richter on deterioration of US subprime credit card debt and loans, driven in part by the overuse of hedonic quality adjustments in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and (2) to introduce Exploring Economics to the website Naked Capitalism, which is an effort to promote critical thinking through the medium of a finance and economics blog and fearless commentary.

This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which however do not give any explanation for the occurrence of financial crises and thus cannot suggest any remedies for the present situation. A broad range of theoretical approaches analyzing financial crises from a medium term perspective is then discussed. Within this group we focused on the insights of Marx, Schumpeter, Wicksell, Hayek, Fisher, Keynes, Minsky, and Kindleberger. Subsequently the contributions of the Regulation School, the approach of Social Structures of Accumulation and Post-Keynesian approach, which focus on long-term developments and regime shifts in capitalist development, are presented. International approaches to finance and financial crises are integrated into the analyses. We address the issue of relevance of all these theories for the present crisis and draw some policy implications. The paper has the aim to find out to which extent the different approaches are able to explain the Great Recession, what visions they develop about future development of capitalism and to which extent these different approaches can be synthesized.

Der Vortrag erläutert die Grundkonzepte, die Methodik und die Forschungsinteressen der Kritischen Politischen Ökonomik. Jäger bezeichnet diese als integrative Analyse von Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Politik, für die die Untersuchung von Klassenkonflikten zentral ist. Der Vortrag erläutert Begriffe wie Produktivkräfte, Produktionsverhältnisse, Akkumulation, Arbeit und Kapital. Jäger erläutert neben der Methodologie, Dialektik, auch die politische Zielsetzungen und den emanzipatorischen Anspruch der Theorieschule. Ein aktueller Bezug wird über einen Abschnitt zur Analyse der Eurokrise hergestellt. Zudem werden Differenzen zur Neoklassik regelmäßig aufgegriffen.