IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mes/ijpoec/v40y2011i3p59-71.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The U. S. Economic Crisis

Author

Listed:
  • Fred Moseley

Abstract

This paper argues that the fundamental cause of the current economic crisis in the U. S. economy was a significant long-term decline in the rate of profit from the 1950s to the 1970s. Capitalists responded to this profitability crisis by attempting to restore their rate of profit by a variety of strategies, including wages and benefit cuts, inflation, speed-up on the job, and globalization. These strategies have largely restored the rate of profit, but have resulted in stagnant real wages for workers for decades. As a result, household indebtedness has increased to unprecedented levels and must be substantially reduced in order to make a sustainable recovery possible. In addition, increasing indebtedness in the financial sector has greatly increased the instability of the financial system, and this financial indebtedness must also be reduced significantly. In the event of another banking crisis, bankrupt banks should be nationalized and operated in the public interest.

Suggested Citation

  • Fred Moseley, 2011. "The U. S. Economic Crisis," International Journal of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(3), pages 59-71.
    • Handle: RePEc:mes:ijpoec:v:40:y:2011:i:3:p:59-71
    DOI: 10.2753/IJP0891-1916400305
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2753/IJP0891-1916400305
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2753/IJP0891-1916400305?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nikolaus Heimerl, 2023. "Crisis theories: Tendential fall in the rate of profit, underconsumption and economic crises in the 21st century," Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft - WuG, Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte für Wien, Abteilung Wirtschaftswissenschaft und Statistik, vol. 49(1), pages 121-151.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mes:ijpoec:v:40:y:2011:i:3:p:59-71. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/MIJP20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.