Britain: recession and recovery

In the Great Recession of 2008-9, Britain did not suffer the deepest slump of the top seven capitalist economies in the world.  In the UK, real national output fell 6% from its peak in Q108 to its low in Q309. Output fell more in the big manufacturing and exporting economies of Germany and Japan.  But

The mass of profits and economic crisis

In my book, The Great Recession (see chapter 24 and appendix B) available from Lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-great-recession/6079458, I argue that the best short-term indicator of an oncoming capitalist slump or economic recession is the movement of profits – in particular, the total mass of profit. According to Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of

Business as usual

John Mack (Morgan Stanley), Brian Moynihan ( Bank of America), Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan), and Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) – these masters of the financial universe paraded before the US Congress yesterday to explain why their banks managed to bring world financial system to its knees and cause the worst slump in capitalist production since

The stock market cycle – still in a bear market

In my book, The Great Recession, there is a chapter on stock market cycles.  I show that the movement in the value of stocks and shares is closely correlated with the movement in the profitability of capitalist production. Indeed, there is a cyclical movement in stock market prices with an up phase (called the bull

Big in China

It seems that China.org.cn has heard of my book, The Great Recession. The editor has picked a piece by Heiko Khoo for its opinion column, in which Khoo points out how Marxist economics has become relevant again  in explaining the global crisis of capitalism. See http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2010-01/08/content_19204711.htm Khoo says: In the era before 1989, the planned

Inequality: rich and poor

Economist Rebecca Wilder (http://www.roubini.com/author/rebecca_wilder) recently looked at the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database (October 2009), to see how unequal the world is, as measured by income. She drummed up some charts that (quote): illustrate the frequency distributions for global per-capita income (income divided by population) across 182 countries (you can download my country-level data here,

Employment and growth in ‘the recovery’

Economist Prieur de Plessis (http://www.roubini.com/author/prieur_du_plessis) posted an item in his blog last week pointing out that in the last decade of ‘noughties’  US employment stagnated. I posted a chart about the decade of zeros in the context of the Dow Jones Industrial Index a few days ago. There are a number of economic statistics conveying

The great recession

Don’t forget that my new book on The Great Recession, published in early December is available from Lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-great-recession/6079458. It will be on Amazon etc very shortly. You can see me interviewed on his book by going to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSDN5sbPzw8 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSDN5sbPzw8 And you can hear a recent radio interview from resonancefm 104.4 London go to

Michael Roberts on the next recession

The Great Recession is over but the next recession is only a few years away.  Here’s why. The deepest and longest economic recession in the advanced capitalist economies since the 1930s is more or less over.  But it won’t be long before capitalism plunges into another.  That won’t happen in 2010, but there will be