Abstract
In this article, the economic crisis from the US perspective is analyzed, using a Marxist approach. As the so-called Great Recession constitutes a general crisis of the capitalist economy at world level, this article intends to provide an analytical framework to explain it from the profitability of capital point of view, while emphasizing the meaning of the real estate bubble and the placement of the US economy in the world system. In doing so, an additional objective of this article is to provide elements to reveal the limitations of the conceptions of the theory of the crisis based on income distribution, finance, neoliberalism, and generally any aspect outside the core of the process of capitalist valorization as the key explaining factor.
Highlights
In this article, we analyze the economic crisis of 2007–09 in the US from the perspective of its place in the world economy, using a Marxist approach
Unlike other analyses on the causes of the crisis and on the US economy, this text (1) theoretically characterizes the Great Recession (GR) and the implications that the place of the US in the world capitalist system has for the study of the crisis; (2) the meaning of the housing bubble is exposed in order to identify its impact on capital accumulation and the profit rate; (3) profitability is studied by using different indicators, both the rate and the mass of corporate profits; and (4) the characteristics and shortcomings of the profit income recorded in the System of National Accounts (SNA) are explained
The first hypothesis we propose is that, given the speculative instinct being always present in a system whose driving force is profit maximization, the base of the central role of the housing bubble in the recent cycle of economic expansion is a problem of underlying profitability
Summary
We analyze the economic crisis of 2007–09 in the US from the perspective of its place in the world economy, using a Marxist approach. The US economy has more possibilities than others to activate mechanisms to counter declining profitability by way of lowering production costs, access to goods already produced, and capital to invest In this sense, such clarification is useful from the perspective of the implicit criticism of other conceptions of the crisis, which is largely explained by (1) extrapolating the phenomena that appear in the SNA of an economy, usually the US, without previously placing it on an analysis of world capitalism as a whole. It seems that the problem would be an excess of profits resulting from the lack of demand, in turn caused by a regressive income distribution; and (2) not considering the determinants of speculative phenomena such as the housing bubble
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