I went to a lecture by the Dutch academic Marxist Howard Nicholas
http://www.iss.nl/iss_faculty/profiel_metis/1100462/ last night, and he
argued that since the crash of 2007-2008 total debt levels had reached a new
peak, so that most likely another financial crash will occur in the
foreseeable future. He also was pretty certain interest rates would rise in
the coming years. Holland has an especially dangerous debt overhang, since
the total outstanding mortgage debt is so enormous, while house prices have
been falling.
It was a pretty grim powerpoint presentation with lots of graphs, but he
kept smiling all the while (which was slightly incongruous).
He was a great believer in economic cycles, including Kondratieffs, but he
really failed to prove that the economic cycles were indeed cyclical, i.e.
that there was a recurrent sequence of the same sort of events. He seemed
tot think because there were recurrent upswings and downswings
(fluctuations) with some regularity, that this indicated an economic cycle
of itself.
That was not a very convincing argument, since of course in the space of ten
years a lot of qualitative changes also occur. He claimed that the shortterm
cycles had to do with the replacement of machines etc. (I assume fixed
equipment) but he offered no proof of that. As is usual for Marxists, he
ignored the implications of the hybrid structure of capital accumulation,
i.e. the accumulation of non-productive assets (financial assets, real
estate, durables) as well as productive assets. He believed that since a lot
of production had shifted to Asia, the balance of power had shifted in
favour of the East as well.
His book ("Marx's theory of price and its modern rivals") is interesting
especially for his concept of "reproduction prices" (he largely dispenses
with talk about "values") as an alternative to equilibrium prices. Marx of
course created no such theory of prices, but Howard's claim is that Marx
intended something like that.
J.
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