Trond, your recent post that the debt cycle `caused' stagnation from the late 1970s appeared to me as a cart before the horse. The argument I've been more closely drawn to is that the emerging problem of overaccumulated capital in the advanced industrial countries found a temporary means of displacement into financial circuits. Theoretically, this is consistent - from the starting gate - with the divergent expositions of Marx, Hilferding and Grossmann. Discussing it in posivitist terms would entail tracing the rise of excess productive circuit capacity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, assessing the mechanisms by which flows of funds switched around institutionally and geographically (such as into petrodollars), and in turn relating these gyrations to the financial innovations, deregulation and liberalization that seem to have pushed the debt cycle into a qualitatively different stage since the late 1970s. I've done this exercise for the Zimbabwean and South African economies (which follow this line of argument), and I've seen works by Mandel, Clarke, Harvey and Armstrong et al that are consistent at the global scale. Haven't Pollin, Burkett, Dymski or other lefty financial economists explored these relationships in the US? But if you do have cause and effect backwards, Trond, does that matter for your broader argument about polarization? Probably not... Patrick Bond Johns Hopkins
