14.10.2008
Recommended Reading
My old friend Jim Livingston,
a historian at Rutgers, argues in a two-part
article that the conditions
that led up to the Great Depression are very similar to those led up to the
current economic and financial crisis. Livingston thinks that in the both cases
the cause lay in the
production/investment/profitt/wage system – what policy-makers now call “the
fundamentals” -- rather than in the financial system and that the solution will
also lie in stimulating consumer demand for goods and services rather than in
hoping, perhaps in vain, that recapitalized banks will discover businesses
eager to take out loans for expansion.
--John B. Judis