The global economic crisis – Nacho Alvarez

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Plan of the lecture

• The neoliberal answer to the crisis since the 1980’s

- The extension of neoliberal measures: liberalization, privatization and external opening of economies.

- Main characteristics of the neoliberal period: financialization, stagnation and unemployment.

- Restoring profitability: the wage stagnation.

- The resurgence of financial capital

• Marxist analysis of the current crisis

- Profitability and evolution of the rate of profit

- Financialization and accumulation of fictitious capital: the crisis of neoliberalism

- The Euro crisis: a storm in the center of the world economy

- The crisis in Latin America and Asia

• The responses of the elites to the current crisis and possible alternatives

- The response in USA: the support to Wall Street and to financial capital

- Bailouts, austerity and Memorandums in the European Union: deepening social regression

- Alternative economic policy

Reading materials

• Husson, Michel and Louçã, Francisco (2012): “Late capitalism and neo-liberalism. A perspective on the current phase of the long wave of capitalist development”, January 2012.

• Husson, Michel (2010): “The debate on the rate of profit”, International Viewpoint, July 2010.

• Moseley, Fred (2012): "The U.S. Economic Crisis: Profitability Crisis and Household Debt Crisis Combined”, URPE-Occupy Summer Conference, August 2012.

• Shaikh, Anwar (2012): “Causes and Consequences of the Current Global Economic Crisis”, URPE-Occupy Summer Conference, August 2012.

• Toussaint, Eric (2011): “In the eye of the storm: the debt crisis in the European Union”, CADTM, September 2011.

• Toussaint, Eric (2011): “New Debt Crisis in Third World?”, International Viewpoint, 31, October, 2011.

• Millet, Damien and Toussaint, Éric (2012): “What emergency programme for the crisis?”, International Viewpoint, July 2012.