On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Doug Henwood wrote: > Fred B. Moseley wrote: > > >You are comparing a cyclical low (1982) with a cyclical high (1997). > >And do your estimates include interest? > > 1997 was four years before the cyclical high, actually. But the 1982 > low was in many ways - political as well as economic - a point of > structural reversal. Mexico's debt crisis marked the onset of > neoliberal restructuring of the world; the stock market took off at > almost the same minute as the Mexican quasi-default; and the Reagan > boom was about to begin. That was about a lot more than a business > cycle - it was about a whole new regime of accumulation.
And my point is that this new regime of accumulation - whose main purpose was to restore the rate of profit - has been only partially successful. 1997 was the peak for the share and rate of profit, as you must know, after which they declined sharply, so that the share of profit in 2001 was almost as low as in 1982. Doug, do you think that profit has been restored to such an extent that the US economy is entering a new "long-wave" period of growth and relative prosperity, with signficant increases in average real wages? Comradely, Fred
