Search

U.S. financial deregulation is often popularly presented as a fundamental attack on financial regulation that began with neoliberalism's Big Bang in 1980. This paper argues this position is wrong in two ways. First, it is a process that stretches back decades before 1980. Textbook mentions of 1970s precursor 'financial innovations' fall far short of presenting the breadth and duration of the pre-1980 attack on the system of regulation. Second, it has not been an across-the-board attack on financial regulation in the name of market efficiency as required by its ideology and claimed by its advocates, but rather a focused attack on only one of the five pillars of the system of regulation. This paper develops both of these assertions through a presentation of the five central pillars of the pre-1980 system of financial regulation, and the four major attacks on the three different aspects of the restrictions on financial competition. Keywords. financial competition, financial deregulation, financial regulation, neoliberalism JEL Classification Codes: N22, G21, G28, Financial deregulation in the United States, as a particularly important aspect of economic deregulation there in general, sharply accelerated following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the associated [...]

The Weisskopfian approach has dominated empirical studies of the US rate of profit for the last thirty-five years. Forty-five years earlier, Michal Kalecki developed a different frame suitable for empirical profit rate studies, which had the potential to give different, but complementary, insight into the profit rate analysis based on the Weisskopfian approach. This paper first presents a development of the Kaleckian frame. It then applies this frame to the US economy and presents some preliminary empirical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current economic crisis in the US has generated the greatest popular discontent with the system and from that possible potential for radical change since World War II. This article looks at the Marxist tradition for generating revolutionary demands, including the essential issue of avoiding sterile revolutionary demands, and what distinguishes revolutionary demands from the socially more common progressive reformist demands. It then considers this issue specifically in the particular context of the US today of a working class that has been almost entirely demobilized for three decades, and largely politically disarmed since World War II. It specifically considers an important progressive set of economic demands that was issued early in the crisis, and compares these with a few recently issued demands that come out of an analysis of the crisis by revolutionaries who are seeking to begin to mobilize the working class to the project of transcending capitalism. The article ends with some preliminary proposals for extending these latter demands, in the approach of Marx, Engels and Lenin, more broadly to the current crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the feasibility of a Democratic Planned Socialism. List of socialism advocates; Goal of socialism in 'human development'; Proposal for rules and procedures for democratic coordination, control and planning of the economy.

Gives a presentation on the transformation of the `new solution,' an economic theory. Response from critics to the `new solution'; Details on Karl Marx's approach to a solution.

The article introduces papers published within the issue which were presented at the 6th Annual Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) in Amherst, Massachusetts in May 2011, including one on state-owned enterprises (SOE) in China, another on the implications of the need to prevent major climate change for the developmental strategies of China and India and a paper on the influence of neoliberalism on the reform of emergency services in Great Britain.