Michael Roberts — Stock market crash: 1987, 2007 or 1937?

Michael Roberts looks at past stock market declines from the POV of the profit rate. Different conditions applied in each case, and the contemporary situation is different, too.

Michael Roberts Blog
Stock market crash: 1987, 2007 or 1937?
Michael Roberts

Keynes.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Emergence in stock markets
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Markets in financial instruments are comprised of two principal cohorts. The first cohort is comprised of "investors," who buy to hold longer term. The second is comprised of traders, who buy to sell shorter term.

Prices in markets are based on changes at the margin. Total capitalization is based on the most recent price. This is obviously unrealistic, since all units cannot be sold at this price even though they are valued at it.

Traders are generally a predominant influence on margin price. Their incessant incremental activity to extract gains based on price fluctuations makes markets liquid, relatively stable, and efficient.

Major turning points involve buying and selling pressure from both traders and investors converging to create buying or selling pressure depending on the ratio of "greed and fear."

Roberts's analysis focuses more on investors, and Dillow's analysis more on traders. It's the melding of the two that make the market at the margin.

Michael Hudson — The Paradox of Financialized Industrialization

Congratulate Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, on his new appointment as Guest Professor at Peking University.

These remarks were made at the World Congress on Marxism, 2015, at the School of Marxism, Peking University, October 10, 2015. The presentation was part of a debate with Bertell Ollman (NYU). I was honored to be made a permanent Guest Professor at China’s most prestigious university.

What follows is a summary of Marx's contribution to understanding the present global crisis in terms of finance capital, which Marx called "fictitious capital," and industrial capital, with workers having largely been successfully suppressed by both preventing them from pursuing the interest of the class or tricking them into not doing so. What he has been saying for a long time summarized in terms of the present in relation to China and the West.

Michael Hudson Blog
The Paradox of Financialized IndustrializationMichael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

Finian Cunningham — Bankrupt Capitalism: The Real Greek Verdict

Whatever the outcome of the neck-and-neck Greek referendum on EU-imposed austerity, the real verdict is clear: capitalism is a bankrupt, redundant economic system that has become a scourge on humanity....

Over the past two decades, capitalism has degenerated into a financial casino system, driven by the decline of profits in manufacturing and real production. It is no long a system that provides for human needs. It has become a form of financial parasitism, stock market and currency speculation, dictated by banks and fictitious capital. The system has become divorced from the real world – a realm where the global one per cent thrive while the vast majority of humanity struggle to exist.

Driven by neoliberal ideology of deregulation and regressive taxation where the wealthy pay less and less in tax, whole countries have now found themselves in a form of debt slavery. That has in turn decimated social security through austerity on the unemployed, pensioners and workers. The collapse in economic production has been concealed by the spawning of fictitious capital, which results in the parallel universe of seemingly roaring stock markets and banking. But in the end, it is all debt that is dumped on wider society....

Finian's got his Irish is up, as they say, and well he should considering the fate of Erin before Greece. Anyone see a pattern developing?

Sputnik
Bankrupt Capitalism: The Real Greek Verdict

Finian Cunningham

Max Keiser: fictitious capital with Michael Hudson — VIDEO

Max Keiser: fictitious capital with Michael Hudson

Max and Michael discuss Michael's latest book, The Bubble and Beyond.