Abstract
It is striking that the global economic and financial crisis that broke out in 2007–2008 has been described as the beginning of a “depression.”1 This is partly because the “recoveries” from the 2008–2009 slump in both the United States and the European Union fit the technical definition of a depression — that is, a long period of suboptimal growth. But, talking about a depression also acknowledges that we are confronted, not with a normal downswing in the business cycle, but with a profound, rare, systemic crisis. It also encourages us to compare the present crisis with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Just as in the 1930s, the weak recovery has encouraged commentators, led by Lawrence Summers, a former US Treasury Secretary and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, to speculate that a chronic shortage of effective demand is dooming the advanced economies to “secular stagnation.”2
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Notes
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Callinicos, A. (2015). Neoliberalism, Austerity, and Crisis. In: Pereira, A.W., Mattei, L. (eds) The Brazilian Economy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137549815_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137549815_2
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