1. The state of world economy
Michael Roberts

2. The Great Recession
The Great Recession of really was great. It was the longest and deepest in its contraction of output that the global capitalist economy, as represented by the 30 advanced capitalist nations of the OECD, has experienced since the Great Depression of
From the peak of the previous boom in real GDP growth from 2007 to the trough of the Great Recession in mid-2009, the OECD economies contracted by 6% points of GDP.
At the trough of the Great Recession, the level of industrial production was 13% below its previous peak, while world trade fell 20% from its previous peak. World stock markets fell an average 50% from the peak in 2007

3. The Great Recession

4. Relative loss of national income

5. Official forecasts
Before 2007, no official strategist of economic policy forecast any crisis.
In October 2008, the great financial maestro Fed chair Alan Greenspan told the US Congress, “I am in a state of shocked disbelief.” and “the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well”.

6. Why did we not see it coming?
“Your Majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.”
British Academy, “The Global Financial Crisis—Why Didn’t Anybody Notice”?,” British Academy Review (July 2009

7. Mainstream economics
The doyen of the neoclassical school, Robert Lucas, confidently claimed back in 2003, that “the central problem of depression prevention has been solved”.
And leading Keynesian, Oliver Blanchard, soon chief economist at the IMF, told us as late as in 2008 that “the state of macro is good”!

8. Nobel prize winners! Eugene Fama:
“We don’t know what causes recessions. I’m not a macroeconomist so I don’t feel bad about that! We’ve never known. Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity. If I could have predicted the crisis, I would have. I don’t see it. I’d love to know more what causes business cycles.”

9. Keynesian views Lack of effective demand Breakdown of ‘animal spirits’
Minsky: inherent financial instability
Banking deregulation and reckless speculation
“Financial weapons of mass destruction” – Warren Buffett

10. Marx’s law of profitability

11. A long depression

12. Recessions and depressions

13. Rising debt

14. Debt stock

15. EM burden ahead

16. Brazil: big public debt

17. Brazil’s burden

18. Corporate profits slow

19. Long Depression We are still in the Long Depression:
Cyclical ST swings
(up);
(down);
(up);
(down);
(up);
(down)?

20. The short-term cycle

21. Trump and trade wars

22. Threat to the US

23. One belt one road