Economics and Political Power during the Crisis

The piece describes some of the effects that Nixon's decision to delink the dollar from gold in the 1970s had for the relationship between the IMF and its member states. A focus is on the negative effects of this change on societies in the Global South.

David Harvey illustrates the five most common narratives on why the financial and economic crisis took place – from human frailty to policy failure.

Was sind Finanzmärkte, Hedgefonds und Schattenbanken? Über diese Fragen erläutert Brigitte Young die Funktionen von Finanzmärkten und Hedgefonds, sowie deren Dysfunktionen anhand prominenter Beispiele. Young geht zudem auf die Regulierung von Hedgefonds nach der Finanzkrise und den Zusammenhang zum Schattebankensystem ein. Zuletzt stellt sie die Frage, ob das Finanzsystem einen sozialen Nutzen hat.

This paper presents an overview of different models which explain financial crises, with the aim of understanding economic developments during and possibly after the Great Recession. In the first part approaches based on efficient markets and rational expectations hypotheses are analyzed, which however do not give any explanation for the occurrence of financial crises and thus cannot suggest any remedies for the present situation. A broad range of theoretical approaches analyzing financial crises from a medium term perspective is then discussed. Within this group we focused on the insights of Marx, Schumpeter, Wicksell, Hayek, Fisher, Keynes, Minsky, and Kindleberger. Subsequently the contributions of the Regulation School, the approach of Social Structures of Accumulation and Post-Keynesian approach, which focus on long-term developments and regime shifts in capitalist development, are presented. International approaches to finance and financial crises are integrated into the analyses. We address the issue of relevance of all these theories for the present crisis and draw some policy implications. The paper has the aim to find out to which extent the different approaches are able to explain the Great Recession, what visions they develop about future development of capitalism and to which extent these different approaches can be synthesized.