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Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy) 1st Edition

by Ismael Hossein-zadeh (Author)
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 12 ratings
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This book provides a critique of the neoclassical explanations of the 2008 financial collapse, of the ensuing long recession and of the neoliberal austerity responses to it.

The study argues that while the prevailing views of deregulation and financialization as instrumental culprits in the explosion and implosion of the financial bubble are not false, they fail to point out that financialization is essentially an indication of an advanced stage of capitalist development. These standard explanations tend to ignore the systemic dynamics of the accumulation of finance capital, the inherent limits to that accumulation, production and division of economic surplus, class relations, and the balance of social forces that mold economic policy.

Instead of simply blaming the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players, as neoliberals do, or lax public supervision, as Keynesians do, this book focuses on the core dynamics of capitalist development that not only created the financial bubble, but also fostered the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players and subverted public policy.

Due to its interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in economics, finance, politics and sociology.

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  1. ISBN-10
    0415638062
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0415638067
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publication date
    April 22, 2014
  5. Part of series
    Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6.14 x 0.62 x 9.21 inches
  8. Print length
    188 pages
  9. See all details
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3.8 out of 5 stars
12 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Alfred J Kottman
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2014
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    Clearly exposes the confusion of recent economic thinking.
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  • JEAN DAVID BEYER
    3.0 out of 5 stars Ignorance because of Parasitic Finance Capital
    Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2014
    Parasitic Finance Capital has arranged my economy so that I have too little discressionary in come to afford to read this book.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Maria Elena Jimenez
    5.0 out of 5 stars Reinstitution of the regulatory safeguards that were put in place in response to the (1929-33) Great Depression is
    Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2016
    Anthony Gabb
    1/6/16

    Just finished reading Ismael Hossein-Zadeh's book. Most of the criticism of economic policies that led to the 2008 financial crisis has come from Keynesian economists, who see market deregulation of the past several decades as the cause of the financial bubbles and bursts. Reinstitution of the regulatory safeguards that were put in place in response to the (1929-33) Great Depression is, therefore, seen as a major step in the direction of tempering the recurring inflation and deflation of financial bubbles. Keynesian/liberal economists and politicians tend to characterize the 2008 financial collapse and the ensuing Great Recession as a crisis of “bad” policies of “neoliberal capitalism,” not of capitalism per se. They blame the abandonment of the Keynesian, New Deal, or Social-Democratic economics largely on neoliberal ideology and/or Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic policies.
    This book, written in the classical/Marxian tradition of socio-economic analysis, argues that the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal economics has much deeper roots than pure ideology, that the transition started long before Reagan was elected President, and that public policies are more than administrative or technical matters of choice. More importantly, they are class, not bad, policies. It argues that while blaming deregulation as a major factor behind financial bubbles and bursts is not false, it masks the fact that such factors are inherent to the essential dynamics and/or strategies of the accumulation of finance capital. Blaming deregulation as the primary factor behind booms and busts in the financial markets begs the more fundamental questions: Why deregulation in the first place? What changed or undermined the regulatory safeguards that were established in response to the Great Depression?
    The book is an invaluable, comprehensive and comparative analysis of the mainstream versus Marxian analyses with respect to the 2008 financial crisis, as well as the subsequent Great Recession. It is a cogent account of Marx’ theory of capitalist development/accumulation as a more “robust” approach to understanding the 2008 financial meltdown compared to the apologist Keynesian account which, in part, promotes the false notion that government can effectively regulate and manage capitalism. In reality, however, argues the author, the power relation between the state and the market/capitalism is usually the other way around…it is a deeply socio-political matter that is organically intertwined with the class nature of the state and the policy-making apparatus.
    The high level of rigor and demonstrated sagacity to simplify and use economic concepts makes this book both convincing and accessible. It shows how Keynesians confuse causality with triggers, by arguing that deregulation and financial “innovations” are causes of financial crises. On the contrary, the study demonstrates that deregulation and financial architecture are triggers whereas the cause is systemic.
    The book makes a strong case that the Marxian theory of unemployment, based on his theory of the reserve army of unemployed labor, provides a much stronger explanation of the protracted high levels of unemployment than the Keynesian view, which attributes the plague of unemployment to the “misguided policies of neoliberalism.” Likewise, the Marxian theory of subsistence or near-poverty wages provides a more cogent account of how or why such poverty levels of wages, as well as a generalized predominance of misery, can go hand-in-hand with high levels of profits and concentrated wealth than the Keynesian perceptions, which view high levels of employment and wages as necessary conditions for an expansionary economic cycle.
    In a clear and easily understandable language, the book shows how in the age of finance capital, where accumulation of capital has increasingly become more fictitious than real, the financial sector has effectively become parasitic, i.e., appropriating wealth/income from the real sector instead of contributing to its production. Accordingly, under the influence of the powerful financial oligarchy central banks in the core capitalist countries have turned monetary policy into an instrument of further enriching the rich by creating and safeguarding asset-price bubbles. In other words, the book demonstrates that under the rule of finance capital monetary policy has effectively become a means of redistribution from the bottom up.
    After thoroughly discussing a number of responses offered by various schools of economic and political thought to the chronic financial instability and protracted economic uncertainty, the author puts forth his own response in the following words: “meaningful, lasting economic safety-net programs can be procured, safeguarded and carried out only through overwhelming pressure from the masses—and only on a coordinated global scale.” Such a strategy, he maintains, has the potential of providing “a more logical and promising solution to the problem of economic hardship for the overwhelming majority of the world population than the neat, purely academic and essentially apolitical Keynesian stimulus packages on a national level.”
    This is a wide-ranging and highly interdisciplinary book which goes way beyond the narrow and esoteric focus of mainstream economics—organically combining economics, politics, sociology and history. It is a well written book that will be of interest not only to a range of disciplines in academe but also to lay readers who are interested in understanding the unstable financial markets, as well as the woes and vagaries of capitalism in general.
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  • kimmyclause
    4.0 out of 5 stars This is a great book. Ismael Hossein-zadeh has a deep understanding of ...
    Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2014
    This is a great book. Ismael Hossein-zadeh has a deep understanding of economics and a way with words that helps explain it to those of us who are not economists. The only issue I have with this book is the price. I borrowed the copy I read from a friend, or else I would not have been able to read it. I simply cannot pay over one hundred dollars for a book.
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  • Alan G. Nasser Sr.
    5.0 out of 5 stars a comprehensive, illuminating and accessible overview of the economic crisis
    Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2014
    I have read most of the most widely discussed accounts of the causes and nature of the current economic crisis. Those written by insiders like Sheila Blair and Neil Barofsky provide details of what went on during the initial stages of the crisis and who said and did what. The useful information they contain is available nowhere else, and that seems to me to be the main merit of these accounts. A key problem, though, is that they tend to locate the causal origins of the crisis in bad decisions made by powerful and influential individuals. A few do a bit better: they may go further in tracing the Great Recession to the rise of financial speculation and the growing share of financial profits in total profits since the 1970s and 1980s. But virtually none try to explain the relative rise of finance capital in recent decades. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh's (hereafter HZ) account in Beyond Mainstream Accounts of the Financial Crisis is to my mind the most informative of the books dealing with the crisis, and for three main reasons: he offers a compelling account of the relative rise of finance capital, his account is clear and cogent, and, very importantly, he assesses comparatively the most important and influential alternative explanations for the emergence of the crisis. That is, rather than simply detailing his own analysis, he attempts, successfully I think, to test his account, so to speak, against competing explanations. In natural science, this is standard procedure: a proposed theory is defended against the most salient alternative accounts. In the process the author hopes to show that his or her narrative is superior in explanatory value to those alternatives. HZ adopts this demandingly comprehensive strategy and succeeds in defending an explanatory story that is forceful in its own right, and features none of the defects of the alternative accounts. All this is accomplished in pellucid, unpretentious prose.

    It is neither possible nor desirable to cover literally every one of the alternative approaches, mainstream/neoliberal, Keynesian, Marxian, Institutionalist, Post-Keynesian, Libertarian, et al accounts of the crisis. HZ focuses on the most widely discussed and adopted theories, the mainstream/neoliberal, Keynesian and Marxian approaches. Interestingly, the most pertinent points in HZ's critiques can be applied fruitfully to just about any respectable alternative account. Since mainstream theory is now neoliberal in content, HZ's extended and powerful critique of the mainstream can be applied nicely to e.g. libertarian accounts as well.

    It is not easy to give an accurate account of positions with which one strongly disagrees. It is to my mind one of the most valuable features of HZ's book that his accounts of theories with which he disagrees are clear and do not create straw men. HZ offers reliable accounts of rival theories. So readers feeling they need a refresher course in any or all of the three theories HZ treats of are well served.

    Not long after the poop hit the fan in September, 2008, the Keynesian economist Paul Krugman of Princeton University and the NYT op-ed page, and surely the most widely read economist in the country, wrote in The New York Times Magazine that on the whole economists had failed to see the crisis coming. Well, "on the whole"... In fact, a good many economists had been warning for years that unless the explosion of credit, the ascendancy of finance and the long-run decline in the median wage was reversed, a bubble-triggered crisis was not unlikely. It was not "economists" who failed to read the handwriting on the wall, but economists like Krugman. Krugman is no idiot, and it's not as if there is nothing to be learned from his writing. But the limitations of Keynesian analysis are not negligible. For example, why was Krugman not attuned earlier to the what is now a forty-year decline in the median wage? In a more recent op-ed, Krugman reveals that he had included the incomes of hedge-fund managers and other financial bigwigs under the category of 'wages.' Had Krugman understood that the incomes of radically different socioeconomic classes do not belong in the same category, he might have focused not on how "we" were doing, but on how different social classes were doing, and why the difference directly impacts the future of employment, and, more generally, the material security and well-being of the working majority. The typical median wage earner is working-class; no hedge fund manager is. No significant conclusions can be drawn from aggregating their incomes under a single category. HZ's approach rules out the kind of errors we find in much Keynesian analysis. For HZ, economic analysis is a species of social analysis. Because we live in a hierarchically stratified society, we should expect that economic and political power are intertwined, and we should suspect that policymakers may be guided by interests that diverge from the interests of the working majority. HZ is able to reveal the explanatory power of an approach that takes the realities of socioeconomic power asymmetries seriously.

    In the course of his comparative evaluations, HZ provides substantial discussion of a range of related matters. Among these are Rudolf Hilferding's analysis of finance capital (which has oddly been given short shrift by many Marxian commentators) the history and rationale of debt cancellation and the case for public banking.

    In sum, HZ manages to pack a lot into 167 pages. The book is written in such a way as to be informative to both scholars and to the reasonably educated reader. You will learn a great deal from this book. I wish I had written it myself.
    5 people found this helpful
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