A World on Fire: Observations and Speculations in a Crottyian Vein

Abstract

I offer this article as a small way of honoring my friend, mentor, and role model Jim Crotty, whose intellectual legacy, commitment to engaged scholarship, lived experience, and warmth and generosity continue to influence me profoundly. Here, I offer several observations and speculations on the state of play in the global and US financial systems in a Crottyian vein. These include several 1980s throwbacks—bank failures in the United States; rentier-driven tight monetary policies across the world with attendant negative effects; and, debt distress and the likelihood of a (new) “lost decade” in the Global South. These familiar experiences are unfolding against the backdrop of an interregnum in which a “post-American global financial order” is emerging in an environment marked by “productive and destructive incoherence.”

JEL Classification: F02, F33, O23, E44, E58

Keywords

Jim Crotty bank failures monetary policies debt crises post-American global financial order

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Crotty

James

. 1983. On Keynes and capital flight. Journal of Economic Literature XXI: 59–65.

Crotty

James

. 1990. Keynes on the stages of development of the capitalist economy: The institutional foundation of Keynes’ methodology. Journal of Economic Issues 24 (3): 761–80.

Crotty

James

. 1999. Was Keynes a corporatist? Keynes’s radical views on industrial policy and macro policy in the 1920s. Journal of Economic Issues 33 (3): 555–78.

Crotty

James

. 2017. Capitalism, Macroeconomics and Reality: Understanding Globalization, Financialization, Competition, and Crisis. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Crotty

James

. 2019. Keynes against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge.

Grabel

Ilene

. 2015. The rebranding of capital controls in an era of productive incoherence. Review of International Political Economy 22 (1): 7–43.

Grabel

Ilene

. 2017. When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Grabel

Ilene

. 2018. The upside of a messier global financial architecture. Current History 117 (802): 321–24.

Grabel

Ilene

. 2019. Continuity, discontinuity, and incoherence in the Bretton Woods order: A Hirschmanian reading. Development and Change 50 (1): 46–71.

10.

Grabel

Ilene

. 2022. Post-American moments in contemporary global financial governance. In The Downfall of the American Order? Liberalism’s End?, eds. Peter J.

Katzenstein

Kirshner

Jonathan

, 124–43. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

11.

Grabel

Ilene

. 2023. The war in Ukraine and the ~~End of the~~ American financial order? Review of Radical Political Economics 55 (4): 547–556.

12.

Sullivan

Jake

. 2023. Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership at the Brookings Institution. The Briefing Room Speeches and Remarks, April 27. Washington, DC: The White House. Accessed at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/04/27/remarks-by-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-on-renewing-american-economic-leadership-at-the-brookings-institution/.

13.

Taleb

Nassim

. 2018. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Everyday Life. New York: Random House.

14.

UN Affairs. 2022. UN chief calls for action to put out “5-alarm global fire.” UN News January 21. Accessed at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/01/1110292.