Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. IV)

This is the fourth in the magisterial series of essays by the former editors of Monthly Review on the state of the U.S. economy and its relation to the global system. Like its predecessors, this volume focuses on the development of U.S. capitalism as it takes place, and covers the 1980s. The authors stress the profound contradictions of the underlying processes of capital accumulation and identify, before any other economic commentators, the immense implications of the use of the explosion of debt to attempt to solve the problems presented by the underlying stagnation in the real economy.

Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004) was born in New York City, educated at Exeter and Harvard, and after receiving his Ph.D. in 1937, went to the London School of Economics, to Vienna, and to other places on the Continent for graduate study. He taught economics at Harvard until 1946 and was visiting professor of economics at Cornell, Stanford, and the New School. He was a founding editor of Monthly Review and author of Monopoly Capital (with Paul Baran) and The Theory of Capitalist Development, among many other books and articles. Harry Magdoff (1913–2006) directed studies of productivity for the WPA in the 1930s. Towards the end of the Second World War, he became chief economist in charge of the Current Business Analysis Division at the Department of Commerce where he oversaw publication of the Survey of Current Business. Later, he worked as special assistant to Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace. He is widely recognized for his economic analyses of imperialism and was co-editor of Monthly Review from 1969 until 2006.