La recente crisi internazionale: elementi di novità, meccanismi noti e cause di fondo.

We firstly provide a brief description of the crisis episodes, from the 2007-8 “liquidity crisis” to the 2008-9 “global recession”. Then, we discuss some possible interpretations of the recent evolution, focussing on diverse aspects of the crisis: from the elements of novelty (financial innovations and new practices of risk management) to known mechanisms (the pro-cyclicality of the credit supply and the role of finance in a monetary production economy) and its fundamental causes which, in our opinion, date back to the deregulation policies implemented in many countries during the last decades, starting from the US and the UK. Those policies have created new profit opportunities in various contexts, so promoting a renewed process of capitalist accumulation. This process has also resulted in a wide-ranging increase of inequality and instability, thus implying a crescendo of crisis episodes (both at the national and the international level) until the more recent one. Accordingly, we think that the current crisis is linked to the underlying movements of capitalist accumulation (from the financialisation of advanced economies to the gradual shift of the “centre” of the world economy towards China and other Asian emerging countries), and to both its functioning as a monetary production economy and its political dimension.