Special Issue on the Global Financial Crisis – July 2009
Cambridge Journal of Economics
Special Issue on The Global Financial Crisis
Editors: Stephanie Blankenburg and José Gabriel Palma
This Special Issue examines the current global financial crisis from a range of heterodox perspectives. An economic calamity of such proportions, with such potentially wide-ranging social and political repercussions, creates a sense of urgency. There is, of course, a pressing need not only to understand what has happened and why, but also to act so as to prevent worst case scenarios from coming about. Furthermore, many who have for years advanced more far-reaching structural reform agendas recognise that current circumstances present a rare opportunity that needs to be grasped. This Special Issue responds to this sense of urgency in a specific way. It combines in-depth analyses of specific – regional, sectoral, technological and methodological - facets of the crisis with an impressive breadth of coverage that spans its antecedents, causes and longer-term consequences.
Although the authors all share a heterodox background in economics that informs their approaches, the point of this Special Issue is not, and at this stage of ongoing events could not be, to provide a once-and-for-all unified view of the financial crisis and its social, economic and intellectual consequences. Rather, taken together, the contributions to this issue provide an encompassing picture of the scope and structural depth of the global financial crisis that, while rich in detail, focuses minds on the most pertinent problems and questions facing policy-makers today. A number of contributions are primarily concerned with the causes of the global financial crisis. Some focus in on the immediate short-run determinants including the inadequacy of recent financial regulation, while others adopt broad political economy perspectives and concentrate on underlying, more historically rooted, structures and processes. Constructive reform proposals and discussion of adequate policy responses are present throughout this Special Issue, but certain papers focus on these issues explicitly. The papers collected here provide a clear indication of the scale of the intellectual challenge that lies ahead. The task of systematically sorting through the debris left behind by the current financial and economic crisis, and developing an overall assessment of the damage done and its significance has only just begun.
Preview
The editors of Cambridge Journal of Economics have chosen the following papers from the special issue as a preview. Click on the links below to view them for FREE.
Introduction: the global financial crisis
by Stephanie Blankenburg and Gabriel Palma
From global imbalances to global reorganisations
by Robert Wade
The rise and fall of money manager capitalism: a Minskian approach
by Randall Wray
Published on behalf of
The Cambridge Political Economy Society