At the Heart of the Matter: Household Debt in Contemporary Banking and the International Crisis

This paper considers the nature and role of household indebtedness in contemporary banking and the current financial and economic crises. It offers a concise empirical exposition of the centrality of household lending and related financial services to leading banking institutions and to the credit systems of a number of advanced and middle-income economies. It also offers socioeconomic characterizations of this debt and its macroeconomic significance from the standpoint of Marxist political economy, affording two distinctive insights. First, the concrete social content of household debt over the past two decades has helped ensure this lending remained highly profitable to lenders, making it a natural vehicle for destabilizing capital-market competition. Second, a crisis characterized by record levels of over-indebted wage-earning households is likely to pose distinctive difficulties to a process of market-based recovery. While the destruction of capital values during a crisis lays the basis for the eventual restoration of profitability and solvency for some enterprises, over-indebted wage-earning households face no analogous opportunity. Without new speculative asset-price bubbles, the restoration of their financial stability hinges on reductions in consumption or increases in wages, both of which present obstacles to a market-based process of economic recovery.

Demand, Production, and the Determinants of Distribution: A Caveat on "Wage-Led Growth"

The incomes of workers and capitalists pertain to different moments of accumulation. Wages are shares of capital outlays sustaining production; profits are shares of commodity sales. If aggregate demand and the scale of productive undertakings are shaped with a measure of mutual autonomy, the class distribution of income and the measure of economic activity are jointly determined by the same processes. In those settings “wage-led growth” has neither analytical nor policy purchase as associations between wage shares and levels of output (or growth) are confounded consequences of distinct effects on each measure of broader developments in the economy. A more appropriate dichotomy is that between “investment-led” and “consumption-led” growth, with the former resulting in comparatively higher wage shares. After advancing and illustrating these points, this paper motivates its approach to class income flows and the role of demand--which draw on the Circuit of Capital--in relation to the equivalent Kaleckian approaches sustaining arguments for “wage-led growth”

Credit, Profitability and Instability: A Strictly Structural Approach

This paper offers a purely structural characterisation of the content, limits and contradictions of credit relations in capitalist accumulation. Considering steady-state evolutions and step-change perturbations in a dynamic model of the Marxian circuit of capital, it establishes that sustained paces of net credit extension may boost aggregate profitability, the rate of accumulation, and the aggregate financial robustness of capitalist enterprises. These gains are limited by the economy’s dynamic productive capacities, and tempered by the risks of credit and monetary disruptions created payment obligations established by credit. Economies with higher paces of net credit extension are shown to be more vulnerable to the disruptions to accumulation variously emphasised by Marxian, Keynesian and Post-Keynesian contributions.

An exercise on developing an ontology-epistemology about schizophrenia and neuroanatomy

This paper describes preliminary ideas on formalizing some concepts of neuroanatomy into ontological and epistemological terms. We envisage the application of this ontology on the assimilation of facts about medical knowledge about neuroimages from schizophrenic patients