The Great Recession: Causes, Consequences, and Responses

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Notes

¹ Tom Murse, “When Did the Great Recession End? A Brief History of American Recessions,” October 18, 2010, < http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/moneymatters/a/When-Did-The-Great-Recession-End.htm>. In the US, the National Bureau of Economic Research sets official beginning and ending dates of recessions. For a useful, if mainstream, history of the Great Recession, see especially the series found under “Credit Crisis—The Essentials,” The New York Times, < http:///topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/index.html?scp = 4&sq = causes%20of%20great%20recession&st = cse>.

² For generally mainstream (liberal or conservative) analyis of the causes of, and policy responses to, the Great Recession, see Ray Barrell and E. Philip Davis, “The Evolution of the Financial Crisis of 2007–8,” National Institute Economic Review 206 (October 2008), pp. 5–14; Wendell Cox, “Root Causes of the Financial Crisis: A Primer,” newgeography, October 28, 2008, < http://www.newgeography.com/content/00369-root-causes-financial-crisis-a-primer>; James Davis, “The Cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis,” Accuracy in Media, October 14, 2008, < http://www.aim.org/guest-column/the-cause-of-the-2008-financial-crisis/>; Eklavya, “Reasons for Global Recession: In Plain Simple English,” The Indian Blogger: Life and Times in India, October 18, 2008, < http://www.theindianblogger.com/problems/reasons-for-global-recession-in-plain-simple-english/>; International Monetary Fund, “Crisis and Recovery,” International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook, April 2009, < http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf>; Daniel Jeffs, “Government Officials Share Blame in Financial Crisis,” USA Today, March 3, 2011; Mark Perry and Robert Dell, “How Government Failure Caused the Great Recession,” The American: The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, December 26, 2010, < http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf>; Anne Sennish, “System Favors the Wealthy,” USA Today, March 3, 2011; Jacob Weisberg, “What Caused the Economic Crisis?: The 15 Best Explanations for the Great Recession,” Slate, January 9, 2010, < http://www.slate.com/id/2240858/>; and Laurence Whitehead, “The Crash of '08,” Journal of Democracy 21:1 (January 2010), pp. 45–56.

³ For explanations and policy recommendations from a progressive perspective, see especially the articles collected in Gerald Friedman, Fred Moseley, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense Collective (eds), The Economic Crisis Reader (Boston, MA: Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 2009) and in Gerald Friedman, Fred Moseley, Chris Sturr, and the Dollars & Sense Collective, eds., The Economic Crisis Reader, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 2010); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Karl Marx, Capital, Volumes I–III (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990–1992); and Michael Roberts, “The Causes of the Great Recession: Mainstream and Heterodox Interpretations and the Cherry Pickers,” March 5, 2011, < http://www.karlmarx.net/marx-crisis-theory/thecausesofthegreatrecessionmainstreamandheterodoxinterpretationsandthecherrypickers>. For ongoing progressive analysis of the Great Recession and political economy in general, see especially Dollars & Sense ( < http://www.dollarsandsense.org/>), the Economic Policy Institute ( < http://www.epi.org/>), United for a Fair Economy ( < http://www.faireconomy.org/>), and Monthly Review Press (http://monthlyreview.org/).

⁴ See for example James O'Connor, “Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 1 (Fall 1988), p. 20; and John Sitton, Marx Today: Selected Works and Recent Debates (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 9.

⁵ See for example Ron Lieber, “Consumer Watchdog Is All Ears For Ideas,” The New York Times, July 16, 2011; and James B. Stewart, “As a Watchdog Starves, Wall Street Is Tossed a Bone,” The New York Times, July 16, 2011.