Economic Cycles

Harold James commented:

"In the nineteenth-century world, people rapidly picked themselves up after downturns and went back to business as usual. In that sense, the phenomenon of the business cycle looked relatively permanent and unchanging. Nowadays, however, a cyclical collapse comes as a great surprise. In its aftermath, we start to reinvent our view of economics. Every ten years or so, we think that a particular model of growth is so broken that it cannot be resurrected. The world needed to be rethought in 1979, 1989, 1998, and 2008."

"[…] But each wave of collapse breeds a greater degree of disillusion about particular institutions, which are blamed for the outcome. It may be the welfare state in the 1970’s, the Communist Party apparatus in the 1980’s, the Asian industry and trade ministries in the 1990’s, or the nexus of the US Treasury and Wall Street in the 2000’s."

"As each institution is eroded, there is less and less left in the way of alternatives. That is also true of currencies."

"The dollar has been knocked off its pedestal by the crisis, but any conceivable substitute is obviously even more flawed and more problematical. The euro is the composite currency of an area with a poor growth record and an inadequate response to the economic crisis. The renminbi is still non-convertible. So there is no master currency at all any more."