Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: US Consumer Confidence index surges

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

Louis,
     Accounting profits go up and down (others can
do all kinds of things depending on how they are
measured).  One of the reasons we had the stock
market bubble was because profits generally went
up during the 1980s and 1990s, at least in the US,
although I stand to be corrected by that notorious
Yale-educated snob if I am wrong.  Much of that
reflected well-known attacks against the working
class that succeeded.  One reason the bubble has
been coming down has been that indeed, profits
have been declining again recently. But that is hardly
the same thing as a general, secular tendency to decline.
     BTW, I think that a little mentioned reason for the
stock market bubble, and at least some of the rise
in profits in the 1990s, was due to the end of Soviet
socialism.  This is the great unmentioned secret factor.
The risk of nationalization in a foreign country of a
subsidiary of a US-based multinational corporation
has gone way down, way down.  This probably justifies
a permanent increase in the average price-earnings
ratio on Wall Street.  But, of course bubble dynamics
came in and it was all overdone.
      No, I am not approving of this at all.  Just noting it.
      Mandel, eh?  He is pretty good on a lot of stuff, but
certainly has his limits.  Sounds like you are still at
some level enamored of "that prostitute Trotsky" (who
is so often right....   ), :-).  Both of them were long wave
guys.  Where are we now?  Still not too far up an
upswing or at the beginning of a long downswing?
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 2:21 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:9688] Re: Re: Re: Re: US Consumer Confidence index surges


> >Louis,
> >      Declining rate of profit?  Oh, so you really
> >are into all that OPE-L stuff after all, eh?  Do
> >you buy the Kliman-McGlone counterattack
> >against the Okishio Theorem to save the idea,
> >or do you prefer Fred Moseley's more empirical
> >approach with its special categorizations of labor?
> >Barkley Rosser
>
> Actually, I prefer not to get involved in these sorts of arcane debates
> abstracted from the real economy. What I am much more interested in is how
> the airline industry, which accounts for some 30 percent of the US export
> market, ran into a profit crunch in the late 1960s. This has to do with
the
> price of fuel, the investment in 747s, etc. So I suppose that I am
> something of a Moseley-ite if push comes to shove. In any case, I start
out
> with the premise that profits did hit a brick wall. When I sit down to
> write my analysis, I will probably delve into Ernest Mandel for a
> theoretical orientation. He stands head and shoulders over anybody else
who
> has done economics in the past-WWII period.
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
>
>