The 2008 crash was rooted in decades of industrial decline papered over by debt

Evidence

Many popular, shortsighted accounts of the financial crash in 2007–8 portray the collapse as merely the combination of improper mortgage sales and overleveraged investment banks. Historian Robert Brenner traces the root causes deeper, to the “huge, unresolved problems in the real economy that have been literally papered over by debt for decades.” What may have appeared as broad-based prosperity for many during the 1990s and 2000s was actually an ever-greater buildup of debt, as the engine of growth continued to slow. This is what Brenner calls “the long downturn—the extraordinarily extended phase of reduced economic dynamism and declining economic performance, persisting through the end of the millennium and into the new.” Brenner’s explanation is that industrial overcapacity has stalled the manufacturing growth engine, and none of the attempted alternatives (service economy, digital economy, knowledge economy, finance economy) have provided enough growth to make up for that decline. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how financial structure shapes cultural form: this long-downturn thesis is the macro backdrop against which the finance takeover of culture industries plays out. — connects to: Financial crashes correct overextended finance relative to depressed industrial production — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 530; Financial bubbles burst when current production cannot repay loans borrowed from the future. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 825; Pre-2008 capitalism cannot be restored because debt fueled its demand — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1674