Increase, fluctuations and external debt in the economy of the United States: 1980-2000 / Crescimento, flutuações e endividamento externo na economia dos Estados Unidos: 1980-2000

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2010

RESUMO

This work aims to explain how the external indebtedness of the U.S. economy since the 1980s attenuated and still attenuates the macroeconomic effects originated from the tendency of the gross domestic product to stagnate. This tendency comes from the fall of the productive accumulation in its relation to the national product, explained by the growing disadvantages of the industrial profit rates when compared to the financial ones. These disadvantages can be explained mainly by the bigger capital/product rates in the industrial sectors, lowering its rates of profit. This is intensified by (a) the performance of the relative prices, which shows an ongoing fall in goods prices and a increase in nongoods prices, and (b) by the increasing trade deficits, stressing domestic production. Particularly, these tendencies were intensified by the oil crisis and the high interest rates of the middle 1970s. The growing participation of the financial sectors in the national economy is the other face of this tendency of the productive accumulation to fall. Moreover, this work intended to discuss how the external indebtedness is correlated to the instability of the economy, showing how, during all the period, the external indebtedness worked as a mechanism of stabilization. The work then tried to describe this process of stabilization. After this, the work intended to explain why the absolute rise of the industrial rates of profit, since the middle 1980s, was not able to diminish the rate of the external indebtedness. This occurred because the financial rates of profit expanded still more rapidly, expressing the persistence of the above mentioned different performances between productive and non-productive sectors in the U.S. economy. It explains why the increase in profitability of productive capital during the 1990s continued insufficient to conduct the economy to smaller degrees of external indebtedness. This is the specific conclusion of chapter 9, which tries to demonstrate how a faster process of accumulation of capital did not take to a lesser external debt during the middle 1990s. It occurred because that process of economic growth needed a still more vigorous rate of productive investment to make possible a fall in external indebtedness. Hence, the conclusion that emerges is that only a much more stronger process of productive accumulation would be able to diminish the external indebtedness process - a not easy process, given the poorest domestic performance of industrial sectors in face of the other domestic sectors and in face of the international ones. That is, the external indebtedness attenuated but did not solve the occurrence of a falling rate of productive accumulation. So, this fall of the rate of profit in industrial sectors would have conducted the economy to a still more fragile degree of investment and consumption if there was not the hegemonic role of dollar in the international economy, which permits the above mentioned strategy of external indebtedness.

ASSUNTO(S)

ambiente macroeconômico contemporâneo crescimento econômico economia dos estados unidos economic crisis finanças internacionais united states estados unidos história econômica. economy history. u.s. economy economic policy international finance economic increase crises econômicas contemporary macroeconomic conditions política econômica

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