The subprime crisis has certainly put an end to a great illusion, one that wanted the world economy know more seasons, it is no longer subject to cycles. This wonderful theory, born in the late twentieth century, explained that thanks to productivity gains provided by new technologies, the eradication of inflation, the emergence of large emerging economies with billions of new consumers , the world economy was promised to continued expansion and infinite, without major upheavals. The Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the crash of Internet stocks in 2000 had hardly shaken the belief that a new era had opened, made perpetual growth, and we lived directly, without really realizing it, the end - happy - economic history.
With the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, with the GDP of industrialized countries falling in proportions not seen since the 1930s, this thesis also attractive enthused lived. The cycles are back, and with them, leading economists who studied and modeled. In libraries, we look at their books again as the dust had covered.
Of these, commercial crises and their periodic return in France, England and the United States, the French Clement Juglar, published in 1862. He was one of the first to establish that beyond the apparent causes immediate and specific to each crisis, there are common elements to explain both their recurrent and inevitable. A start - like it! - By ... periodic disruption of credit and the role of speculation. "Symptoms preceding crises are signs of great prosperity, "wrote Juglar, physician training. We will notify businesses and enterprises of all kinds (...), the prices of all products, land, houses (...), the declining interest (...). A growing luxury causes excessive spending, based not on income but on the estimated capital after the share price. "Only waiting the word subprime. Using the medical vocabulary, the good doctor Juglar continued: "Crises such as illness, seem a prerequisite for the existence of companies which trade and industry dominate. We can predict, mitigate, preserve them to some extent, facilitate the resumption of business, but to remove them, is what so far, despite the most varied combinations, has been given anyone. "If
Juglar had revealed short-term cycles (eight to ten years), cycles are much longer (about fifty years) that the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev identified in long waves of economic , published in 1926. His work, which came to the conclusion that the capitalist economy is subjected, at regular intervals with phases of depression and embellished, it restarts after every crisis, were qualified by the Kremlin theory "wrong and reactionary," incompatible with the announced death of capitalism. In 1930, Kondratiev was sentenced in a rigged trial to forced labor camps in the Gulag, before being shot seven years later on the orders of Stalin.
Joseph Schumpeter, himself, had the chance to flee Austria and Nazism to join the United States and Harvard. Echoing by combining the discoveries of Juglar and Kondratiev, he developed his own theory of cycles in Business Cycles (1939). For Schumpeter, capitalism is subject to "periodic oscillations Tendency, "four-stroke, four seasons (prosperity and recession, depression and recovery). It is a kind of "perennial gale", periods of contraction is the logical and inevitable expansion of those that preceded them. "Not only he is never stationary, but it will never become" subject to "creative destruction" associated with ongoing innovations. What led Schumpeter to relativize the importance of crises. In the book he dedicated to the economist, Alexis Karklins-Marchay recounts the words that he wanted his students to Harvard the middle 1930s. "Gentlemen, you are worried because of depression, you should not because for capitalism, depression is a good cold shower. "
Schumpeter was convinced of the superior efficacy of capitalism to create long term wealth and increase the welfare of mankind. And they mean those who deny these achievements as "stupid, ignorant or irresponsible." But he was also convinced that capitalism could not survive, partly because citizens, as and when their standard of living rose, bear less and less what this instability and insecurity inherent therein. They would demand more and more a system seemingly more protective, more stable, more and more state, that is to say, of socialism. Much has been said that the subprime crisis marked the triumph of the ideas of Keynes. She might be, much more, the analysis of Schumpeter.
Pierre-Antoine Delhommais
