Macroeconomics

Economic stagnation

European debt crisis

Economics

Market economy

Capitalism

European integration

Keynesian economics

Politics

Political science

Economy

International economics

Financial crisis

Mercantilism

European union

Cambridge Journal of Economics

This paper argues that the re-emergence of stagnation tendencies in modern capitalism can be related to financialisation and its macroeconomic failures leading to the recent crises, and in particular to the macroeconomic responses towards the crisis and the respective regime shifts in mature capitalist economies. The focus of the paper is on the latter, and it examines the regime changes for six mature capitalist economies, the two liberal Anglo-Saxon economies of the USA and the UK, a representative country from the Nordic welfare states, Sweden, the three important Eurozone countries France, Germany and Spain, as well as the core Eurozone (EA-12) as a whole. The concept of macroeconomic regimes under the conditions of financialisation is recapitulated, applied to the period before the crisis, and finally the regime changes during and after the crisis are examined. It is shown that a dominant tendency towards export-led mercantilism, in particular in the Eurozone and its main member countries, imposes an aggregation problem on the global economy and thus contributes to stagnation and rising global macroeconomic risks. Finally, short- and long-run alternative policies to deal with these problems are suggested.

Financialisation and tendencies towards stagnation: the role of macroeconomic regime changes in the course of and after the financial and economic crisis 2007–09