My new book, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’–a description of the current state of the global economy in China, Europe, Japan, Emerging Markets and the US and a theoretical analysis of the coming crisis–is now available from Amazon, from the publisher, Clarity Press, or from my own website, kyklosproductions. com. Check out at either of the following 3 urls:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=se
http://www.claritypress.com/Rasmus.html
http://www.kyklosproductions.com/homewar.html
ABSTRACT of the Book:
“Six years after the collapse of the global economy in 2008, and the weak and uneven recovery that followed, indications are growing once again that economies are slowing worldwide and financial and economic instability are on the rise.
Just as contemporary economics failed to predict the 2008-09 crash, and over-estimated the subsequent brief recovery that followed, economists today are again failing to accurately forecast the slowing global economic growth, the growing fragility, and therefore rising instability in the global economy. Simultaneously, after more than a half decade of tens of trillions of dollars of central bank money injections to bail out banks and investors, after trillions more in business tax cuts and subsidies, and after crushing fiscal austerity for the rest—fiscal and monetary policy solutions introduced by central banks and governments since 2008-09 have proved mostly ineffective, and even counterproductive, in generating a sustained and broad economic recovery.
This book offers a new approach to explaining why mainstream economic analyses have repeatedly failed and why fiscal and monetary policies have been incapable of producing a sustained recovery.
The new approach is based on a new conceptual framework, centered on a unifying concept called Systemic Fragility. Rooted in 9 key empirical trends, Systemic Fragility consists of the dynamic interaction of three constituent forms –financial, consumption, and government balance sheet fragility. Expanding upon the early contributions of Keynes, Minsky and others, the Theory of Systemic Fragility offers an alternative explanation why the global economy is slowing long term, becoming more unstable, why policies to date have largely failed, and why the next crisis may therefore prove even worse than 2008-09.
The book and theory further describes transmission mechanisms between the three forms of fragility that exacerbate each and lead to a deepening of Systemic Fragility in turn. How the buildup of Systemic Fragility in the pre-crash and recovery phase makes the global economy more prone to frequent and more intense crashes, to deeper real economic contractions, and to weaker recoveries, while rendering fiscal-monetary policies increasingly ineffective. The book further explains how the price system in general, and financial asset prices in particular, function as fundamental destabilizing forces under conditions of Systemic Fragility. How the global system has in recent decades become dependent upon, and even addicted to, massive liquidity injections. How fiscal policies have exacerbated fragility and instability. And how fundamental changes in the structure of the 21st century global capitalist economy—in particular in financial and labor market structures—are fundamentally responsible for making the global economy more systemically fragile and thus in turn prone to more frequent and deeper instability and crises.
The book concludes with an appendix statement that describes three simultaneous equations that express in notational form the variables associated with the Theory of Systemic Fragility.”
Readers interested in joining the first week of January Jack’s online course, “The Global Economy in Crisis, 2015-2016′, based on his just released book, offered by the World Institute for Social Change (WISC), beginning Jan. 2, check it out at: https://zcomm.org/zschool/moodle/
Dr. Jack Rasmus @drjackrasmus
Jack Rasmus 
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