Jeong Seong-jin: Most media and analysts label the current crisis as a “financial crisis.” Do you agree with this characterization?

Robert Brenner: It's understandable that analysts of the crisis have made the meltdown in banking and the securities markets their point of departure. But the difficulty is that they have not gone any deeper. From Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chair Bernanke on down, they argue that the crisis can be explained simply in terms of problems in the financial sector. At the same time, they assert that the underlying real economy is strong, the so-called fundamentals in good shape. This could not be more misleading. The basic source of today's crisis is the declining vitality of the advanced economies since 1973, and, especially, since 2000. Economic performance in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan has steadily deteriorated, business cycle by business cycle, in terms of every standard macroeconomic indicator – GDP, investment, real wages, and so forth. Most telling, the business cycle that just ended, from 2001 through 2007, was – by far – the weakest of the postwar period, and this despite the greatest government-sponsored economic stimulus in U.S. peacetime history.