Friday 28 November 2008

The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk


Hey, Kondratiev's in fashion again! Haven't heard of him since wading through Ernst Mandel all those years ago. Since his long wave theory is so difficult to prove - or indeed, disprove - it can function beautifully as a kind of 'magic bullet' which buttresses any particular argument anyone would like to make about the short term economic future.

But for some historians, Kondratiev is a wimp focused on piffling short -term issues.

Here's Cicero on the Roman credit crunch:

"Defend the republic from this danger and believe me when I tell you - what you see for yourselves - that this system of monies, which operates at Rome in the Forum, is bound up in, and is linked with, those Asian monies; the loss of one inevitably undermines the other and causes its collapse."

Er, yeah. & then came Sulla, followed a generation or so later by the collapse of the Republic in favour of the Empire.

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