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FROM THE ARTICLE: "Last year two very gifted researchers, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, argued that the Iraq War would not make oil plentiful and cheap at all, but scarce and expensive with the leading oil companies profiting greatly from the new environment of heightened instability and soaring oil prices. Nitzan and Bichler had been making predictions of this kind for quite some time, from before the invasion in fact, but to no avail. I'm happy to say that we finally have confirmation of their claims, thanks to BBC Newsnight Greg Palast."

THE MISMATCH THESIS: What do economists mean when they talk about "capital accumulation"? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is anything but clear, and it seems the most unclear in times of turmoil. Consider the "financial crisis" of the late 2000s. The very term already attests to the presumed nature and causes of the crisis, which most observers indeed believe originated in the financial sector and was amplified by pervasive financialization. However, when theorists speak about a financial crisis, they don't speak about it in isolation. They refer to finance not in and of itself, but in relation to the so-called real capital stock. The recent crisis, they argue, happened not because of finance as such, but due to a mismatch between financial and real capital. The world of finance, they complain, has deviated from and distorted the real world of accumulation. According to the conventional script, this mismatch commonly appears as a "bubble", a recurring disease that causes finance to inflate relative to reality. The bubble itself, much like cancer, develops stealthily. It is extremely hard to detect, and as long as it's growing, nobody – save a few prophets of doom – seems able to see it. It is only after the market has crashed and the dust has settled that, suddenly, everybody knows it had been a bubble all along. Now, bubbles, like other deviations, distortions and mismatches, are born in sin. They begin with "the public" being too greedy and "policy makers" too lax; they continue with "irrational exuberance" that conjures up fictitious wealth out of thin air; and they end with a financial crisis, followed by recession, mounting losses and rising unemployment – a befitting punishment for those who believed they could trick Milton Friedman into giving them a free lunch. This "mismatch thesis" – the notion of a reality distorted by finance – is broadly accepted. In 2009, The Economist of London accused its readers of confusing "financial assets with real ones", singling out their confusion as the root cause of the brewing crisis. Real assets, or wealth, the magazine explained, consist of "goods and products we wish to consume" or of "things that give us the ability to produce more of what we want to consume". Financial assets, by contrast, are not wealth; they are simply "claims on real wealth". To confuse the inflation of the latter for the expansion of the former is the surest recipe for disaster. The division between real wealth and financial claims on real wealth is a fundamental premise of political economy. This premise is accepted not only by liberal theorists, analysts and policymakers, but also by Marxists of various persuasions. And as we shall show below, it is a premise built on very shaky foundations. When liberals and Marxists say that there is a mismatch between financial and real capital, they are essentially making, explicitly or implicitly, three related claims: (1) that these are indeed separate entities; (2) that these entities should correspond to each other; and (3) that, in the actual world, they often do not. In what follows, we explain why these claims don't hold water. To put it bluntly, neither liberals nor Marxists know how to compare real and financial capital, and the main reason is simple: they don't know how to determine the magnitude of real capital to start with. The common, makeshift solution is to estimate this magnitude indirectly, by using the money price of capital goods – yet this doesn't solve the problem either, since capital goods can have many prices and there is no way of knowing which of them, if any, is the "true" one. Last but not least, even if we turn a blind eye and allow for these logical impossibilities and empirical travesties to stand, the result is still highly embarrassing. As it turns out, financial accumulation not only deviates from and distorts real accumulation (or so we are told), it also follows an opposite trajectory. For more than two centuries, economists left and right have argued that capitalists – and therefore capitalism – thrive on "real investment" and the growth of "real capital". But as we shall see, in reality, the best time for capitalists is when their "real accumulation" tanks! . . .

The U.S. stock market is again in turmoil. After a two-year bull run in which share prices soared by nearly 50 per cent, the market is suddenly dropping. Since the beginning of 2018, it lost nearly 10 per cent of its value, threatening investors with an official 'correction' or worse. As always, there is no shortage of explanations. Politically inclined analysts emphasize Trump's recently announced trade wars, sprawling scandals and threatening investigations, as well as the broader turn toward 'populism'; interest-rate forecasters point to central-bank tightening and china's negative credit impulse; quants speak of breached support lines and death crosses; bottom-up analysts highlight the negative implications of the Face-book/Cambridge Analytica debacle for the 'free-data' business model; and top-down fundamentalists indicate that, at near-record valuations, the stock market is a giant bubble ready to be punctured. And on the face of it, these explanations all ring true. They articulate various threats to future profits, interest rates and risk perceptions, and since equity prices discount expected risk-adjusted future earnings, these threats imply lower prices. But there is one little problem. Unlike their pundits, capitalists nowadays tend to look not forward, but backward: instead of matching asset prices to the distant future, they fit them to the immediate past.

[FROM THE ARTICLE] As these lines are being written (April 2018), the The U.S. stock market is again in turmoil. After a two-year bull run in which share prices soared by nearly 50 per cent, the market is suddenly dropping. Since the beginning of 2018, it lost nearly 10 per cent of its value, threatening investors with an official 'correction' or worse. As always, there is no shortage of explanations. Politically inclined analysts emphasize Trump's recently announced trade wars, sprawling scandals and threatening investigations, as well as the broader turn toward 'populism'; interest-rate forecasters point to central-bank tightening and china's negative credit impulse; quants speak of breached support lines and death crosses; bottom-up analysts highlight the negative implications of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica debacle for the 'free-data' business model; and top-down fundamentalists indicate that, at near-record valuations, the stock market is a giant bubble ready to be punctured. And on the face of it, these explanations all ring true. They articulate various threats to future profits, interest rates and risk perceptions, and since equity prices discount expected risk-adjusted future earnings, these threats imply lower prices. But there is one little problem. Unlike their pundits, capitalists nowadays tend to look not forward, but backward: instead of matching asset prices to the distant future, they fit them to the immediate past.

What do economists mean when they talk about 'capital accumulation'? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is anything but clear, and it seems the most unclear in times of turmoil. Consider the recent 'financial crisis'. The very term already attests to the presumed nature and causes of the crisis, which most observers indeed believe originated in the financial sector and was amplified by pervasive financialization. However, when theorists speak about a financial crisis, they don't speak about it in isolation. They refer to finance not in and of itself, but in relation to the so-called real capital stock. The recent crisis, they argue, happened not because of finance as such, but due to a mismatch between financial and real capital. The world of finance, they complain, has deviated from and distorted the real world of accumulation. And since, according to Milton Friedman, there is no such thing as a free lunch, it is only fitting that, having indulged in this distortion, we must now pay the price for it in the form of a financial crisis. This 'mismatch thesis' – the notion of a reality distorted by finance – is broadly accepted. In 2009, The Economist of London accused its readers of confusing 'financial assets with real ones', singling out their confusion as the root cause of the brewing crisis. Real assets, or wealth, the magazine explained, consist of 'goods and products we wish to consume' or of 'things that give us the ability to produce more of what we want to consume'. Financial assets, by contrast, are not wealth; they are simply 'claims on real wealth'. To confuse the inflation of latter for the expansion of the former is the surest recipe for disaster. The division between real wealth and financial claims on real wealth is a fundamental premise of political economy. This premise is accepted not only by liberal theorists, analysts and policymakers, but also by Marxists of various persuasions. And as we shall show below, it is a premise built on very shaky foundations. When liberals and Marxists say that there is a mismatch between financial and real capital, they are essentially making, explicitly or implicitly, three related claims: (1) that these are indeed separate entities; (2) that these entities should correspond to each other; and (3) that, in the actual world, they often do not. In what follows, we explain why these claims don't hold water. To put it bluntly, neither liberals nor Marxists know how to compare real and financial capital, and the main reason is simple enough: they don't know how to determine the magnitude of real capital to start with. The common, makeshift solution is to estimate this magnitude indirectly, by using the money price of capital goods – yet this doesn't solve the problem either, since capital goods can have many prices and there is no way of knowing which of them, if any, is the 'true' one. Last but not least, even if we turn a blind eye and allow for these logical impossibilities and empirical travesties to stand, the result is still highly embarrassing. As it turns out, financial accumulation not only deviates from and distorts real accumulation, it also follows an opposite trajectory. For more than two centuries, economists left and right have argued that capitalism thrives on 'real investment' and the growth of 'real capital'. But as we shall see, in reality, the best time for capitalists is when their 'real accumulation' tanks! . . . .

What do economists mean when they talk about 'capital accumulation'? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is anything but clear, and it seems the most unclear in times of turmoil. Consider the recent 'financial crisis'. The very term already attests to the presumed nature and causes of the crisis, which most observers indeed believe originated in the financial sector and was amplified by pervasive financialization. However, when theorists speak about a financial crisis, they don't speak about it in isolation. They refer to finance not in and of itself, but in relation to the so-called real capital stock. The recent crisis, they argue, happened not because of finance as such, but due to a mismatch between financial and real capital. The world of finance, they complain, has deviated from and distorted the real world of accumulation. And since, according to Milton Friedman, there is no such thing as a free lunch, it is only fitting that, having indulged in this distortion, we must now pay the price for it in the form of a financial crisis. This 'mismatch thesis' – the notion of a reality distorted by finance – is broadly accepted. In 2009, The Economist of London accused its readers of confusing 'financial assets with real ones', singling out their confusion as the root cause of the brewing crisis. Real assets, or wealth, the magazine explained, consist of 'goods and products we wish to consume' or of 'things that give us the ability to produce more of what we want to consume'. Financial assets, by contrast, are not wealth; they are simply 'claims on real wealth'. To confuse the inflation of latter for the expansion of the former is the surest recipe for disaster. The division between real wealth and financial claims on real wealth is a fundamental premise of political economy. This premise is accepted not only by liberal theorists, analysts and policymakers, but also by Marxists of various persuasions. And as we shall show below, it is a premise built on very shaky foundations. When liberals and Marxists say that there is a mismatch between financial and real capital, they are essentially making, explicitly or implicitly, three related claims: (1) that these are indeed separate entities; (2) that these entities should correspond to each other; and (3) that, in the actual world, they often do not. In what follows, we explain why these claims don't hold water. To put it bluntly, neither liberals nor Marxists know how to compare real and financial capital, and the main reason is simple enough: they don't know how to determine the magnitude of real capital to start with. The common, makeshift solution is to estimate this magnitude indirectly, by using the money price of capital goods – yet this doesn't solve the problem either, since capital goods can have many prices and there is no way of knowing which of them, if any, is the 'true' one. Last but not least, even if we turn a blind eye and allow for these logical impossibilities and empirical travesties to stand, the result is still highly embarrassing. As it turns out, financial accumulation not only deviates from and distorts real accumulation, it also follows an opposite trajectory. For more than two centuries, economists left and right have argued that capitalism thrives on 'real investment' and the growth of 'real capital'. But as we shall see, in reality, the best time for capitalists is when their 'real accumulation' tanks! . . . .

THE MISMATCH THESIS: What do economists mean when they talk about "capital accumulation"? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is anything but clear, and it seems the most unclear in times of turmoil. Consider the "financial crisis" of the late 2000s. The very term already attests to the presumed nature and causes of the crisis, which most observers indeed believe originated in the financial sector and was amplified by pervasive financialization. However, when theorists speak about a financial crisis, they don't speak about it in isolation. They refer to finance not in and of itself, but in relation to the so-called real capital stock. The recent crisis, they argue, happened not because of finance as such, but due to a mismatch between financial and real capital. The world of finance, they complain, has deviated from and distorted the real world of accumulation. According to the conventional script, this mismatch commonly appears as a "bubble", a recurring disease that causes finance to inflate relative to reality. The bubble itself, much like cancer, develops stealthily. It is extremely hard to detect, and as long as it's growing, nobody – save a few prophets of doom – seems able to see it. It is only after the market has crashed and the dust has settled that, suddenly, everybody knows it had been a bubble all along. Now, bubbles, like other deviations, distortions and mismatches, are born in sin. They begin with "the public" being too greedy and "policy makers" too lax; they continue with "irrational exuberance" that conjures up fictitious wealth out of thin air; and they end with a financial crisis, followed by recession, mounting losses and rising unemployment – a befitting punishment for those who believed they could trick Milton Friedman into giving them a free lunch. This "mismatch thesis" – the notion of a reality distorted by finance – is broadly accepted. In 2009, The Economist of London accused its readers of confusing "financial assets with real ones", singling out their confusion as the root cause of the brewing crisis. Real assets, or wealth, the magazine explained, consist of "goods and products we wish to consume" or of "things that give us the ability to produce more of what we want to consume". Financial assets, by contrast, are not wealth; they are simply "claims on real wealth". To confuse the inflation of the latter for the expansion of the former is the surest recipe for disaster. The division between real wealth and financial claims on real wealth is a fundamental premise of political economy. This premise is accepted not only by liberal theorists, analysts and policymakers, but also by Marxists of various persuasions. And as we shall show below, it is a premise built on very shaky foundations. When liberals and Marxists say that there is a mismatch between financial and real capital, they are essentially making, explicitly or implicitly, three related claims: (1) that these are indeed separate entities; (2) that these entities should correspond to each other; and (3) that, in the actual world, they often do not. In what follows, we explain why these claims don't hold water. To put it bluntly, neither liberals nor Marxists know how to compare real and financial capital, and the main reason is simple: they don't know how to determine the magnitude of real capital to start with. The common, makeshift solution is to estimate this magnitude indirectly, by using the money price of capital goods – yet this doesn't solve the problem either, since capital goods can have many prices and there is no way of knowing which of them, if any, is the "true" one. Last but not least, even if we turn a blind eye and allow for these logical impossibilities and empirical travesties to stand, the result is still highly embarrassing. As it turns out, financial accumulation not only deviates from and distorts real accumulation (or so we are told), it also follows an opposite trajectory. For more than two centuries, economists left and right have argued that capitalists – and therefore capitalism – thrive on "real investment" and the growth of "real capital". But as we shall see, in reality, the best time for capitalists is when their "real accumulation" tanks! . . .

This paper uses the theory of 'capital as power' to analyze the struggle over public pensions in the United States. While mainstream commentators claim that public pensions must be 'reformed' because they are 'under funded', I argue that the metrics used to make this argument are unsound. Instead, the push to privatize public pension systems is driven less by actual funding problems, and more by the desires of elite investors who seek to control pension capital and reap the enormous investment fees associated with it. I propose that the deconstruction of public pensions is part of a larger effort to undermine collective action, so as to remove resistance to dominant capital.

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified longstanding concerns about mounting levels of corporate debt in the United States. This article places the current conjuncture in its historical context, analysing corporate indebtedness against the backdrop of increasing corporate concentration. Theorising leverage as a form of power, we find that the leverage of large non-financial firms increased in recent decades, while their debt servicing burdens decreased. At the same time, smaller firms experienced sharp deleveraging alongside increasing debt servicing costs. Crucially, smaller corporations also registered severe losses over this period, while large corporations remained profitable, and in fact doubled their net profit margins from the early-1990s to the present. Taken together, the results from our mapping exercise uncover a series of dramatic changes in the financial fortunes of large versus smaller firms in recent decades, a phenomenon we refer to as the great debt divergence. We explain this divergence with reference to the dynamics of power in the era of 'shareholder capitalism', and we argue that the US political economy in the post-COVID 19 world is likely to resemble the pre-COVID 19 one, only with more market turmoil, more concentration, more inequality, and even less investment.

The presidential election of Donald Trump has rekindled hopes for a U.S. recovery. The new president promises to 'make America great again', partly by creating many millions of new jobs for U.S. workers, and judging by the rising stock market, capitalists seem to love his narrative. But if Trump actually delivers on his promise, their attitude is likely to change radically. In our 2016 paper, 'A CasP Model of the Stock Market', we developed the concept of a 'CasP policy cycle', the idea that government policy, insofar as it caters to the imperative of capitalized power, favours low employment growth in order to enable low rates of interest and sustain the capitalist share of income. Should Trump proceeds with and succeeds in reversing this CasP policy cycle, his authoritarianism may end up undermining rather than boosting capitalized power. In this sense, his regime could well mark the beginning of the next major bear market.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new Middle East phenomenon that we called 'energy conflicts' and argued that these conflicts were intimately linked with the global processes of capital accumulation. This paper outlines the theoretical framework we have developed over the years and brings our empirical research up to date. It shows that the key stylized patterns we discovered more than twenty years ago – along with other regularities we have uncovered since then – remain pretty much unchanged: (1) conflict in the region continues to correlate tightly with the differential profits of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition, particularly the oil companies; (2) dominant capital continues to depend on stagflation to substitute for declining corporate amalgamation; and (3) capitalists the world over now need inflation to offset the spectre of debt deflation. The convergence of these interests bodes ill for the Middle East and beyond: all of these groups stand to benefit from higher oil prices, and oil prices rarely if ever rise without there being an energy conflict in the Middle East.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new Middle East phenomenon that we called 'energy conflicts' and argued that these conflicts were intimately linked with the global processes of capital accumulation. This paper outlines the theoretical framework we have developed over the years and brings our empirical research up to date. It shows that the key stylized patterns we discovered more than twenty years ago – along with other regularities we have uncovered since then – remain pretty much unchanged: (1) conflict in the region continues to correlate tightly with the differential profits of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition, particularly the oil companies; (2) dominant capital continues to depend on stagflation to substitute for declining corporate amalgamation; and (3) capitalists the world over now need inflation to offset the spectre of debt deflation. The convergence of these interests bodes ill for the Middle East and beyond: all of these groups stand to benefit from higher oil prices, and oil prices rarely if ever rise without there being an energy conflict in the Middle East.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new Middle East phenomenon that we called 'energy conflicts' and argued that these conflicts were intimately linked with the global processes of capital accumulation. This paper outlines the theoretical framework we have developed over the years and brings our empirical research up to date. It shows that the key stylized patterns we discovered more than twenty years ago – along with other regularities we have uncovered since then – remain pretty much unchanged: (1) conflict in the region continues to correlate tightly with the differential profits of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition, particularly the oil companies; (2) dominant capital continues to depend on stagflation to substitute for declining corporate amalgamation; and (3) capitalists the world over now need inflation to offset the spectre of debt deflation. The convergence of these interests bodes ill for the Middle East and beyond: all of these groups stand to benefit from higher oil prices, and oil prices rarely if ever rise without there being an energy conflict in the Middle East.

In the March 2021 issue of Harper's, Scorsese wrote an essay to pay tribute to Federico Fellini, the Italian director who directed such great films as La Strada, 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, Nights of Cabiria and Satyricon. Scorsese writing on Fellini is definitely newsworthy for cinephiles who want to know about Fellini's beginnings in Italian neo-realism (for example, he worked with Rosselini on Rome, Open City), or who simply want to be reminded of why his filmography is so great. However, the news of this essay's arrival went well beyond film studies and had very little to do with Fellini. People were talking about the essay because Scorcese framed his tribute to Fellini – which was both personal and knowledgeable – with an argument about the decline of cinema as an art form. This paper explains why Scorsese is right about the differences that exist between himself and a director like Fellini. In fact, we can use Scorsese's argument as a platform to widen our perspective on the political economy of Hollywood. The story Scorsese is telling about the business of Hollywood is a story about business interests wanting to reduce risk. The ambiguity of risk in this story – is it financial risk or is it aesthetic risk? – is a helpful shortcut to understanding what reducing risk means for those who have control over the industrial art of filmmaking. When the Hollywood film business is estimating its future earnings, risk perceptions account for the possibility that the future of culture will be different–and perhaps radically different–from what capitalists expect it to be. This logic of capitalist accounting, while quantitative in expression (prices, income, volatility, etc.), is social in essence. For this reason, the capitalization of cinema cannot overlook any social dimension of cinema, be it aesthetic, political or cultural. The eye of capitalization searches for any social condition that could have an impact on "the level and pattern of capitalist earnings" (Nitzan & Bichler, 2009, p. 166). This paper is a lightly edited compilation of a two-part series originally published by Notes on Cinema in June and July, 2021. It has been re-published here with permission of the author.