A CRISIS OF CAPITALISM

 

The text is an article from the British newspaper The Guardian. It was written by the Italian economist Riccardo Bellofiore. The title of the article is “A crisis of capitalism”. It was published Wednesday 21 September 2011.

 

In the text the economist quotes Marx and uses devices like metaphor and irony in order to judge the country’s political situation; Marx says the Italian crisis is the crisis of capitalism which basically has three causes: the European crisis, the long standing structural failing and the principles of flexibility. These three facts have a lot of consequences in Italy.

 

The first cause, the European crisis, is stagnation based on us-driven exports and also it is based on a set of: institutional funds, capital asset inflation, consumer debt and the unwillingness to refinance indebted countries.  Moreover these aspects had some consequences in the Italian state as: a booming of the interest rate spread, a decrease in the GDP growth rate and the rise in interest rates.

 

The second cause, the long standing structural failings, has a lot of consequences as: the decrease in labour productivity, the decrease in growth rate, the disappearance of industrial sectors, the importation of technology from abroad and the privatization of public enterprises.

 

The third cause, the principles of flexibility, has two main consequences: the collapse of labour productivity and the unemployment.

All in all the three main causes could have some solution as: the improvement of investments, the capital controls, the intervention of the state to provide employment and last but not least the new system of public banks.

 

 

 

CAPITALISM

 

The text is taken from a blog of “The Economist” web site, from the section “Schumpeter business and management”. The text is organized in two different parts: the first one where there is an introduction paragraph written by blogger, this paragraph deals with the topic which is capitalism or in general business. The second one is a list of quotations of powerful people, such as economists, writers or essayist.

 

The function of the first paragraph is to deal with the main theme: the Capitalism. In this part of the text there are four names of four famous economists which have given their definition of Capitalism. The blogger explains that in the text there are other definitions of Capitalism and there are a lot words that belongs to the semantic field of economy.

 

In the second part of the text there are 13 definitions of Capitalism which have been given to 13 different people which have had a considerable importance in the field of economy or in business in general as Marx, Al Capone, Churchill, Friedman, Schumpeter.