Michael Roberts, ecomics editor of Socialist Appeal, explains the immediate causes of the present crash of the markets: the currency crisis in South East Asia and how these economies, which were supposed to be models of capitalist development suddenly collapsed.
In this major article, Ted Grant provides us with a general analysis of the present state of capitalism. With chapters on the nature of the boom/slump cycle, the peculiarities of the present "boom", the claim that Information Technology has solved the problems of capitalism, the crisis of overproduction, the situation in South East Asia, the consecuences that the coming slump will have and the tasks in front of Marxists at this particular juncture.
This long article by Alan Woods reviews the events since the stock exchange crash of October 1997, and how the crisis has spread to the once powerfull economies of South Korea and Japan despite the reassuring comments of most bourgeois economist in the aftermath of the crash. An update to the ideas developed in Ted Grant's article The First Tremors - An analysis of the global economic situation