Our economics correspondent Michael Roberts looks at the British economy and the real situation facing workers in Britain today, which is somewhat different to the rosy picture painted by Tony Blair and his spin doctors.
The capitalist pundits are worried that the US and world capitalist economy is not recovering as they expected. Stock markets around the world are plummeting, investment spending is unusually weak and consumer spending unusually strong. This current capitalist economic cycle has no precedent in the whole post-war period. Yet this pattern has at least one ominous parallel before the second world war: the US economy of 1926-29.
In the six months to June 30, the US stock market had its biggest fall since 1970, down 14%. Following Enron, we have the WorldCom fiasco, which threatens to be the biggest bankruptcy in world history. Corporate executives lived off the fat of the boom, but now the tide has ebbed, the nasty rocks of failure, corruption and thievery are being revealed.