never recovered in a sustained manner. This led to a persistent slowdown in productive investment -- -- basically, the entire decline in the rate of investment is attributable to the fall in the rate of profit -- -- which in turn led to a marked slowdown in economic growth and mounting debt problems. And the government's response to all this delayed the outbreak of a major crisis as the cost of further exacerbating the debt problems. To take just one example, the whole rise in U.S. Treasury debt (as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) prior to the crisis is due to a combination of a fall in corporate profits (as a percentage of GDP) and reductions in tax rates on profits that kept the after-tax rate of profit from falling as sharply as did the before-tax rate. So the effects of the fall in the rate of profit were transferred in large part from corporations to the government. But the real clincher, the thing that convinced me that Marx's falling-rate-of-profit is needed in order to account for the whole mess, is the fact that it happens to account surprisingly well for why the rate of profit fell. Over the six decades that preceded the financial crisis, there was little long-run change in either the relation between profit and wages or the rate at which money prices rose in relation to commodities' real values. When you set aside those factors, what's left is that the rate of profit fell