The 1990s finds the business climate in the U.S. nearly ideal for capitalists. During the economy's uninterrupted growth, the stock market has more than doubled. So it's not surprising that American capitalists are pretty self-satisfied right now. Leading Economic Indicators project continued healthy growth. There are no signs of a downswing into the recessions that bedeviled capitalism in the past.
Capitalists think they are standing atop an economic crest from which they can see forever.
Giddy from the rarefied air of this lofty height, some capitalist economists are now celebrating the end of the business cycle. Steven Weber, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, stops short of asserting that there will never be another depression. He considers without conclusion theories that economic downswings are brought about by external shocks, from errors in monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board, or by businesses developing erroneous expectations of consumer demand. But he does not mention, let alone offer any argument against, the Marxist analysis that the business cycle is the consequence of the profit-driven capitalist economic system. Because the workers are paid only a portion of what they produce, imbalances between supply and demand are inevitable.