Finance and reproduction : Rudolf Hilferding’s crisis theory

Beside an analysis of bank credit and financial markets, of monopoly capitalism, he role of the state and imperialism, Hilferding’s Finance Capital offers a theory of economic crisis which presents itself as an intent to incorporate the movements of profit rates and relative prices, and the financial conditions of accumulation, to the analysis of capital reproduction. Crisis emerge from an excess rate of gross investment, leading to an impossibility to finance the rising cost of fixed capital. Hilferding’s theory has thus an “Austrian” flavour, even if his monetary analysis is closer from Keynes than from Hayek. And remains a point of departure for a post-marxian theory of crisis