Policies and Institutions for Moderating Deep Recessions, Debt Crises and Financial Instabilities

This paper outlines a long-term policy and institutional framework for reducing the intensity of recessions, debt crises and financial instabilities, especially for the Core nations and areas that bore the brunt of the anomalies during 2008-2013. We argue that institutional changes need to be systemic, amounting to the construction of a new social structure of accumulation (SSA) or mode of regulation (MOR), which we call an SSA of embedded communitarian liberalism. Five institutional spheres are introduced which are in need of systemic change, due to the entrenched contradictions and problems which the current set of institutions generate. These involve firstly institutions within the world-system of finance and production; secondly relating to finance versus industry; thirdly capital versus labor; fourthly state systems of production; and fifthly the interlinking of state, community and ecology.