My apologies for having called you an apparent Austrian. Although some people who seem to share your ideas can be appropriately called that.
"But more importantly, the investor money goes out of productive and into housing speculation."
That is no doubt a distortion caused by low interest rates. But, and there is always a but about these things, that seems to be the price that one as to pay for the existence of a global savings glut. If there are no opportunities for productive investment, where is the money suppose to go? Under the mattress? Haven't you realize that even with interest rates close to zero there is still a need for fiscal policy?
You say: also an important qualification, during the Great Depression, unemployment was around 24%. Right now, the adjusted unemployment rate is around 20%.
Bearing in mind that the apparent 20% are at a time when billions are being spent in fiscal stimulus and the interest rates are said to stay almost at zero for the foreseeable future, imagine what that figure would have been if that were not the case? We all would be eating grass by now.
Since "we're exploring possible economic dynamics", what do you think about TRPF?
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) is a theory in the crisis theory of political economy, according to which the rate of profit—the ratio of the profit to the amount of invested capital—decreases over time. This hypothesis gained additional prominence from its discussion by Karl Marx in Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III,[1] but economists as diverse as Adam Smith,[2] John Stuart Mill,[3] David Ricardo[4] and Stanley Jevons[5] referred explicitly to the TRPF as an empirical phenomenon that demanded further theoretical explanation, although they differed on the reasons why the TRPF should necessarily occur.[6]Geoffrey Hodgson stated that the theory of the TRPF "has been regarded, by most Marxists, as the backbone of revolutionary Marxism. According to this view, its refutation or removal would lead to reformism in theory and practice".[7] Stephen Cullenberg stated that the TRPF "remains one of the most important and highly debated issues of all of economics" because it raises "the fundamental question of whether, as capitalism grows, this very process of growth will undermine its conditions of existence and thereby engender periodic or secular crises."[8]
