The ‘new golden age of accumulation’, the new depression and the greek economy

The purpose of this paper is to delve into the deeper causes of the current crisis and its detailed manifestation in the case of the Greek economy. The major argument of the paper is that the root cause of the crisis is fundamentally identified in the declining profitability which past a point leads to a stagnant mass of real net profits thereby discouraging investment spending and leading to rising unemployment. In the case of the Greek economy, this crisis of profitability has been aggravated by the contraction of its major productive activities, that is, manufacturing and agriculture. The contraction of these activities not only worsened the crisis but furthermore paved the way for the development of different forms of its expression; that is, mounting debt and unprecedented high rates of unemployment bringing the whole society into a stalemate.