(1) The structure of the sub-prime crisis and financialization of labour-power: The sub-prime crisis originated from the US bubbly housing boom which lasted for ten years until 2006, and expanded to a world crisis. The preceding boom was promoted by speculative housing finance. About 43% of the total US households are estimated to have obtained homes by housing loan. The subprime housing loan was for people mostly of relatively lower income without sufficient creditability. Thus, commoditized labour-power became more and more broadly financialized in our age. The structure of US housing loan was double-decked in this period. At the first floor, mainly mortgage companies lent housing loan to households, and immediately sold housing loan credit to other financial institutions such as SPV (Special Purpose Vehicles) which was owned by big investment banks. Then at the second floor, SPV and parent banks bundled and re-composed such individual housing loans into mortgage backed securities (MBS) and other forms of securities, and sold them in a world market. Through this double decked financial market, global idle money was continuously poured into the US speculative housing boom. (2) Expansion of the sub-prime financial crisis to the world crisis: Corresponding to the double decked structure of the US housing finance, the collapse of the speculative housing boom in the USA spread destructive impacts to the US and the global economy in two aspects. Firstly, as the boom was promoted by speculative trading in financial business, deterioration of sub-prime and other housing loan based securities like MBS hit badly both US and world-wide banks and other financial institutions. The financial crisis enforced widely to depress business activity and consumer demand. Secondly, so long as the US consumption was much expanded by housing related expenditure, the collapse of housing boom itself devastated the US real economy. (1)The impact of financial crisis, (2)a decline of export, (3)the chained collapses of similar real estate booms in some countries, are main routes or types of contagion of economic crisis in the world. The Japanese economy suffered much from the second, in relation to domestic economic problems, though not much from the first route this time. (3) How to apply Marxian crisis theories: Against neo-classical economics, Marxian political economy is well equipped with basic theories of economic crisis. An attempt is shown here to apply Marx's over-accumulation theory of crisis to the sub-prime crisis, by emphasizing also Marx's and Uno's theoretical contributions to the theory of monetary and financial instability. (4) Social costs of the sub-prime crisis: Neo-liberalism was grounded upon the neo-classical micro-economics, and asserted that a competitive and deregulated market can realize most efficient waste-less economies. The result of its dominance for about three decades in the leading economies should be seriously criticized in view of waste-full social costs of the subprime crisis in four forms. What to think about the capital loss among them from the view of labour-theory of value is presented as a theoretical issue to be reconsidered. (5) The end of neo-liberalism for social democracy and socialism: The sub-prime crisis signified the historical limitation of neo-liberalism and actually worked as an epoch to end the neo-liberal regime. Both Obama Democrat and Hatoyama Democtat administration were born in 2009, demonstrating people's choice for such a change. A wider room to argue for new possibilities of social democracy and socialism is now open as global agenda. The issues of green recovery and basic income are referred to as illustrations. The large-scaled once-a-century world crisis requests us revival of political economy concerning wider historical alternatives for the future.

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People have their own understanding upon history. However, there comes a moment when their understanding is radically shaken and forced to restructure it. World war I, the collapse of world market through the great economic crisis and the fall down of the reconstructed gold standard system, and World war II were no doubt such events. These three events are catastrophes that mean the system cannot return to the original normal condition. Then, is not 'A crisis That Comes Only Once in a Hundred Years' also such an event? This is my point at issue. 'A Crisis That Comes Only Once in a Hundred Years' is not narrowly confined to 2008 financial crisis but means a catastrophe that began in 1971 when the US government stopped to change dollar into gold in order to escape from the pressure of serious stagflation, and was highlighted in the financial crisis in 2008. The US avoided to face the difficulty and steered to other direction. The US government attributed the cause of stagflation to a government failure, the failure of Keynesian managed economy, and adopted deregulation, small government and other neo-liberal policies to find a way out of difficulties. At the same time, the US government denied any responsibility upon the huge current account deficit of balance of payment. Instead, they accused surplus countries. The US abandoned the financial prudence crucial to the maintenance of international currency system. In 1980s, as a result of high interest rate and strong dollar policy, the US discovered and developed a mode of global capital accumulation, in which the US, supplying over-abundant dollar to the world market by continuous current account deficit, promoted capital accumulation freely by way of attracting and redistributing super abundant dollar worldwide. This new mode of global capital accumulation is very opportune for the US, but it cannot avoid to bring about terrible result to the world market. It has built up a structure of bubble capitalism. Under a great credit expansion, on one hand, the US has become a huge absorber to consume more than produce, and on the other hand, the rest of the world has euphorically dreamed an extra high rate of growth by export to the US. There grows the condition of frequent bubble occurrence. US's huge residential bubble and its crash is nothing but a finish of this exciting story. So long as the US cannot solve the current balance deficit, the world market system with US dollar as key currency cannot avoid its collapse. This collapse means the fourth catastrophe. But what we are facing is not only a catastrophe, but also the run away of capitalism that rash at self destruction. The world market system after World war II has made a continuous rash at destruction of natural environment and human tie, and ruin itself therefore. It is nothing but runaway or dash at selfruin. Anyway, we are now in a market system dashing at self-ruin, and the system is falling into catastrophe by functional disorder. Can the mankind overcome this great calamity? What is necessary to overcome it?

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How should characteristics of the economic crisis in 2008 be captured? The first point is that it occurred under a stable movement of prices in spite of the managed currency system. Under the managed currency system in the post-war period, inflation has been built in the economic system, because of suspending the gold conversion and fiscal policy. In other words, the de facto standard price has been volatile and the value of currency has gotten its depreciation. On the other hand, the periodic economic contraction in the economic crisis (rapid and violent economic contraction) disappeared. Inflation has represented contradictions of capitalism economy in the post-war period. However it should be notable that after the mid of the '80s the prices of developed countries are stable. The '08 crisis also occurred under the same circumstance. Simultaneously capitalism economy got rapid contractions of economy in this crisis; increasing unemployment, decreasing production and slow down of consumption. It seems to be a classical economic crisis under the gold standard system, although the managed currency system still survives. The government in the developed countries continues the fiscal policy and some countries are threatened the strict budget deficit. Is this a cause of inflation? Here we have an important subject; why the stable prices movement and the economic crisis like a classical one stand side by side with the managed currency system? The second point that should be noticed when we analyze the current economic crisis, is that the bubble economy and its burst have often been observed since the '80s in the world economy. A characteristic of the current economic crisis is that its origin was the burst of the sub-prime lone bubble and its influence become serious and expanded the world wide. This is the second subject; what conditions is the bubble economy linked with the stable prices movement by? And does the economic adjustment under the current economic crisis give us any theoretical implications? In this paper I answered these questions by pointing out three factors that determined some features of the current economic crisis. The first factor is economic stagnation in developed countries (or advanced capitalist nations) since the 1970s. There are three causes of this economic stagnation. The First of all is the shortage of investment opportunity in the stage of monopoly capitalism. P. A. Baran and P. M. Sweezy asserted that it was the 'low-absorption of monopoly capital'. The second factor is an accomplishment of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the era of the economic globalization. According to Marx, In advanced countries, capitalists tend to concentrate their investment to the capital-intensive industry in consequence of global competition and move the labor-intensive industry to developing countries. Consequently in the advanced countries the rate of profit tends to be slow-down, on the other, the rate of surplus value increase. Developing countries have the contrary tendency. Therefore in the advance countries the income of households and its consumption level decreases. It is the third factor of the economic stagnation in the advanced capitalist countries. The second factor that determined some features of the current economic crisis, is the change of the feature of monopoly capital; the autonomous of financial capital. The financial capital that has been parasitic with industrial capital in the stage of monopoly capital, has been gaining its profit independently from industrial capitals, that is, the autonomous. The third factor that determined some features of the current economic crisis is the international currency system, that is, the dollar system. The dollar-key currency system makes the reproduction structure of world-wide and the overproduction of peripheral countries can be absorbed by the US. This has

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The crisis of 2007-9 resulted from a financial bubble marked by weak production, expanding bank assets, and growing household indebtedness. For these reasons the crisis casts light on the financialisation of capitalist economies. The literature on financialisation generally links weak production with booming finance; according to some, causation runs from weak production to booming finance, while for others it runs in the opposite direction. This article argues that there is no direct causation between booming finance and weak production. Rather, financialisation represents systemic transformation of capitalist production and finance, which ultimately accounts for the crisis of 2007-9, and has three main features. First, less reliance of large corporations on banks; second, banks shifting their activities toward mediating in open markets and transacting with individuals; third, increasing implication of individuals in the operations of finance.

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Post-Keynesian economists have given greater importance to the role of income distribution in the analysis of employment and economic growth. According to post-Keynesian theory, income distribution has a dualrole-(1) higher wage share may stimulate aggregate demand and economic growth by increasing household consumption (wage-led economy) and (2) lower profit share may result in lower investment demand (profit-led economy). Since the combined effect is ambiguous from a theoretical viewpoint, it is important to obtain empirical evidence to identify the dominant effect. Empirical researches on post-Keynesian theories have been ongoing; see for example Stockhammer and Onaran (2004), Naastepad and Strom (2006), etc. However, there are few works that use a Japanese dataset. This paper constructs a simple Kaleckian model, based on Blecker (1989) and Bhaduri and Marglin (1990), and examines the role of income distribution in the Japanese case. We estimate a structural vector auto regression (SVAR) model for five variables; profit share, capacity utilization, capital accumulation, exports, and imports. The first three variables are the key in a Kaleckian model to discuss the role of distribution with regard to demand and growth. The last two trade variables are employed to evaluate the effect of international trade. Blecker (1989) argued that increasing international price competition prevents the wage-led economy from being realized, since the higher wage costs may reduce international competitiveness. In this paper, we discuss whether Blecker's claim holds true. We find from the impulse response analysis that the Japanese economy has been a profit-led economy in the period from 1980 to 2004, i.e., a higher profit share tends to increase aggregate demand and growth. An increase in profit share depresses consumption in the short run but will raise investment demand in the long run to overcome the initial reduction. Moreover, the effect of profit share on exports is very limited and too weak to have a significant effect on production and growth. Our findings imply that workers have an incentive to accept an increase in profit share because they would be able to enjoy the long-run benefit from increasing employment and wage income, although in the short run, they must suffer from an initial reduction in the wage income. In the last part of this paper, we conduct a simulation analysis using the estimated results and discuss the possibility of this kind of coordination.

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This paper explains why the U.S. economy experienced high growth from the 1990s to the early 2000s while the Japanese economy stagnated during this same period. To do so, we firstly construct a Kaldorian cumulative causation model which takes into account the interrelation between demand and labor productivity growth in a two-sector (investment goods and consumption goods sectors) framework. Secondly, we estimate the model parameters, using data for the U.S. during 1994-2004 and for Japan during 1991-2003 and substitute them into our model. Then, we compare both countries estimated demand regime functions, which describe the effect of productivity on demand, and productivity regime functions, showing the effect of demand on productivity in each sector. Our results are summarized as follows. The U.S. rapid GDP growth in the 1990s was characterized by the investment goods sector's high demand growth, which in turn was mainly driven by its high labor productivity growth. The U.S. established a new growth regime, which was caused not by wage indexation to productivity and mass consumption, as appeared during the so-called 'Fordism' period, but by decreasing the investment goods price and increasing investment demand in the consumption goods sector. Moreover, higher export and public expenditure growth for the consumer goods sector was the driving force behind this sector's high growth. As for the Japanese economy, although the investment goods sector also attained rapid productivity growth and could have raised its high demand growth during this period, it was unable to do so. The decreasing investment goods price didn't lead to its high demand growth as it did in the U.S. because the idle stock due to over-accumulation and bad loans caused by the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s gave disincentive for firms to invest. But, we should note that deregulating the labor market itself, which leads to an increase in the low-skilled irregular worker, could not produce higher performance without active labor market policies because it brings about low productivity in both the investment goods and the consumer goods sectors.

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