Overproduction crises every ten years or so..
Same old crises, same old amnesia, same old denial that we can do anything about it.
Tom mentions Keynes, someone else mentioned the Austrian economists - all very well, but will solve nothing, just prolong the agony. Thatcher threw out the Keynesians cos they cost the capitalists money, and think its stupid to gut the public sector. Only as soon as capitalism is about to implode, what do they roll out but Keynesianism - after millions have starved to death and the rest have been emaciated by unemployment and despair, and are ready to tear the bourgeoisie to pieces and set up a state for everybody and not just the fat cats. Then when things have cooled down, after a world war or two, the fat cats of the world, the Friedmans, Kissingers, Reagans and Thatchers start rolling it all back.
So much for bourgeois solutions.
Matt Creat mentions Marx, and he's the only one here to do so. And Marx is the reason bourgeois economics is such shit. Cos carrying on where Adam Smith and Ricardo left off, he used THEIR axiomatic principle of the LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE to show that capitalism was based on a permanent and evergrowing ripoff of the wage-earners and the poor (the working class with nothing to sell but their muscles and brains). So obviously classical bourgeois economics, based on a sound scientific principle was useless for the fat cats.
Read Volume 3 of Capital for a laugh - the chapter giving the official reports on the financial crises (overproductioin crises) of 1848 and 1858 is a hoot. All the main representatives of the fat cats, the biggest bankers, politicians, manufacturers etc are interviewed, they all give different reasons, and every damn one of these reasons is being trotted out by the same ignorant bastards today.
Their reason their models, however complex, don't predict any crises is that their axioms, their basic principles are based on regular stable growth - equilibrium between costs, prices, profits, investment etc. Supply equals demand and everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. What Marx showed is that these crises are regualr, have scientifically demonstrable recurring conditions for arising, and will continue till capitalism is replaced by cooperative planned production or we all get killed.
Wars are a constant, and so are crises. Which is why all the lying spineless fat-cat media spend so much of their time white-washing wars and forgetting all about past crises until the next one. Then some of the fat-cat spokesmen are purged or hop out of windows, and everything begins from scratch - boom and bust, bust and boom. Amnesia School of Economics, MBA (Master of Bugger All).
So till the basics of the model are changed, they can recruit as many nuclear physicists as they like, and use as much computing power as they like, or as many smart missiles or stone-aged countries as they like, and they'll still be fucked.
(Or maybe Paris has got something up her bunt to save us all?)