Time Is Running Out (Depression, Polycrisis, and the World Economy in the 2020s)

In a moment of interlocking and compounding crises that many commentators have aptly termed the “polycrisis,” a leading economist offers a clear-eyed account of the underlying trends fueling the global instability and market mayhem that have come to characterize contemporary capitalism.

Rampant inequality. Unchecked climate change. A global pandemic. And now, seething international divisions and the escalatory spiral of war and state violence. As the world moves toward the end of the 2020s, each of the pieces of this mosaic are becoming impossible to ignore, but how do they all fit together? And where is it all heading?

To answer these questions, Marxist economist Michael Roberts draws on his forty-plus years of experience working in various financial institutions in the City of London to provide an empirically grounded and wide-ranging appraisal of the global situation.

Roberts takes readers on a tour of the contemporary global economy, first by turning back to the Great Recession of 2008, and then offering a granular look at the economic priorities and contradictions of every region of the world.

What emerges from this accounting of the polycrisis is the inescapable fact that capitalism’s rapacious drive toward profit over and against any geopolitical boundaries or ecological limits threatens both humanity and the planet.