The tendential fall in the rate of profit lies in the center of a long-lasting debate among Marxist scholarship on its centrality and empirical relevance in the investigation of structural crises. Without neglecting the financial aspect of the current crisis, which is covered in the vast majority of academic accounts, we try to discover its underlying roots in the entire spectrum of capitalist production in the US, in reference with that debate. Our empirical evidence indicates that the US economy experiences an inability to recover profit rates to the high levels of the first postwar decades on a sustainable basis. It is proposed that this is due to the reluctance of policy makers to allow the vast destruction of unproductive capital, because such a process entails a potential systemic risk for the established socioeconomic and political status-quo.

LIST OF FIGURES . 2LIST OF TABLES . 3LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 4

1. INTRODUCTION 51.1. AIM, HYPOTHESIS, AND OUTLINE OF THE THESIS 62. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 82.1. THE ″LAW OF THE TENDENCY OF THE RATE OF PROFIT TO FALL″ 82.2. MARXIAN THEORY OF CRISES . 92.3. THE LAW OF THE TENDENCY OF THE RATE OF PROFIT TO FALL AS THE MARXIAN INTERPRETATION OF CRISIS AND CRITICISM TO IT 12

4. HETERODOX INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CRISIS . 204.1. A SMALL NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL DEBATE ON THE STAGFLATION CRISIS 204.2. THE CURRENT DEBATE . 224.2.1. The financialization approach 224.3. THE DISPUTE OVER PROFITABILITY TRENDS . 24