Professor Terrence McDonough:

If we consider the entirety of my academic work on the current period and the basis for it - I have also done work on the 19th century in Ireland which is less relevant - my concern has been to understand the historic dynamics specifically of capitalist systems. In my work I have identified what I think is a useful characterisation of the long-term dynamics, which is that we have periods of relative calm and relatively successful capitalist growth, during which recessions are shallow and the expansions are long, but we also have periods of capitalist crisis. We can find the periodic arrival of these crises in the revolutions of 1848, the long depression of the late 19th century, the great depression of the 1930s, the great stagflation of the 1970s and, now, the great recession of the early 21st century.