FIRST IT WAS ROUBINI, NOW ANOTHER BRAVE SOUL STEPS FORWARD

In an article I mentioned below, Nouriel Roubini gave Karl Marx some credit:

So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong).

Now, George Magnus, a  senior economic adviser at UBS,  writes pretty much the same thing in Bloomberg News op-ed:

Give Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy
By George Magnus Aug 28, 2011 5:00 PM MT

Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx.

As he wrote in “Das Kapital,” companies’ pursuit of profits and productivity would naturally lead them to need fewer and fewer workers, creating an “industrial reserve army” of the poor and unemployed: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery.”

The process he describes is visible throughout the developed world, particularly in the U.S. Companies’ efforts to cut costs and avoid hiring have boosted U.S. corporate profits as a share of total economic output to the highest level in more than six decades, while the unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent and real wages are stagnant.