摘要：The recession that began in Canada and the United States in 1990 and eventually engulfed most of the developed capitalist world was notable in three major respects: it produced one of the most severe international economic contractions since the Second World War; it brought an end to one of the most long-lasting - if peculiar - economic expansions in the history of world capitalism; and, unlike previous recessions of the past twenty five years, it resisted tendentious and simplistic explanation in terms of causes (such as the mid-1970s increase in oil prices) that could be defined as exogenous to the normal dynamics of capitalist accumulation.
