The first economist to connect the theory of crisis to the theory of monopoly was the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, who drew his inspiration from Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Kalecki’s work in the early 1930s in Polish had developed, according to Joan Robinson and others in the circle of younger economists around Keynes, the main elements of the “Keynesian” revolution, in anticipation of Keynes himself. Kalecki moved to England in the mid-1930s where he helped further the transformation in economic analysis associated with Keynes. There he developed his concept of the “degree of monopoly,” which stood for the extent to which a firm was able to impose a price mark-up on prime production costs (workers’ wages and raw materials). In this way, Kalecki was able to link monopoly power to the distribution of national income, and to the sources of economic crisis and stagnation. Kalecki also explored the more general historical conditions affecting investment. In the closing paragraphs of his
Theory of Economic Dynamics (1965) he concluded: “Long-run development is not inherent in the capitalist economy. Thus specific ‘developmental factors’ are required to sustain a long-run upward movement.”
This analysis was carried forward by Josef Steindl, a young Austrian economist who had worked closely with Kalecki in England. According to Steindl’s
Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (1952), giant corporations tended to promote widening profit margins, but were constantly threatened by a shortage of effective demand, due to the uneven distribution of income and resulting weakness of wage-based consumption.
* New investment could conceivably pick up the slack. Yet such investment resulted in new productive capacity, that is, an enlargement of the potential supply of goods. “The tragedy of investment,” Kalecki wrote, “is that it is useful.”
* Giant firms, able to control to a considerable extent their levels of price, output, and investment, would not invest if large portions of their existing productive capacity were already standing idle. Confronted with a downward shift in final demand, monopolistic or oligopolistic firms would not lower prices (as in the perfectly competitive system assumed in most economic analysis) but would instead rely almost exclusively on cutbacks in output, capacity utilization and new investment. In this way they would maintain, to whatever extent possible, existing prices and prevailing profit margins. The giant firm under monopoly capitalism was thus prone to wider profit margins (or higher rates of exploitation) and larger amounts of excess capacity than was the case for a freely competitive system, thereby generating a strong tendency toward economic stagnation.
*
Blizz alone pulls in enormous cash every month. They're financially extremely stable. Vivendi were idiots to ever have sold them off.
Summers were brighter and fields were greener too! 
