Why the Stock Market Plunged
The Socialist Program with Brian Becker
The Socialist Program
4.7 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today's episode, Brian and Prof. Richard Wolff discuss the coming recession and this week's stock crash, why capitalism is so unstable with frequent recessions, and the war on the working class.
Professor Richard Wolff is an author & co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work. You can find his work at rdwolff.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | over the weekend, Donald Trump refused to rule out that his policies might accelerate a coming |
| 0:07.7 | recession. On Monday, the stock market plunged on Tuesday morning and it continued to go down. |
| 0:16.4 | Of course, stock markets can go down and up. We know that. But we're going to talk about why the |
| 0:21.4 | stock market is so volatile. We need a new system. We need a new society. We need to demand that |
| 0:29.0 | which may have sounded impossible even a few weeks ago, but is not only realizable, but an |
| 0:35.1 | imperative necessity. I'm your host, Brian Becker. The Socialist Program brings you content. to the economy, the state of the working class, and the crimes of big business. |
| 1:12.7 | I'm your host, Brian Becker. |
| 1:16.1 | The Socialist Program brings you content several days a week. |
| 1:21.9 | Thanks to the support of our patrons at patreon.com forward slash the socialist program. |
| 1:27.4 | We appreciate all of your support and encourage you to become a patron today if you enjoy listening to the show. |
| 1:29.3 | Richard Wolfe is the co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work. He's the author of many books, |
| 1:34.0 | including understanding capitalism, which is available at Democracy at Work.Info. Professor Wolf, |
| 1:40.9 | welcome back. Thank you very much, Brian. Glad to be here. |
| 1:44.9 | Well, Richard, whenever the stock market starts to crash, the specter of another 2008-2009 meltdown |
| 1:53.5 | or earlier recessions, of course, the Great Depression that started with a big stock market crash in October 1929. That becomes the dominant news. |
| 2:04.8 | I'm looking at Financial Times today, Wall Street Journal today. There's obviously a sense of |
| 2:10.8 | alarm in these newspapers that are principally, their principal audience is the capitalist class, the big banks, the corporations. |
| 2:19.3 | There's a sense of alarm. I'm going to read some of the headlines after you get a chance to react to |
| 2:24.8 | it. I want to start, though, with a clip, and it sort of gives you a sense of the alarm that was |
| 2:30.3 | sort of everywhere in the mainstream media as of Monday. Let's listen. |
| 2:34.7 | Let me show you the Dow Jones Industries. |
| 2:37.0 | We have a four-digit loss in the Dow Jones Industries at the moment. |
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