Since 2013 various eminent mainstream economists, including Fisher and Summers, have proposed reviving the doctrine of “secular stagnation”, initially introduced by Alvin Hansen in 1934. The main reasons Summers adduced for this revival were the massive financial expansion without overheating in the real economy before the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the absence of an economic upturn after the crisis. According to these authors, the only explanation for this trend could be a negative Wicksellian natural rate of interest, produced by an excess of saving over investment at any positive interest rate. In these approaches, the dynamic of this disproportion would be explained, in a typical context of neoclassical growth theory, by changes in demographic dynamics.

But the idea that the real world economy has entered into a new stagnation trend is really the other side of the coin in explaining the extraordinary long-term growth that characterised the three decades in the aftermath of World War II. The reasons for this peculiar phase in world economic history and the end it met with in the 1970s has long been  the main research objective of Régulation Theory, which found accumulation regimes and corresponding modes of regulation as the major determinants of the features of economic growth and development. In this theoretical context, secular stagnation could be read as the last effect of the neoliberal accumulation regime that emerged from the crisis of the previous Fordist accumulation regime in the seventies.