Immanuel Wallerstein: The Worst (of the economic crisis) is yet to come.

This is a video of an interview with Immanuel Wallerstein an eminent U.S. sociologist well known for his world systems theory approach to analysing global events. Here is a short quote from the Wikipedia entry:

""Immanuel Wallerstein, a leading advocate of the approach, uses the same terminology. He characterizes the world system as a set of mechanisms which redistributes resources from the periphery to the core. In his terminology, the core is the developed, industrialized, democratic part of the world, and the periphery is the underdeveloped, raw materials-exporting, poor part of the world; the market being the means by which the core exploits the periphery.

Wallerstein traces the origin of today's world-system to the 16th century in Western Europe, and defines it as:

"...a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning."[1]
Apart of these, Wallerstein defines four temporal features of that. Cyclical rhythms represent the short-term fluctuation of economy, while secular trends mean deeper long run tendencies, such as general economic growth or decline. In the theory the term contradiction means a general controversy in the system, usually concerning some short term vs. long term trade-offs. For example the problem of underconsumption, wherein the drive-down of wages increases the profit for the capitalists on the short-run, but considering the long run, the decreasing of wages may have a crucially harmful effect by reducing the demand for the product. The last temporal feature is the crisis: a crisis occurs, if a constellation of circumstances brings about the losing of the system's structure, which also means the end of the system.

Technically speaking, World-systems analysis is not a theory, but an approach to social analysis and social change """

NOTE: The video is from RT Russia Today but don't worry it is in English!