The capitalist world economy has long maintained itself, as any system
does, by mechanisms that restore equilibrium every time its processes move away from it. The equilibrium is never restored immediately, but only after a sufficient deviation from the norm occurs, and, of course, it never is restored perfectly. Because it requires that deviations go a certain distance before they trigger counter-movements, the result is that the capitalist world economy, like any other system, has cyclical rhythms of multiple kinds. We have discussed one of the principal ones it has developed, which are called Kondratieff cycles. They are not the only ones.