PDF File 1968 Political Crisis in the Keynesian-Fordist economy. The second major crisis of the 20th century began in the late 1960s and stretched all the way to the early ‘80s. It was an overaccumulation crisis, caused by the spread of Fordist production methods to Western Europe and Japan, resulting in a saturation of global markets and a decline of the profit rate in the mas manufacturing industries. It was also a crisis of Keynesian deficit financing: repeated attempts to stimulate the economy through counter-cyclical spending gave rise to stagflation, or the combination of stagnant growth and ever-increasing inflation