Crisis opening in 2007

The world economy since 2008

Since the immediate recovery from the great 2008-9 economic crisis, world economic growth has been slow and troubled. Major areas have slipped back into recession. Now a “third leg” of the crisis, or even a new crash, are possibilities for 2016. Martin Thomas surveys the path, the causes and the sequels of the crisis. The story started in finance. In June 2005 mortgage interest rates in the USA started rising sharply. They levelled off and declined after July 2006, but in the meantime house prices had reversed their giddy rise of previous years. House prices would continue to fall until...

The hegemony of neoliberalism

Friedrich Hayek Review of Philip Mirowski: Never let a serious crisis go to waste: how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown (Verso, 2013) Philip Mirowski addresses the left, very broadly defined — “people who have taken it as a fundamental premise that current market structures can and should be subordinate to political projects for human improvement” — but with “a simple message: Know Your Enemy before you start daydreaming of a better world”. He dismisses most already-circulating “better world” schemes as helpless against the dominance of neoliberalism. He quotes Paul Krugman — “I...

A workers’ government will seize the banks

It wasn’t the stars, or geology. It wasn’t ocean currents, or the weather. The world economy was brought crashing down in 2008 by the particular way we have allowed it to be organised. It was brought down by being organised around the priority of maximum competitive greed and gain of a small exploiting minority. From the early 1980s to 2008, world capitalism became more and more governed by the drive for quick, fluid gains, measured and coordinated through an increasingly complex and fast-flowing system of world financial markets. Ever more elaborate forms of credit were packaged and traded...

The hegemony of neoliberalism

Review of Philip Mirowski: Never let a serious crisis go to waste: how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown (Verso, 2013)


Philip Mirowski addresses the left, very broadly defined - "people who have taken it as a fundamental premise that current market structures can and should be...

Finance and the "other exploitation"

Review of Costas Lapavitsas: Profiting without producing, Verso 2013


Capitalist exploitation is not just by the boss extracting from the worker, in return for a meagre more-or-less “living wage”, an expansible value-added which may be something like three times what’s paid out in wages.

It also...

Osborne plans Lloyds and RBS sale

The merry-go-round of high finance stalled in 2007-8, throwing off and injuring millions of people. Chancellor George Osborne is anxious to start it up again, and to stage some privatisations in the run-up to the 2015 general election as distraction from the economic gloom. In 2008 governments across the world, including the most conservative and neo-liberal of them, stepped in to nationalise and bail out banks and financial institutions, and thus to steady the merry-go-round. Then, they talked of neo-liberalism being discredited, and of a new era of social regulation. Once the financiers...

RBS: don't privatise! Expropriate!

"The whole idea of a bank that is 82% owned by the taxpayer but run at arm's length from government is a nonsense...", says Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England. King's answer is that the 82%-owned Royal Bank of Scotland should be broken up. The profit-making bits of it would be privatised, and the loss-making bits retained by the government and run down. The Government is reluctant because doing that would mean open and definitively registering the losses the Government has made on the RBS shares it bought in the crisis of 2008. The operation was always more like "compensation without...

Expropriate the banks!

Fiddling around with ring-fences isn't enough. To organise investment for social benefit; to redress inequality; to give any reforming government the means it needs to fend off the pressure of global financial markets - there is no alternative but to expropriate the banks and high finance. They should be converted into a public banking, mortgage, and pension service, under public ownership and democratic and workers' control. The last five or six years have indicted the banks. Even the conservative Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf admits, though without drawing full conclusions, that:...

Take over the banks!

Five years ago, the demand for the public ownership of the banks was the preserve of a small minority of socialists. Today it follows logically from the exposed venality of the banking system. There have now been three waves of banking failure in the recent past. Socialists should use these events to argue relentlessly for state ownership and democratic control of the banking system. First the advent of neoliberalism from the 1970s was premised on the renewed role of finance capital. Finance capital became in Lenin’s words “the typical ruler of the world”. It was “a power that is peculiarly...

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