Costas Lapavitsas — Understanding and confronting financialisation

The crisis that shook global capitalism in 2007-9 is a crisis of financialisation. It resulted from a vast financial bubble in 2001-7 that matched the extraordinary rise and transformation of finance in the preceding period. The crisis was certainly not merely the result of monetary and credit policy, but reflected the profound structural financialisation of contemporary capitalism. For the same reason, the crisis has cast fresh light on a range of radical policies that are urgently required to confront and reverse financialisation: public ownership and control over financial institutions, public investment, preventing productive enterprises from playing games in financial markets, reducing the exposure of households to private finance for housing, health, education, pensions and so on. Measures of this type are intrinsically anticapitalist, opening new avenues for the communal and associational organisation of society. Reversing financialisation could open new paths toward socialism.

Prime — Policy Research in Macroeconomics
Understanding and confronting financialisation
Costas Lapavitsas | Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Currency is a public utility.