The root cause of the financial crisis is not to be found in hedge funds
and greedy bankers, but rather in
a more fundamental social problem - huge inequalites in income distribution, argues Branko Milanovic.
What is striking about the
'contemporary West' is that its appetite for unbounded
consumption fully took off at almost the exact moment that its capacity
to pay for it began to diminish - underpinning a global financial crisis and the current transfer of power from West to East, argues Guy Rundle.
The financial crisis undermines all the ideological
assumptions that have supported political discourse over the past 30 years.
Now, with politicians standing 'naked', the crisis could result in profound and
diverse changes to our way of structuring the economy, argues Martin Jacques.
Deep structural causes based on free market principles and an addiction to economic growth underpin the global economic crisis. How do we explain these causes - and does the renewed fixation with the policies of John Maynard Keynes offer an adequate solution?
The Wall Street
meltdown is not only due to greed and to the lack of government
regulation of a hyperactive sector. This collapse stems ultimately from
the crisis of overproduction that has plagued global capitalism since
the mid-1970s - and the worst is not yet over, says Walden Bello.
The most fundamental flaw in the US financial market system is its inherent drive
towards excess, and the end result is
always systemic implosion.The costs are now coming headlong like a runaway freight train, writes Henry C K Liu.
The
financial meltdown in the United States is huge, but it isn't unique.
In
a nutshell, our modern economic system has become divorced from what an
"economy" is supposed to do in human terms, writes Joshua Holland.