... the last word being, What do we do about it? But if, like me, you're confused about what it is, here's video footage from a Socialist Project meeting last Monday. It featured Greg Albo and David McNally, both political economy experts, offering complementary takes on the financial crisis:



(I won't post footage of Jim Stanford, who spoke between them. Aside from a weak-kneed Keynesian call for more regulation, he didn't really add anything to the analysis.)



I won't try to summarize the presentations - I have to watch them again myself. But both made the crucial point that this is not about 'bad apples': greedy bankers and lax regulators. Capitalism isn't controlled by any one person or group. Its competitive logic means that the capitalist class has to create more and more liquidity, whether it's rational or not. Eventually the gap between the value that the real economy produces, and the value that the speculative economy gambles on being produced, gets too large. Then there's a crash.