A Turning Point or Business as Usual?
A Turning Point or Business as Usual?
This chapter documents the culture of extreme risk-taking that became business as usual in this era of “financialization.” It suggests that the crisis of 2008 was a more or less conventional capitalist crisis and that it can potentially be met by a more or less conventional, largely Keynesian government response. But it was also a panic, a product of social psychology, and the chapter closes by asking what happens when such a panic coincides with deeper capitalist crises and long-term technological cycles. We face a choice of possible futures: serious reforms (which seem increasingly unlikely as anxiety about a deep depression subsides), muddling through and leaving in place the sources of future crises (most likely), and an even greater crisis produced not by economic failure but by political madness or war.
Keywords: risk-taking, financialization, 2008 crisis, capitalist crisis, social psychology
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