The Rise and Fall of the Finance-Driven Economy

Abstract

“Occupy Wall Street” does not quite seem credible as a revolution that can overthrow capitalism, at least not yet. However, the finance-driven economy that transformed America and the world between the early 1980s and the financial market meltdown appears irretrievably broken. The critical question for our economic and political future is whether or not the broken financial markets of today can be mended, by themselves or by the politicians. If they cannot be, we are likely to see a “world without finance” in our future with profound consequences for workers, savers, investors, and employers … in a word, all of us.

Hegel remarks somewhere “all great world-historic facts … appear twice”; he forgot to add the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)