After the 2008 financial crash – a crisis chiefly brought about by private, not public, debt – governments saved the capitalist system from breakdown. Not only did they pump money into the financial system: they took over private assets. A few months after Lehman Brothers collapsed, the US government was in charge of General Motors and Chrysler, the British government was running high street banks and, across the OECD, governments had committed the equivalent of 2.5 per cent of GDP to rescuing the system. And yet, even though the crisis was caused by a combination of high private debt and
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