The Great Crash*

Supra-National Money and the Euro Crisis: Lessons from Karl Polanyi

“…This money was not a means of exchange, it was a means of payment; it was not a commodity, it was purchasing power; far from having utility itself, it was merely a counter embodying a quantified claim to things that might be purchased. (Polanyi, 1944\1957, p. 196) It is these pillars of the so-called self-regulated market economy, which collapsed in the 1930s with the proximate cause being the bursting of the credit bubble, but with the deeper roots being found in the post-First World War international imbalances, together with the growing income inequalities in favour of rentier income of the previous era, and which eventually brought down haute finance, now dominated by Wall Street bankers, as recounted, among others, by Galbraith (1961). These developments, together with the international deflationary process following the collapse of Wall Street, as previously mentioned, quickly brought down the gold standard and, with it, the whole idea of founding the monetary system on the basis of the notion of commodity money, whose supposed purpose was to facilitate exchange.…”

The Triple Crisis of Western Capitalism

“…37 What is even more telling is that the vast majority of the political parties represented in the German Bundestag were prepared to pass the Lisbon Treaty without any 'caveat'. That it did not pass without democratic checks is due to the actions of a tiny minority of delegates who challenged the treaty in the Constitutional Court.…”

“…36 In 1926 the rampant real estate speculation in Florida that had begun around 1920 collapsed. 37 However, these developments were ignored by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Instead, securities just took the opposite, upward direction.…”

From Bretton Woods to the Global Financial Crisis: Popular Politics, Paradigmatic Debates, and the Construction of Crises

“…Likewise, Galbraith (1954) casts financial bubbles as self-reinforcing speculative manias that threatened market collapse. Yet, despite its early prominence, such egalitarianism has lost favor in recent decades.…”