Speculation and Growth under Contemporary Capitalism

A pervasive view of the current financial crisis of capitalism holds that it is essentially an aberration. Some attribute this aberration to specific mistakes committed in the past, for instance by Alan Greenspan with regard to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. Some, including many belonging to the first category, hold the lack of adequate regulatory mechanism as being responsible for this aberration. Paul Krugman, the current year’s Nobel laureate, blames it on insufficient “oversight” of the financial system. And even Joseph Stiglitz the well-known radical economist and Nobel laureate, characterizes it as a “system failure”, a term that more or less sums up this entire range of explanations, in so far as it makes the crisis a phenomenon that in principle could have been avoided with impunity.