Sublime

Third, this constant and pointless demand for financialization will create political and business opportunities to better facilitate it.

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows – one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report – and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’ In response to

Economics is broken. It has failed to predict, let alone prevent, financial crises that have shaken the foundations of our societies. Its outdated theories have permitted a world in which extreme poverty persists while the wealth of the super-rich grows year on year. And its blind spots have led to policies that are degrading the living world on a

At the end of the day, what matters is not what happens during the recurrent bubbles, but what comes next. The price to pay for widespread instability is that some investors regularly lose money because they didn’t pick the winner, whereas many employees eventually lose their jobs because they happened to work for the losers. In this context, the

We think we can take it as a given that there is another recession in front of the United States and/or Europe at some point. That is the natural order of things. But it would be better to have that inevitable recession as far into the future as possible, and preferably with a little inflationary cushion and some room for active policy responses. A

Financial history has not ended, any more than political history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the next financial crisis will not be like the last one. It will not be triggered by defaults in US subprime mortgages, nor transmitted round the world by under-capitalized banks. It will be different because no two financial crises are ever