The Unraveling of the Empire of Finance Capital

We are living through an acute and irreversible stage of the systemic decline of finance capital. Not coincidentally, it is a time when Wall Street’s political supremacy in the U.S. is all but complete, having wholly captured or neutralized both political parties. This period is increasingly characterized by overlapping, cascading crises. Although the exact point in time that we entered this tumultuous juncture in history, under the firm hegemony of Wall Street, is subject to debate, we are clearly there.

The crises of bursting dot.com, stock and housing bubbles have been superseded by finance capital’s inability to reflate any of the old domestic bubbles, despite the transfer to Wall Street of $12-14 trillion through its synchronized servants in the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve. While unreconstructed "left" Obamites moan that the object of their hopes has failed to apply enough "stimulus" lubricant to get the machinery rolling, the real story – the one historians will tell – is that an administration whose economic policies were minted by Wall Street cannot halt the unraveling of the finance capitalist system.

The reason is simple: Wall Street’s hegemony, its unfettered freedom to act out its imperatives, inevitably spawns recurring – and ever deeper – crises. The more politically dominant finance capital grows, the deeper and more frequent the crises.

The crisis is now general, meaning the machine cannot be repaired. If $14 trillion – roughly the size of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product – couldn’t fix finance capital, nothing can. Indeed, it appears the greatest transfer of wealth in history, purportedly designed to flood the United States with loaned money, is instead being exported, causing such horrendous destruction to the world economic order that nations are joining to fence out the piranha-like U.S. dollar, before it destroys human society.'

Read more...