2008 Financial Crisis

The 2008 financial crisis is the most totemic political-economic event in living memory. What were the causes of the crash? How does it relate to previous crises in capitalism, like 1970s stagflation? Many believed that 2008 signalled the end of neoliberalism. How did neoliberalism endure in its immediate aftermath? Does China's alternative economic model represent a serious challenge to neoliberalism almost two-decades on? How should we make sense of the post-2008 multipolarity in global politics?

Scott Lavery is Lecturer in Political and International Studies at University of Glasgow. His first book is British Capitalism After the Crisis (Springer, 2019). He joins Chris Saltmarsh and Dillon Wamsley to discuss the short and long-term causes of the 2008 financial crisis, what the crisis has meant for neoliberalism, the fundamental conditions of British capitalism, and how we can use political economy to analyse contemporary crises.

Recommended reading:
1) Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism (Polity, 2011)
2) Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World (Penguin, 2018)
3) Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013) (chapter 12)

Works referenced in this episode:
1) Helen Thompson on inflationary pressure
2) Nicholas Crafts and Terence C. Mills on productivity slump