Debt capitalism self-destructs

By Henry C K Liu

In a period of less than a year, what had been described by US authorities as a temporary financial problem related to the bursting the housing bubble has turned into a fully fledged crisis at the very core of free-market capitalism.

A handful of analysts have been warning for years that the wholesale deregulation of financial markets and the wrong-headed privatization of the public sector during the past two decades would threaten the viability of free-market capitalism. Yet ideological neoliberal fixation remain firmly imbedded in US ruling circles, fertilized by irresistible campaign contributions from profiteers on Wall Street, methodically purging regulatory agencies of all who tried to maintain a sense of financial reality.