“Capitalism was bailed out at a global cost of some $20tn. But this didn’t resolve the crisis – it shifted it from the private sector to the public sector, saving the investment banks from outright collapse at the expense of the public treasury, leading the sovereign debt crises we’ve seen. Now, having rallied behind bail-outs, global ruling classes are increasingly shifting behind austerity and structural adjustment after the fashion of that imposed on the ‘global south’ in recent decades. But that in turn will merely shift the crisis on to a new plane, because the private sector is not well-placed to make up for the sudden contraction in demand that is being imposed. There’s nowhere to pick up the slack,” writes Richard Seymour.
His full blog article, which contains a bunch of links to relevant news articles and has a European slant but is still definitely worth reading by people in North America, can be read here.