Things Fall Apart: From the Crash of 2008 to the Great Slump - Hardcover

Vasudevan, Ramaa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8132110986 ISBN 13: 9788132110989

Publisher: SAGE, 2013

Synopsis

The crash of 2008, when financial markets came to a standstill, has had profound effects that are still being felt globally. Five years after those dramatic events, countries such as Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Cyprus are still reeling from the aftereffects of the financial crash, while the USA and the UK continue to be in the grip of a long slump.

The crash exposed criminal swindles and the more rampant risky practices that have become the norm with the major banks. It has also revealed the failure of policy to curb unbridled risk taking with other people’s money and the failure of policy-makers and economists to see the signs of the inevitable collapse.

This book goes further to penetrate the fog of finance and explore the structure and balance of class forces that led to the crisis and its unfolding consequences. The author places the crisis in both historical and global perspectives through comparisons with the Great Depression and the focus on elaborating the role of the hegemony of the dollar over the international financial system. She argues that the crisis is as much a crisis of the neoliberal model of accumulation that finance launched as it is of the mechanisms by which dollar hegemony was preserved.

This book provides an accessible point of entry to the literature on the crisis and its aftermath. It lays out a rich empirically grounded analysis of both the structural causes and the continuing repercussions of the crash of financial markets in 2008.

About this title

About the Author

Ramaa Vasudevan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, Colorado State University. She earlier held a vis­iting position at Barnard College, Columbia University. Before embarking on a PhD on Trade Finance and Uneven Development at the New School of Social Research, she also taught for many years at PGDAV College at Delhi University.

While her earlier research in India studied the transformation of labor markets in the colonial agrarian economy (a case study of two districts in Eastern UP), she is now focused on exploring the political economy of money and finance. She has written numer­ous articles in various journals including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Review of Radical Political Economics, Monthly Review, and Economic and Political Weekly and has contributed chapters in Global Economic and Financial Crisis: Essays from Economic and Political Weekly and Globalization and Develop­ment: A Handbook of New Perspectives.

From the Back Cover

Delves further into the unfolding consequences of the crisis that continue even today. This title argues that the seeds of the present crisis were sown as capitalism responded to the stagflationary crisis of the seventies. It provides a historical as well as a global perspective of the crash by comparing it with the Great Depression of 1930s.

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8132110986
• ISBN 13: 9788132110989
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244