At this site, we've been mulling over the idea of economic models since last February and pondering the possibile need for a new one here in the USA. I just found what could be a seminal article on this topic, "Too big to save: the end of financial capitalism," by Saskia Sassen, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, New York, and at the London School of Economics. It appeared last April at Opendemocracy.com. It begins as follows: The misnamed "Group of Twenty" (G20) meets in London on 2 April 2009 to discuss how to save the global financial system. It is too late. The evidence is in: we don't have the resources to save this system - even if we wanted to. It has become too big to save: the value of global financial assets is several times the size of global gross national product (GDP). The real challenge is not to save this system but to definancialise our economies, as a prelude to move beyond the current model of capitalism. Why should the value of financial assets stay at almost four times the overall GDP of the European Union, and even more of the United States. What do everyday citizens - or the planet - gain from such excess?Sassen has a strong term to describe the predatory practices of the existing model of capitalism:
A defining feature of the period that begins in the 1980s is the use of extremely complex instruments to engage in new forms of primitive accumulation, with taxpayers' money the last frontier for extraction.And here, says Sassen, is what primitive accumulation has been designed to do:
