from Red Pepper.
The crisis of 2007-9 was a systemic upheaval rather than just the result of poor regulation, or of speculative excesses of finance. It was a crisis of financialised capitalism. Financialisation is a structural transformation of advanced capitalist economies, resulting in asymmetric growth of the circulation of money relative to production and allowing finance to penetrate even minor niches of social and personal life. Hence a systemic failure of private banking could become a global crisis.