Apocalyptic Capitalism

Capitalism in an Apocalyptic Mood

By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted February 25, 2008.

Yes, global capitalism may be resilient. But it looks like its options are increasingly limited.

Skyrocketing oil prices, a falling dollar, and collapsing financial markets are the key ingredients in an economic brew that could end up in more than just an ordinary recession. The falling dollar and rising oil prices have been rattling the global economy for sometime. But it is the dramatic implosion of financial markets that is driving the financial elite to panic.

And panic there is. Even as it characterized Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's deep cuts amounting to a 1.25 points off the prime rate in late January as a sign of panic, the Economist admitted that "there is no doubt that this is a frightening moment." The losses stemming from bad securities tied up with defaulted mortgage loans by "subprime" borrowers are now estimated to be in the range of about $400 billion. But as the Financial Times warned, "the big question is what else is out there" at a time that the global financial system "is wide open to a catastrophic failure." In the last few weeks, for instance, several Swiss, Japanese, and Korean banks have owned up to billions of dollars in subprime-related losses. The globalization of finance was, from the beginning, the cutting edge of the globalization process, and it was always an illusion to think that the subprime crisis could be confined to U.S. financial institutions, as some analysts had thought.

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