“It’s no accident that the size of the financial sector today as a percentage of GDP is at levels equaled only on the eve of the Great Depression. Like the decade leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, the Roaring Twenties were marked by not only financial boom and technological wonder, but also massive income inequality. Worker wages stagnated and those of the upper classes grew, bolstered in large part by stock prices. Another similarity was a rise in debt, both public and private, which was used to mask the declining spending power of the lower and middle classes and its dampening effect on GDP growth."
Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers
Paul Jay interviews Rana Foroohar on the global economy, debt, and financial crises.
Rana Foroohar is an associate editor and global business columnist for The Financial Times. She’s also CNN’s global economic analyst and she joins us in the studio.
Here is
a link to the original interview and transcript, as well as five additional interview segments.
The Western establishment is caught in a credibility trap. And this intransigence to change and genuine reform is going to lead to severe economic and civil dislocations before it is resolved.
There will be blood.
And no one could have seen it coming— because they have tightly shut their eyes to it, and deafened their hearing with slogans and catch phrases fed to them by think tanks and the mainstream media.
