ABSTRACT
The global crisis has turned out not to be ‘capitalism’s 1989’ – Martin Wolf was right about that (Wolf, 2009) – but it does have many of the characteristics of a defining moment. If it isn’t the end of capitalism, it may still very well be the end of the capitalism that we have known over the past three decades. And the crisis may not signal the slide of the United States into peripheral insignificance, but it certainly represents a key moment in the transformation of the global order, which for twenty years was characterised by US unilateral supremacy propped up by the continued (if shaky) centrality of the US dollar in the world’s financial and trading systems. Likewise, the crisis may not spell the end of the Euro experiment, but as these pages are written in July 2011, the Eurozone is creaking under the impact of sovereign debt crises rolling over Europe one after the other.
