ABSTRACT
As I was writing this book in 2008 during particularly virulent moments of the economic crisis, I could not but reflect on the implications for the arguments put forth by Marx and Hayek. Marx wrote extensively about money, credit and economic crises
which were already a feature of capitalism in northern Europe even before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England. For instance, the bursting of the tulip bulb bubble in 1637, of which historian Patrick Dillon wrote:
The subject of the speculative bubble was not, in fact, flowers themselves, but value in the abstract (i.e. money). The future could be milked for wealth, the Dutch then discovered, and from it wealth could be induced to pour at a speed unimaginable to patient merchants or long-suffering farmers [and the reverse when the bubble burst].1
