ABSTRACT
It is autumn 2011; three years after the dramatic collapse of one of the iconic investment banks that epitomized an all-conquering financial capitalism, Lehman Brothers. By now we know that the case of Lehman Brothers was just the tip of an iceberg, even if no other big banks have been allowed to fail outright. Moreover, the fallout from the financial crisis and the associated over-indebtedness of consumers, businesses and governments, and the retrenchment of spending that is indispensable if that debt burden is to be reduced, have been translated into an ongoing economic depression from which few corners of the world have been spared and that has struck particularly violently in those advanced countries that were the pin-ups of the rampaging financial capitalism of the 1990s: the USA, Britain and Ireland, as well as in certain countries whose governments had persistently failed to master spiralling public sector debt (Greece, Portugal).1
