ABSTRACT
This question of the origin of financial crises is intimately related to the question of globalisation, and whether or not the trends of the last thirty years have substantially altered the relationship between the state and the economy at regional, national and global levels. In the triumphalist era of American resurgence in the 1990s, the superiority of the Anglo-American model of capitalism was once more proclaimed and the space for alternative forms of capitalism, let alone alternatives to capitalism, was declared vacant. Some of the more enthusiastic proponents of globalisation rushed, in the 1990s, to proclaim that the era of the nation-state was over, and predicted that nation-states would wither away, to be replaced by new non-political forms of economic interdependence (Ohmae 1996). Without the interference of national governments the global economy would become a smoothly self-regulating spontaneous order, and financial crises and economic recessions would become a thing of the past, because frictions, rigidities and political interventions, which caused them would be swept away. If financial crises continued to occur, no political response would be necessary; they would be as natural as tropical storms, and should just be left to burn themselves out.
