ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical perspective on the current global capitalist crisis from the standpoint of its dynamics in Latin America. Integration is accomplished via trade liberalization, removing barriers to the mobility of global capital, and abolishing barriers to foreign investment policies of financial and trade liberalization, a major plank in the program of neoliberal policies instituted under the Washington Consensus. Under the leadership of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, the US Treasury cooperated with the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan to substantially deregulate the US financial system. The global capitalist crisis, Petras argued, 'not only undermines even further what remains of the legitimacy of neoliberalism but challenges the entire capitalist class configuration'. The threat of economic collapse and the failure of the banks and the financial system to expand and sustain production would also revive the spectre of 'statist nationalism' as a prelude to a radically changed and unbalanced relation between the state and the market, favoring the former.
