{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":279,"pdf_page":279,"physical_index":279,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0f30fb0a4777aea65a960a4bb43176db784105c880cc928ebf5ef502d31f56b5"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Meanwhile general levels of indebtedness tended to grow for governments, non-financial corporations and consumers alike, as bank lending rose much more rapidly in most parts of the world economy than did productive output. It doubled in the US and trebled in Japan in the 1980s; the US boom of the mid-90s was accompanied by an extraordinarily high level of borrowing by firms and consumers; the housing and property booms of the mid-2000s were similarly sustained by massive borrowing in the US, Britain, Spain and Ireland.\n\nThe impact of finance on the less industrialised countries was already very marked by the 1980s. The loans of the late 1970s had created a never ending dependence on further borrowing from financial institutions in order to keep servicing existing debt. By 2003 the total external debt of sub-Saharan Africa stood at \\$213.4 billion, that of Latin America and the Caribbean at \\$779 .6 billion, and of the South as a whole at \\$2,500 billion.10\n\nOverall the role played by finance within the system was much greater than in either the depression years of the 1 930s or the boom years of the early post-war decades. In those decades the banks had certainly not played the central role Hilferding had ascribed to them at the beginning of the century with his concept of \"finance capitalism\" (see Chapter Four). In the US the big industrial corporations relied on their own internally generated revenues for investment funds; in Japan and Germany the banks played a greater part, but it was one of aiding the expansion of favoured sections of industrial capital. It was with the ending of the long boom that finance seemed to break the bonds that had bound and subordinated it to industrial capital. By the 1980s funds worth billions-and later hundreds of billions-of dollars were moving into and out of economic sectors and particular countries, cherry picking the most profitable outlets for investment before moving on elsewhere, often leaving economic devastation in their wake.\n\nFinance began to impact directly on the lives of the world's workers in a way in which it had not previously. Most people until the 1980s were paid wages in cash every week; now the norm was payment into bank accounts. The spread of home purchase in countries like Britain or the US from a third to two thirds of households provided a new destination for lending-and the diversion of part of wages and salaries into interest repayments. Insurance and private pension schemes likewise spread the tentacles of finance into wider sections of the population than ever before. Credit in the form of mortgages and hire purchase agreement was already important in the 1930s, but it was only in the 1980s that indebtedness began to become central in maintaining people's regular living standards. For the majority of workers in the US or Britain, the mortgage and the credit card became part of everyday life, while governments almost everywhere preached the virtues of depositing regular savings into financial institutions as the way for the workers and middle classes to provide themselves with pensions in their old age. As Robin Blackburn has shown, pension contributions fed into the mushrooming expansion of a financial system over which the contributors had no control.11\n\nFinancialisation and the Bubbles That Burst\n\n279","previous_page":278,"next_page":280}