I thoroughly recommend Ann Pettifor's prescient _The Coming First World Debt Crisis (Palgrave 2007)_ for readers interested in understanding how and why the world is facing, and actually experiencing, financial crises as a result of global economic liberalisation. The book is particularly good on explaining the implications of unaccountable and unelected financial elites being given the power to create money as neo-liberal governments, from the 1970s to the present-day, chose to serve capital rather than society.

Pettifor describes how the money private banks create is based on something quite ephemeral- namely confidence and trust- or, as John Maynard Keynes put it, 'immaterial devices of the mind'. According to the Guardian's lead article concerning the UK economy on May 5th, this confidence is now 'evaporating' as 'falling house prices and consumer spending combine to deepen gloom'.

Pettifor is also good on showing how greedy and unrestrained bankers, investors and venture capitalists have used their power to extract resources from the world's poorest nations, enforcing punitive measures to ensure their debt's are repaid- with crippling rates of interest. The US economy is thus kept afloat on a rising sea of debt, dependent on the consumption of domestic 'debtor-spenders' and the loans of Japan, China and several low-income countries.

Rather than quoting more from her book, I thought I'd reproduce an anonymous poem she uses to illustrate how 'thoughtful committed citizens' should reclaim the economic powers that have been stolen from them, so that their societies can produce independent and autonomous policies and create a world of 'balance, stability, justice, equity and peace'.

The Goose and the Common

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.