Was the global financial crisis really a “debt crisis”?

This seminar draws on Kaletsky’s book Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis, published in 2010 by Bloomsbury. The book’s writing was primarily influenced by the subprime mortgage crises of 2007 to 2009; and draws upon the pattern or the fallibility of capitalism. In this book, Kaletsky suggests that capitalism is “not a static set of institutions but an evolutionary system that reinvents and reinvigorates itself through crisis”, and this seminar will extend the thesis of the book to the euro crisis and British “austerity” debate and ask “Was Global Financial Crisis (GFC) really a “debt crisis”?” and put the argument that excessive borrowing and lending did not cause the GFC or its European aftershocks—the root of the problem was politics, not monetary policy, ethics or regulation.