Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life.

Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities.

The accumulation of capital involves the expansion of value over time.

The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital.

Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class.

If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?

Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.