Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Spain, USA

But the easy money currently provided by central banks to restore growth – easy for capital but not, of course, for labour – further adds to inequality, by blowing up the financial sector and inviting speculative rather than productive investment. Redistribu­tion to the top thus becomes oligarchic: rather than serving a collective interest in economic progress, as promised by neoclassical economics, it turns into extraction of resources from increasingly impoverished, declining societies. Countries that come to mind here are Russia and Ukraine, but also Greece and Spain, and increasingly the United States.

—Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?, (London: Verso, 2016), 68. Text published in New Left Review, vol. 87, May/June 2014.

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