Steering out of crisis

The global financial and economic crisis is of such magnitude that 2008 will probably be looked back upon as a turning point equivalent to 1945, 1971 and 1989. The silver lining is that the crisis has discredited many established ideas about how societies should run their economies, and the impact of this discrediting will last well beyond the recovery. The crisis provides opportunities for advancing a social democratic vision of a moral society, with more of a balance between economic democracy and political democracy, especially in finance; one in which states regain confidence to surveil markets, as in the Keynesian era. A three-stage programme to steer out of the crisis towards something better and very different from what has been followed under neoliberalism is set out. The first deals with the immediate crisis. The second with the restructuring of finance. The third – to which virtually no attention has yet been given – deals with respecialising western economies. Getting far with most of the items would require a step-up in multilateral cooperation.