Governments attempt to regulate and stabilize crises while doing everything possible to stimulate economic growth. Growth based on real, concrete value can fundamentally only be achieved by constantly increasing the rate of exploitation (the extraction of surplus value from the working class). The global “structural adjustment” measures they’re currently imposing are attempts to shift back into more industrial production, which produces the real, concrete value on which their entire economy ultimately rests.

But the crisis of faith in the financial sector is also impacting industry, because the two forms of capital have become so intertwined. Industry has come to depend on credit at every step: to capitalize itself, to operate, and to facilitate the consumption of goods (plus they’ve become dependent on the inflation of the speculative value of their companies – their stock price). Cycles are becoming more volatile: credit dries up, then pressure builds until it must be released again into the economy, but these measures must be ever more extreme (such as central banks dropping interest rates to near 0%), which undermine the system overall even more.