The Global Financial Crisis: System Failure, Great Power Rivalry and Prospects for Structural Change

Western leaders and orthodox analyses portray the global financial crisis as being the result of exceptional 'greed' and excessive 'risk-taking' by irresponsible capitalists in the United States of America, the world's leading capitalist economy. The paper challenges this view by utilising a class method of analysis and political economy approach. We argue the crisis derives from the international capitalist system and from contradictions in the processes of capital accumulation and class conflict globally. This paper examines the role of U.S. led finance in shaping global structures of production based on the exploitation of wage-labour for profit. The crisis has enormous implications for the U.S. as a global power, not only for the stability of the international system, but for power shifts and rivalries as well as militancy and armed groups.