Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reans, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political

topics and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacobin, and

I'll be presenting the show. Many people have prematurely announced the death of the neoliberal

era in the past few decades, but global capitalism has experienced an unprecedented shock over

the past two years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This came on top of the problem

still left over from the crash of 2008 and the worsening climate crisis. Are we back to enter

a new economic era? Our guest today for a conversation about global capitalism after the pandemic

is Cedric DeRont. He's a French economist who teaches at the University of Geneva and the author

of Fictitious Capital, how finance is appropriating our future. In an article published last year,

you argued that 2021 will be remembered as the moment when global capitalism was reorganized

beyond neoliberalism, a tectonic shift that will irrevocably alter the terrain of political struggle.

What was the reasoning behind that argument? There are several factors that are playing in that

big shift in the regulation of capitalism. Of course, we are still in the sequence of the 2008

crisis, and in fact, the 2010s was a kind of a decade of hesitation, mismanagement, and poor

economic performance and social and political tensions all through the global north.

And for this reason, when the pandemic striked, it accelerated changes that were already in the

making. The most obvious element, probably, is the fact that after several decades where price

stability was the main concern of central bankers and policy makers, full employment came to the

fore as the priority of government. And in this sense, what occurred in the US with an explicitly

orientation in favor of high pressure economy was symptomatic of this change of the

configuration. So the question is why policy makers and government decided to shift away from this

centrality of low inflation, and in fact, which was a war on labor, which the main

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