Radical Economics: Escaping Credit Serfdom
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2011
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The role of credit in the build up to the global financial crisis is well known - but what has our reliance on credit been doing to the wider economy and to human behaviour?
The expansion of consumer credit has been encouraged by social democratic as well as centre right governments. But some on the left believe that the growth of the financial sector has given birth to a novel form of capitalism and with that a new kind of worker exploitation.
Paul Mason meets the economists of "financialisation" who believe that credit has become the defining relationship between workers and employers, citizens and public services.
Paul Mason is Economics Editor of Newsnight and the author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed.
Transcript
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| 0:44.4 | forward slash podcasts. In this week's analysis Paul Mason asks if our |
| 0:49.2 | reliance on credit is creating a new form of capitalism. |
| 0:55.0 | I'm in a pub at the bar and all around me people are doing something that 30 years ago would have seemed extraordinary. |
| 1:05.6 | Paying for drinks with credit cards. |
| 1:08.8 | Credit, instead of being something we rely on sparingly for the big things in life has become part of the |
| 1:15.0 | fabric of life and some economists think this signals a major change in the economics |
| 1:29.6 | economics editor of BBC News Night and in this program I'll be exploring an idea that's become |
| 1:34.3 | central to the left's response to the banking crisis. It's called financialization. |
| 1:39.9 | At its heart is the proposition that companies, workers, consumers and even banks themselves |
| 1:46.1 | have been sucked into a kind of credit serfdom. |
| 1:49.1 | So where did it all begin? |
| 1:50.9 | Well the important thing of course is to make sure that the person who has a |
| 1:55.6 | card is somebody who is credit worthy. That's the boss of American Express in 1963, trying |
| 2:02.2 | to explain a brand new thing called a credit card to a man from the BBC. |
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