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As part of the exchange on the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the left, Costas Lapavitsas provides an extensive response to Neil Davidson's and Andy Storey's contributions.

The Greek turmoil commenced as a balance of payments, or "sudden stop," crisis induced by large current account and primary government deficits. It became an economic and social disturbance of historic proportions. Its proximate cause was loss of competitiveness within the Eurozone due in large part to domestic German wage policies. The bailout policies, imposed by the lenders primarily for reasons of Eurozone stability and adopted by Greece, have had disastrous effects on both economy and society. The "historical bloc" that dominates Greek society willingly submitted to the bailout strategy, losing sovereignty, for reasons including fear and identity. JEL Classification: E66, F00, F02, F34

Costas Lapavitsas charts the growth of the 'unstable, unequal and slow‐growing' system of financialised capitalism that has taken root in mature economies over the past 40 years, and outlines initial steps to disentangling businesses, services, workers and households from its grasp.

Costas Lapavitsas considers the political economy of bloated finance and makes a case for establishing democratically‐run public banks, which, he asserts, could strengthen the social and the collective in modern economies

AbstractThe current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism.