Le Monde au 21ème siècle

"This is the seventh and most accessible volume of Fossaert’s eight-volume La Société (1977-1996). A banker, economist, sociologist and historian, Fossaert is a one-man encyclopedia of coherent thought in the global world. At 82, he still writes profusely, and the current issue of my Beirut university journal, Travaux et Jours, carries what I believe is the best study of the current crisis, which he wrote for the occasion, together with an introduction by me on Fossaert’s system. Having long exposed fiscal flaws and the mismanagement of financial fluxes by what he calls ‘the financial herd’, his main explanation of the current crisis is that there is a serious readjustment of the economic construct in the world where the US is no longer the unrivalled economic leader. It was inevitable that there would be a financial crisis as the US readjusts to this new position where it is no longer the main producer of goods. It is basic Marxist theory in the more intelligent sense, in that everything is driven by what you produce and what you market, the famous ‘Mode of Production’ (MP). With the rise of the EU, China and India each eating up on the traditional share of the US economy, that economy has to adjust downwards and this is what we are seeing as a deep crisis of the US MP. For a long time, banks relied on new money to finance old money; it could only break down as the pyramid crashed. Fossaert has talked about financial hurt for a long time, the deregulation of banks being a major threat to their very stability, but the bottom line is that the economic structure of the world has changed, structurally, fundamentally. The crisis is inevitable when the leader which controls the financial structure is in disarray because its MP has fallen behind. Everyone will suffer. Fossaert doesn’t see it as a benign crisis, but as a structural crisis."