We can think about the sub-prime crisis, and the mortgage backed securities that were at its core, as some of the fictitious commodities that Karl Polanyi was talking about. And we’ve only got to look at what’s happened since the crisis to see that that it can have damaging societal consequences and adverse social effects.
“And if we turn to the Eurozone crisis, I think there’s an even closer connection between what Polanyi had to say about the nineteenth century Gold Standard and how this spread of dis-embedded market forces had the effect of, as he put it, annihilating the human and natural substance of society. He saw how the Gold Standard spread across Europe, causing acute social dislocation and revealed what he called the congenital weakness of market society. Now if we look to the Eurozone area and substitute the Euro for the Gold Standard, and look to the southern periphery in countries like Greece, we can see very similar processes going on.”