By Ann Pettifor, Open Democracy, 15th August, 2007

A single day, 9 August 2007, will go down in history as “debtonation day” – the beginning of the end of the deregulation and privatisation of finance that marks the era of globalisation.

It is a moment that I (alongside many others) had long predicted, most notably in an article for openDemocracy written in 2003 (see “The coming first world debt crisis” [1 September 2003], and my book of the same title [Palgrave, 2006]). The problem, as with Cassandras in other areas of life, was to gauge the precise timing of the global financial crisis that we knew was approaching.

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