The future of money: from financial crisis to public resource / Mary Mellor [review]

This is a quite excellent book, elegantly and cogently written, accessible to a broad audience of academic and non-academic readers and driven by a passionate intelligence which diagnoses ruthlessly and prescribes persuasively. It is, firstly, a book which is quite clearly not just about money but about the evolution of a global political economy which was not simply captured by finance capitalism but in which ‘monetary accumulation’ (in Altvater’s sense) became the primary driver of economic activity in the major economies of the world and, as such, generated the worst economic crisis for at least eighty years; since the crisis is by no means played out, it is distinctly possible that the ‘credit crunch’ could yet turn out to be the greatest crisis in the history of capitalism.