Now Gordon Brown has handed over the reins as Chancellor to
Alistair Darling it transpires that for the past ten years Gordon has been
displaying the fiscal prudence of a drunken sailor. The British government has
the biggest hole in their finances in Europe, a whopping £43bn – and it could
get up to £50bn. Where has it all gone?

This article was originally written on the occasion of the seventieth
anniversary of the 1929 Wall
Street Crash. It was not intended purely as a
commemorative or historical piece. It was written because, to Marxists, all the
signs were then apparent that another stock price ‘correction’ was in
preparation.

Republication of the article is timely. In 2007 the sub-prime mortgage bubble
finally burst. The financial crisis has already had a knock-on effect on the
banks through the credit crunch. The capitalist world stands on the threshold
of recession.

Everywhere the cry is: credit crunch!  You can smell the sweat on the brows of
bankers as their necks are squeezed by the tightening credit noose.  In all the offices of the great investment
banks of Wall Street, the City of London and gnomes of Zurich, you can hear the
hissing sound of the global financial bubble bursting and deflating.