Neil Smith
CUNY

 The global financial meltdown of September 2008 has been broadly predictable since the onset of the so-called subprime mortgage crisis in the United States a year earlier.  In reality, of course, it had been on the cards a lot longer.  Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism suggests that as money flees the falling rate of profit in the productive sector – steel, transport, construction, producer services, and other commodities – it seeks refuge in finance.  There, instead of making commodities (material or otherwise), even larger profits (“interest” actually) can be made simply by passing money from hand to hand at a good percentage, packaging other people’s money, and broadly (and wildly) gambling on the future of just about anything.  (My personal favorite is environmental derivatives, which quite literally pay for non-production; with “woodpecker futures,” for example, a certain international paper company “sells” its non clear cutting of forests on grounds of environmental protection – US$250,000 per saved woodpecker).  In such a situation, interest and rents are made regardless of what might actually undergird any investment.  Until someone asks what the myriad bits of paper derivatives actually give them rights to, they pass at face value.