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[...] Buying Time treats state debt as a phenomenon of political economy: not merely one of democracy but also one of capitalism. Capitalism is about the expansion of expandable capital in the form of private property; this entails the danger of a withdrawal of cooperation by those who are needed…

Instead of reifying this process as an expression of eternal standard-economic laws, I treat it as the outcome of distributional conflict between classes.

[...] three processes running in parallel and mutually interlocked (a ‘triple helix’, if you like): the sequence of economic crises of inflation, public debt and private debt (today followed by dramatically expanding balance sheets of central banks, and a corresponding expansion of the money supply…

In Buying Time, I treat the global financial and fiscal crisis of 2008 not as a freestanding individual event, but as a part of, and tentatively also a stage in, a historical sequence. I distinguish three phases: the inflation of the 1970s, the beginning of public indebtedness in the following de…