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 decade, and the increasing debt of both private households and businesses, in both the financial and the industrial sector, since the mid-1990s. Common to these three phases is that each of them ended in a crisis whose solution was at the same time the starting point of a new crisis. In the early 1980s, when the central bank of the United States ended inflation worldwide by a sharp rise in interest rates, public debt rose, more or less as a balance to this; and when this was redressed in a first wave of consolidation in the mid-1990s, private household debt rose, like a system of communicating vessels, and the financial sector expanded with unprecedented dynamism, until it had to be rescued by states in 2008 at the expense of their citizens.