[...] financial crises occur when the gap between fictitious capital and the real value it claims to represent becomes too great. The culture of belief and credulity that underscores the financial sector and the proliferation of fictitious capital stutters or grinds to a sickening halt [...] Financiers stop returning one another’s calls and cease to accept one another’s metaphors for wealth. There is a necessary contraction that brings the volume of fictitious capital into greater proximity to the volume of actually existing labour power. Some financiers’ claims to that labour power must be sacrificed, or other social resources must be privatized or liquidated to fill the shortfall, which is precisely what is happening in our current age of austerity. [...]