Chinese savings gluts or northern financialisation? The ideological expediency of crisis narratives

Debates on the current financial crisis have been intense and ongoing, particularly among economists intent on squirming out from under the burden of responsibility with the convenient refrain that no one saw it coming (besides those whose work was being ignored by the mainstream). However, within this debate and despite its loosely substantiated evocations of Keynes, a broadly neoclassical consensus has reasserted itself, showing little or no variance from the mainstream views that brought us into crisis in the first place. As if a refrain from past crises, the narrative is focused on blaming the peripheries for crisis in the centre. The target is China, the most obvious surplus country within global economic imbalances (besides Germany, which somehow escapes similar castigation).

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