This paper addresses the way the American “Wall Street Capitalism” embodies the irresponsible disconnect between action and results that markets (unlike governments) are supposed to prevent. The mother of all disconnects is the absentee-owned joint stock corporation publicly traded on the stock market. Yet this type of institutionally irresponsible system is seen in much of the world as “The Model”–the most “advanced” form of a private property market economy. Other forms of a more responsible market economy are seen as backward, retrograde, and atavistic forms that have not yet achieved the “advanced” form of Wall Street Capitalism.
The Great Recession of 2008 offers another opportunity to rethink the rather blind idolatry of Wall Street Capitalism that prevades not only the popular consciousness but goes deep into the academic disciplines of economics and finance.
This paper is in the Slovene journal Theory and Practice that dates back to 1964.
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