That Cityphobia post is great, with an uncompromising conclusion: 'what must die is the mystical belief in the power of the markets that has dominated political and economic discourse in most of the Western world for the last several decades ... Unfortunately, we have no current model of where to go from here, apart from a more heavily regulated form of growth-based liberal capitalism.'

As a starting point for seriously thinking through alternatives, I'd like to suggest that you check out 'The Global Political Economy of Israel' by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimson Bichler. They have a website at
http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/

I'm right now only halfway through the book - which was published in 2002 - but before I finished the introduction I realised it was going to be something rare and important.

Although the pretext is a historical analysis of the political economy of Israel, the book effectively presents a new theory of capital. But, unlike Soros's writing, for example, this is an intensely numerate and literate argument backed up to the hilt with solid analysis and in-depth number-crunching.

In a nutshell, Shimson and Bichler propose that capital can't be untied from politics, that 'to study accumulation is to study the commodification of power'. Of course, we all somehow know that to be true, but they present the mechanisms in concrete detail. Particularly, they have an explanation of the real (as opposed to the popular theoretical but broken) relationship between liquidity and inflation that seems not only to work but have some predictive power.

and anyhow, thanks for the links, and for a great blog! I might only sign in and post once in a blue moon but I read every week and always find something worthwhile.