Tooning In: Now You, Too, Can Understand the Financial Crisis -- in Pictures

Tired of reading my endless nattering about the systemic problems of the banking system? Then check out this cool animated analysis of the financial crisis; give it 11 minutes, and it'll walk you through the disaster with little more than a whiteboard, the occasional Monopoly board and some (mild) scatological humor.

The video is produced by England's Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce based on a recent speech by social theorist and geographer David Harvey.

Harvey, a specialist on Marxist thought who teaches at the City University of New York, not surprisingly blames the financial crisis squarely on capitalism's "internal contradictions." You don't have to be a raving Bolshevik (not that there's anything wrong with that) to appreciate the cogency of his analysis:

We've been, since the 1970s, in a phase of what we call "wage repression" -- that wages have remained stagnant. The share of wages in national income right throughout the OECD countries has steadily fallen. It's even steadily fallen in China, of all places, so that there are less and less being paid out in wages.

Well, wages turn out to be also the money which buys goods. So if you diminish wages, then you've got a problem with where your demand is going to come from. And the answer was, well, get out your credit cards -- we'll give everybody credit cards. So we'll overcome, if you like, the problem with effective demand by actually bumping up the credit economy. And American households, British households, have all roughly tripled their debt over the last 20-30 years.

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