Professor Terrence McDonough:

Once the economic crisis hit, the question arose of who was going to pay the piper. The decision was made that bondholders were not going to pay and that governments would pay. Ultimately, the taxpayers paid and, as the Deputy pointed out, the majority of taxpayers are ordinary working men and women. The decision on who was going to pay came down on one side of the question or the other.

In regard to the dominance of financial markets, it is true that if one has a capitalist economy one has to start with money. Capitalist profit making starts and ends with money. One starts with a certain amount of money and ends up with more money. The real question is where that additional money comes from. Financial institutions provide the starting money. The problem arises when the financial sector of the economy becomes so large that it interferes with the provision of resources for the real economy. I would not characterise it as a dictatorship of the financial sector. If we were to go back to the last financially dominated post-Second World War social order, we would find that different elite interests exercised influence in the political arena.