Capitalism 1.0's Dirty Little Secret

The Financial Times FT.com writes:

Capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz, RollingStone.com

The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all.

For much more detail and salient analysis, please read, repost, retweet, resend, and repeat P2P Foundation's Michel Bauwens's Updating our insights on the deepening meltdown. SOURCE: @stuarthenshall.