Just over ten years since the start of the global financial crisis, many advanced capitalist societies are witnessing the rise of private debt to levels previously seen in 2008, and in some cases (most notably Australia, see Keen, 2017: 67) to levels higher than at any point during the crisis. This has led to a renewed sense of unease among key figures of the central banking community, as a new crisis, fuelled (like the previous one) by indebtedness and the threat of mass default, appears to be edging closer. In the summer of 2017, as unsecured consumer credit in the UK topped £200bn for the first time since 2008, Alex Brazier, the Bank of England's executive director for financial stability, warned the banking and finance sectors that ‘Lending standards can go from responsible to reckless very quickly. … Lenders have not entered, but they may be dicing with, the spiral of complacency’ (see Elliott, 2017). This was soon followed by a statement by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, which warned that consumer credit had risen just over 10 per cent in a year, with 8.3 million people in the UK classified as having ‘problem debts’ (Inman and Treanor, 2017). While this situation is nothing new, there are worrying times ahead as consumer credit provision is pushing its historical upper limits, and cheap lines of credit look set to end with likely rises in interest rates in the short to medium term. This situation presents a very real problem for the operation and stability of advanced capitalist societies across the globe for, given that the growth of consumer capitalism has only been possible through the mass provision of private and corporate credit from the 1980s onwards, it is unclear what will happen when further debt creation is no longer an option, assuming there are actual limits to this process.

There are two prominent responses to this situation in the post-crisis literature: one, building on the work of Hyman Minsky, is that crisis is endogenous to financialised capitalism, and that governments, in attending to the immediate pressures of a present crisis, have a tendency to introduce measures which stabilise the economy in the short term but which sow the seeds of another crisis further down the line (see, for example, Keen, 2017; Minsky, 1986).