But we should not deceive ourselves; the inevitable (cyclical) financial crisis is no accident. It has happened time and again, with much the same outcome: it allows a partial restructuring of capitalist social relations. It has the potential to recalibrate the contradictions accumulated since the previous crisis and allows capital to, for instance, demand massive changes to state economic policy and both break up large integrated firms and allow smaller firms to be gobbled up by larger ones (Harvey 2006, 324–329). And, as we have seen in the current crisis, it allows capital to reclaim wealth fought for and won by the working class: the foreclosure of homes, the pulverization of the welfare state, the attack on wages, the assault on workers’ rights (Lapavitsas 2013; McNally 2011). This sort of “corrective” restructuring has been the aftermath of financial crises time and again (see, for instance, Polanyi 2001). Because capitalism is fundamentally based on contradictions, financial crises, in a way, regulate the inherent systemic crisis by limiting its effects to the particular sphere of finance. In the aftermath of such crises, capital has the opportunity redraw or renegotiate the lines of regulation.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 498