From the introduction:

Eckhard Hein argues that the severity of the present crisis cannot be understood without examining the medium- to long-run developments in the world economy since the early 1980s: inefficient regulation of financial markets, increasing inequality in the distribution of income, and rising imbalances at the global (and at the Euro area) level. In his view, these developments have been dominated by neo-liberal policies aimed at deregulation of labour markets, reduction of government intervention into the market economy and of government demand management, re-distribution of income from (lower) wages to profits and top management salaries, and deregulation and liberalisation of national and international financial markets. In his article, Hein uses the terms "financialisation" and "finance-dominated capitalism" interchangeably and explains why they are interrelated and overlap with "neoliberalism", but are not identical with it. He uses a Kaleckian framework to address the question of how the different dimensions of income distribution (functional and personal distribution and the development of top incomes) were affected by finance-dominated capitalism and how they are linked to regional as well as global current account imbalances. Based on this analysis, Hein arrives at an important policy conclusion: the requirement of a wage- or income-led recovery strategy embedded in a "Keynesian New Deal at the Global and the European level".