This is a guest post by Carlota Perez, an academic and  author of Technological revolutions and financial capital: the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages. This article first appeared in Green Alliance’s magazine Inside Track.

The whole discussion about how to overcome the financial crisis and its consequences on the economy is wrongly focused. Getting public finances in order and the financial world back on its feet will not bring the world economy back to business as usual.  Healthy finance with a languid real economy will naturally find new ways of casino behaviour.

What is needed is a set of policies that will decidedly tilt the playing field in such a way that finance would find it more profitable to fund production than to gamble in derivatives or futures, while production, in turn, would find clear pathways to profitable innovation and expansion. We are facing a recurring twice-in-a-century event, equivalent to the 1930s after the crash of 1929, which needs to be understood to find effective solutions. Read more