We're all experiencing the global financial crisis — some much more comfortably than most of us —  but who can really comprehend how it came about? 

In this book Thomas Fazi explains the historical development of the present laissez-faire financial system and provides a clear analysis of exactly how the crisis and meltdown was born. 

The basic function of money and money lending is the useful social function of facilitating trade but Fazi demonstrates how it has been transformed into a means of speculation, divorced from trade and industry. 

While much of what happens on Wall Street and in other big financial centres is today a socially useless activity, it is very lucrative for a small elite. The post-war consensus of a “regulated market capitalism” and a mixed economy has been thrown overboard, allowing financial markets to dominate the economic paradigm and govern our lives. 

Fazi outlines how this financial elite and the big transnational corporations have completely hijacked the EU and provides a whole range of pertinent facts and statistics to underline his arguments. 

Yet in the end, perhaps surprisingly, he argues that calls for individual nations to withdraw from the EU are misguided. Poorer countries — particularly Portugal, Greece and Ireland — would fare even worse outside the organisation, he contends. 

On withdrawal their currencies would suffer immediate devaluation and be subject to wild speculation on the currency markets. They would lose preferential trade treatment, plunging their countries into even worse unemployment, austerity and poverty than at present. 

Fazi argues that instead of withdrawal we have to struggle to democratise the structures of the EU and take control from the elite now ruling the roost. 

His arguments have a logic to them. But like so many “solutions” to Europe’s parlous state of affairs, it is the doing that poses the biggest problem — the how, not the why or wherefore.

(Pluto Press, £15)