This article offers an interpretation of the domestic and global dimensions of the US housing, financial and economic crisis in a Marxian framework. My key argument is that the origins of the Great Recession can be fully understood only within an analysis of the system of globalised production and the corresponding division of labour manifest in the symbiotic relationship between the financialised US-centred core and the commodity-producing periphery. The imbalance between production and finance in the US economy mirrors the global imbalance between the ability to produce and the capacity to consume.
