Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All - A lecture by Costas Lapavitsas

Join us for a lecture by Costas Lapavitsas, Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. This event celebrates the release by Verso Press of Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. Lapavitsas explores the roots of the recent economic crisis in terms of "financialization," the most salient feature of which is the rise of financial profit, in part extracted directly from households through financial expropriation, and discusses the options available for controlling finance and resolutions to the current crisis, in particular, in the Eurozone. The event will be moderated by Cornel Ban, Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University and a specialist in the political economy of crises and transitions. Costas Lapavitsas is a member of Research on Money and Finance (RMF) network at SOAS, the aim of which has been to produce synthetic work on the transformation of the capitalist economy, the rise of financialisation and the resulting intensification of crises. He is the lead author of the new RMF report “Breaking Up? A Route Out of the Eurozone Crisis.” His previous publications include Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit and Political Economy of Money and Finance. The event is jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Europe, the Center for the Study of Asia, the Program in East Asian Studies, and the Undergraduate Economics Association at Boston University and is funded in part through a grant to the Center for the Study of Europe from the European Commission Delegation in Washington DC.