<p>This paper is intended to provide a comprehensive review of financialisation as a major cause for the financial and economic crisis which started in 2007, and to outline the<br />
requirements and the potentials for a long-runsustainable recovery strategy after the ‘Great Recession’. We argue 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 level. Our focus is on the changes in distribution triggered by finance-dominated capitalism embedded in a neo-liberal policy stance since the early 1980s, on potential causes for this re-distribution, on the effects of re-distribution on aggregate demand and growth, and on the role of re-distribution for the<br />
global imbalances underlying the present financial and economic crisis. Finally, the requirements for distribution policies within an expansionary post-crisis economic policy<br />
regime, a wage-led growth regime embedded in a Global Keynesian New Deal, are outlined.</p>
