For the past two years, Western society has experienced what many of its leaders have called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the very least, it was the worst period of instability that our younger generations have ever seen in their lifetimes. But unlike other financial crises that were largely triggered by external forces, such as the oil embargoes of the 1970s, this latest one was the product of our own internal policies and practices; even more so, of our cultural perspectives on the very notion of finance, credit and debt itself. Specifically, the financial crisis that just occurred was the result of the new culture of neoliberalism and the hyper-individuality and debt-based consumption that it brought with it. What's worse is that, without the admission of this new culture, or without any effort to change it, our current economic system will be regularly plagued by such crises from here on into the future. Before any effort can be made towards cultural change, however, we must first understand, at least briefly, the current socio-political ideas that are creating such problems in the modern Western marketplace. As Kotz and McDonough state, “the concept of 'global neo-liberalism' best captures contemporary social reality.” This “new social reality” was, as they called it, a return to the old liberalism and a retreat from the more government-controlled Keynesian style of the postwar years. With this loosening of government control and influence over markets, we have seen the emergence of a new individualistic and privatized vision of the market system. Neo-liberalism as a doctrine, creed or culture, or whatever you want to call it, has become almost a kind of return to the dawn of capitalism… middle of paper… political economy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.Dumenil, Gerard and Levy, Dominique. “The Economics of US Imperialism in the Early 21st Century,” Review of International Political Economy, 11:4 (2004), pp. 657-676. Retrieved from EBSCO, April 21, 2010. Eichengreen, Barry. “The Last Temptations of Risk”, National Interest, 101 (2009), pp. 8-14. Retrieved from EBSCO, April 21, 2010. McDonough, Terrence, Michael Reich, and David M. Kotz, eds. Contemporary capitalism and its crises: social structure of accumulation theory for the 21st century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Smart, Barry. Economy, culture and society: a sociological critique of neoliberalism. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003. Westra, Richard, ed. Confronting global neoliberalism: Third world resistance and development strategies. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2010.