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The sixth chapter examines China’s sailing through the Great Recession of the late 2000s with little apparent damage. China weathered the storm due to its long-term strategy of managed urbanization and migration along with an economic stimulus. These factors structured, dispersed, and reduced discontent generated by the Great Recession. Whereas one might expect the government to have directed all funds to coastal provinces that bore the brunt of the economic downturn, the government instead sent much of its fiscal stimulus investment to interior provinces. The regime, fearing instability and unrest among newly unemployed migrant workers along the coast, sought to encourage employment in the interior. Along with continued collective ownership of land in the countryside and the hukou system, the fiscal stimulus facilitated stability by providing channels for those negatively affected by the crisis to return to the countryside and smaller cities in the interior, dispersing discontent.

Initially, many believed that China would not be affected by the international financial crisis. In fact, some even believed that China would be the one to relieve the world from its troubles. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao stated that he was confident that the 10 years of reform that the country had recently undergone would render it stable and would mean it would be able to endure the crisis. Also, this belief was furthered by a US$586 billion economic stimulus package that had been introduced in November 2008. Even after officials realized that the ability to maintain a stable export growth of manufacturing goods was in sharp decline, confidence persisted. The country continued to accumulate foreign reserves and its banks did not collapse. However, the banking industry appeared to be still susceptible to adverse effects, and the size of the country's financial system hindered policy-making. Also, competition had to be controlled and the role of foreign banks had to be restricted.

This chapter examines the economic rationale for the proposals made by the United Nations Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Monetary and Financial System. The independent commission was created to analyze the causes of the global financial crisis and to suggest adequate responses to reform financial markets, with the goal of restoring global economic stability. Taking into account the failures of both macroeconomic and financial regulations leading to the crisis as well as challenges of international economic governance and systemic reforms, the commission proposed measures that are not only concerned with macro-financial reforms for greater financial risk mitigation and monetary stability, but also with creating the conditions for more equitable and sustainable development in light of contemporary conditions. One of the commission's recommendations calls for the creation of a new credit facility to provide funding for stimulus packages in developing countries. Another is the establishment of a Global Economic Coordination Council (GECC) to provide a democratically representative alternative to the Group of 20 (G20).

This chapter presents and discusses the New Deal offered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to America in response to the collapse of the nation's economic and social institutions. Roosevelt set out to stabilize American capitalism through regulation of the nation's financial and manufacturing sectors, the implementation of policies to promote both higher wages and workers' rights, and the introduction of economic stimulus packages. Though the New Deal's overarching aim was simply to right a listing economy, the president's recovery efforts profoundly altered the meaning of American democracy. As historian Nelson Lichtenstein has demonstrated, New Dealers institutionalized a form of republican government that sought to restrain the inequities associated with industrial capital by empowering the citizenry.

Political and business leaders know that their defects and blunders will be excused if they turn in a respectable growth performance. The quarterly or annual gains in corporate revenue or GDP are really all that matters. But when and why did these raw metrics come to surpass all other indicators of well-being? Although growth is often seen as integral to any capitalist system of accumulation, its recognition as a society’s only relevant standard of worth is largely a postwar development. For example, four-fifths of U.S. growth has occurred in the last fifty years, some part of it driven by Cold War competition to prove the superiority of a market economy. The consensus mood that developed after 1945—which historians have called “growth liberalism”—presided over an expansionist boom in the industrialized world that did not contract until the 1970s. Subsequent doctrines—the supply-side gospel of the Reagan era, the high-tech evangelism of the 1990s, and the asset ownership creed of the 2000s—were all aimed at reviving and boosting the high growth rates that managers of a consumer society had come to expect. Growthmanship spread abroad, along with the internationalization of production, and soon growth in GDP became the most important yardstick for nations, whether in the advanced or the developing world. Slowing growth rates were a cause for concern, while falling numbers were a sign that something was awry, and that close scrutiny, even intervention, from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund was in the offing. Those who believed or behaved otherwise were not wrong; they were simply treated as dropouts from modernity. So entrenched was this orthodoxy that The Limits to Growth, the momentous 1972 Club of Rome report that concluded that current rates of industrial growth could not be sustained ecologically in the long term, was received among business and policy elites as a genuinely heretical document that had to be publicly pilloried. Subsequent surveys, drawing upon a wider range of experts and a more comprehensive collection of scientific data, amplified the 1972 warning about the ruinous impact of unrestrained growth.