End Of Capitalism/World Thinkability Spreads

Paul Krugman being interviewed on Bloomberg over the weekend; at around 7:30 on the stream he's asked about GM and is this the kind of situation where the government can't let a company like that go under? He says well, you know there is this big worry about when the "too big to fail" doctrine starts to spread to everything, then we're talking about nationalising the, seizing the, seizing the means of production.

Back in May, Donald MacKenzie wrote in the LRB:

I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold.