With a comment on the book Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, by Jeff Madrick, as starting point, the authors trace a stark vision of the long process of state debilitation driven forward since the era of Ronald Reagan. In this analysis, the destructive nature of an economy driven by «unregulated greed» is highlighted, and the roles of people such as Alan Greenspan and their contribution to the current disaster are questioned.