The global financial crisis which first began to make itself apparent in 2007 and then broke with full force in the autumn of 2008 has generated an intense debate in academic, business, journalistic and political circles alike about what went wrong and how operational faults in the prevailing Western model of political economy might best be repaired. More importantly, it has at last also begun to stimulate a deeper, albeit slower moving, consideration of whether the Anglo-American world in particular was working with the right model of political economy in the first place. It is the view I seek to defend here that if we are to address properly the former set of concerns – with what went wrong and how we might start to put it right – it is with the latter that we must start. For it is only by acknowledging the complicity and culpability of a decidedly and distinctly Anglo-American conception of capitalism in the inflation and then bursting of the bubble, that we can begin to see the full extent of what is broken and what now must be fixed. It is to this agenda that the present paper speaks. It draws on a now substantial body of empirical research, but it seeks to do so in a rather novel way – to argue that the crisis is best seen as a crisis of and indeed for growth and not as a crisis of debt. It is, moreover, a crisis of and for an excessively liberalised Anglo-American form of capitalism and the Anglo-liberal growth model (as I will call it) to which it gave rise. This is a form of capitalism and a growth model that was inherently unstable and threatened the entire world economy – its excesses cannot be tolerated again.