I came across this today, the five stages of decline, as expounded by business author Jim Collins in his book How the Mighty Fall.
He’s writing about corporations, but I reckon you can read the whole of the modern consumerist/economic liberalism project into this graph. Thatcher and Reagan deliver stage one, the boom of the 90s is stage two, and denial of risk sees you through the 00s. That leaves us, post-financial crisis, entering into the grasping stage.
I quite like this model and how you looked at it in the context of the global financial crisis. I doubt we’ll see stage 5, as a world economy. But perhaps some individual countries will not be so lucky