Overripe Economy is a genealogy of the emergence of a finance-ridden, authoritarian, austerity-plagued American capitalism, from industrialisation to the present day. By providing a panoramic political-economic history of the country, it surveys the ruthlessly competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century, the maturation of industrial capitalism in the 1920s, the rise and fall of capitalism's Golden Age and the ensuing decline towards the modern era. Alan Nasser shows why the emergence of the persistent austerity of financialised neoliberal capitalism is the natural outcome of mature capitalism's evolution.Nasser demonstrates that the nation's historic trajectory was marked by a succession of turning-point political and economic crises and key responses to them. This developmental pattern reveals both the key structural and political vulnerabilities of capitalism itself and points towards the kind of system that can transcend it. At the centre of the argument, capitalism ultimately presents us with two alternatives, either a `new normal' of persistent austerity, declining democracy and a privatised state, or a polity and economy characterised by economic democracy that can ensure both higher wages and a shorter working week.The result of a lifetime's research, this book will make an important contribution to the literature on the roots of the economic crisis and the democratic possibilities it opens up.