"While the sharpest edge os neoliberalism's destructiveness was reserved for the Third World, much of which experienced economic havoc and retardation in the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism's record in major capitalist economies was, to say the least, woeful. Growth remained low, wages stagnated, inequality soared and public institutions and services were privatized, commodified and corporatized for private profit with visible declines in the quantity and quality of delivery. Worse, as the productive economy was increasingly outcompeted by lower cost producers elsewhere, facilitated by Western multinationals' outsourcing, financial activity exploded instead, indebting households, firms and governments and enriching an ever-narrowing elite through predation and plunder and through speculation in mushrooming asset bubbles, the greatest of which ."