For the first time the UK’s consumer debt exceeds the total of its gross national product: a new report shows that British consumers owe £1.35 trillion.

Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 1,20,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings.

As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

These problems arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort, which laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for our contemporary crises.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of the state — minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions — just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim.

In practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.

The first great advantage the neoliberals possessed was an unceasing fountain of money. US oligarchs and their foundations have poured hundreds of millions into setting up thinktanks, founding business schools and transforming university economics departments into bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal thinking.

The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and many others in the US, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, were all established to promote this project.

The revolutionary movements of 1968 also sought greater individual liberties, and many of the soixante-huitards saw the state as their oppressor. The neoliberals co-opted their language and ideas.

Neoliberals were also able to make use of economic crises. An early experiment took place in New York City, which was hit by budgetary disaster in 1975. Its bankers demanded that the city follow their prescriptions — huge cuts in public services, smashing of the unions, public subsidies for business. The IMF and the World Bank used their power over developing nations to demand the same policies.

Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by greater intervention on the part of the state. In confronting it, we must recognise that we will never be able to mobilise the resources its exponents have been given. But as the disasters they have caused unfold, the public will need ever less persuading that it has been misled.

Guardian