The new Great Depression has put an end to one of the greatest periods of prosperity in Spanish economic history. For more than a decade, between the end of 1994 and the beginning of 2008, the Spanish economy grew at a continuous and sustained rate, generally higher than that of most of its European partners. The high rate of job creation made it possible to incorporate the largest workforce in its entire history: seven million workers, half of them migrants from the global South. The engine of the euphoria seemed to lie in the so-called "brick economy." The strong expansion of the construction sector translated, in effect, into the production of more than four million homes, while the country became, due to the strong public investment, the first State of the European Union for kilometers of highway, and then by kilometers of high-speed rail. In any case, the most significant data of these years was not in the strong rate of real estate investment, but in the spectacular increase in the value of the families' assets, which grew more than three times, in just ten years, thanks to the continued rise in house prices. While it lasted, there were few who dared not to criticize, but even to openly want to know these mechanisms. The blanket of asphalt over the last open spaces of the Mediterranean coast, the threat to a growing number of ecosystems, the irreversible depletion of the water cycles in the most deficient regions and the sharp increase in the consumption of materials, especially energy, did not pass unnoticed, but they were undervalued as a "minor cost" of a growth model that provided wealth by the bucketload, both to business agents and public coffers and to important social fringes. Much less pointed out was the apparent paradox of how it was possible to grow at that rate with a labor model characterized by growing precariousness and segregation? To which was added the legal apartheid of migrants from the countries of the South? and for a long-term stagnation of real wages for at least 60% of the population! Undoubtedly, this was possible because the rapid growth of credit and the evolution of the asset bubble allowed a significant increase in domestic consumption that, once again, was greater than that of European countries. It is here, and not so much in a political conspiracy, where the seal of consensus of the development model must be found. Wealth had seemed to benefit practically everyone, because practically everyone had had access to the property that was serving as the basis for the speculative bubble: housing. No one could think then that, in just over a year, the old wealth would turn into business failures, debt, unemployment and the threat of a social implosion with unpredictable effects. Indeed, as if it were a clinical analysis, the crisis has revealed the weakness of the foundations of this model. Beneath the powerful glow of financial wealth beats a majority situation of dispossession, inequality and precariousness. The most disturbing aspect of the current situation is not found, therefore, in the greater or lesser speed of a recovery that will probably insist on the financial or real estate formulas of past years, but rather in the outbreak of a social crisis that we are only now beginning to glimpse It is at this crossroads that the struggles around the distribution of social wealth become decisive and that the debate about what always underlies any economic discussion becomes more urgent than ever.