market fundamentalism

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

Capitalism 3, the Thatcher-Reagan monetarist counterrevolution that culminated in the Bush-Greenspan market fundamentalism described in this book as Capitalism 3.3, adopted the opposite approach. Instead of treating economics as a branch of politics, it treated politics as a branch of economics. Its most important leaders believed that governments were usually wrong and always inefficient; therefore markets should be empowered wherever possible to discipline and control venal politicians. Assuming that the era of market fundamentalism ended with the 2007-09 crisis, what should we expect as the defining characteristic of Capitalism 4?

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Micawber and Mad Max CHAPTER TWO - Political Economy and Evolution CHAPTER THREE - The Four Ages of Capitalism Part II - The Arrow and the Ring CHAPTER FOUR - Annus Mirabilis CHAPTER FIVE - The Four Megatrends CHAPTER SIX - The Great Moderation The Platform Company: A New Business Model The Reinvention of Demand Management CHAPTER SEVEN - The Financial Revolution Megatrends in Housing and Finance CHAPTER EIGHT - The Ring of Finance CHAPTER NINE - Boom and Bust Forever The Theories of Boom-Bust Cycles Why Finance Is Different from Every Other Business Part III - Market Fundamentalism Self-Destructs CHAPTER TEN - The Economic Consequences of Mr. Paulson CHAPTER ELEVEN - There Is No Can Opener The First Era of Economics The Second Era: Keynes’s Government-Led Economics The Third Era: The Triumph of Rational and Efficient The Next Transition CHAPTER TWELVE - Toward a New Economics Part IV - The Great Transition CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Adaptive Mixed Economy Energy Policy and the 2008 Oil Shock CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Irresistible Force Meets Immoveable Object CHAPTER FIFTEEN - What—Me Worry?

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The Thatcher-Reagan revolution of the early 1980s was widely proclaimed as a rediscovery of true capitalism after the cryptosocialist heresies and deviations of the Keynesian period—and this worldview is still held by most conservative politicians and business leaders. In the great scheme of things, however, the dominance of free-market fundamentalism from 1980 until 2009 was just one thirty-year phase in the long history of modern capitalism’s development since the late eighteenth century. Viewing recent events in this historical perspective reveals the crisis and its consequences in a new light. Many politicians and business leaders consider, for example, that any government interference with market forces is inimical to the free-market system.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Published 30 Jun 2014

While they were making some headway, a large part of Western society was rejecting that knowledge in favor of an empirically inad-equate yet powerful ideological system. Even at the time, some recognized this system as a quasi-religious faith, hence the label market fundamentalism. 38 M a r k e t F a i l u r e Market fundamentalism—and its various strands and interpretations known as free market fundamentalism, neoliberalism, laissez-faire economics, and laissez-faire capitalism—was a two-pronged ideological system. The first prong held that societal needs were served most efficiently in a free market economic system. Guided by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, individuals would freely respond to each other’s needs, establishing a net balance between solutions (“supply”) and needs (“demand”).

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Belief in the invisible hand (sometimes also called the invisible hand of the marketplace) formed a kind of quasi-religious foundation for capitalism (see capitalism; external costs; market failure; market fundamentalism). market failure The social, personal, and environmental costs that market economies imposed on individuals and societies were referred to as “market failures.” The concept of market failure was an early recognition of the limits of capitalist theory (see external costs; invisible hand ). market fundamentalism A quasi-religious dogma (see invisible hand) promoting unregulated markets over all other forms of human socioeconomic organization. During the Penumbra, market fundamentalists tended to deny the existence of market failure, thus playing a key role in the denial of the changes that were already under way and therefore in the catastrophes that ensued.

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Historical analysis also shows that Western civilization had the technological know-how and capability to effect an orderly transition to renewable energy, yet the available technologies were not implemented in time.1 As with all great historical events, there is no easy answer to the question of why this catastrophe occurred, but key factors stand out. The thesis of this analysis is that Western civilization became trapped in the grip of two inhibiting ideologies: positivism and market fundamentalism. Twentieth-century scientists saw themselves as the descendants of an empirical tradition often referred to as positivism—after the nineteenth-century French philosopher, Auguste Comte, who developed the concept of “positive” knowledge (as in, “absolutely, positively true”)—but 36 M a r k e t F a i l u r e the overall philosophy is more accurately known as Baconianism.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 24 Mar 2020

The doctrine of divine right of kings ended with England’s Glorious Revolution in the seventeenth century and the American and French revolutions in the eighteenth. The modern equivalent of the divine right of kings might be termed “market fundamentalism,” a creed that has been promoted by the American oligarchy with no less zeal than the old aristocracy advanced divine right. It holds that if the free market has caused a few at the top to aggregate vast wealth and power, the result must be right and good because it is natural and inevitable. One of market fundamentalism’s founders was the philosopher Ayn Rand. Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan was a follower of Rand, and, as we’ve seen, his doctrinaire views almost sank the American economy.

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Just as with the divine right of kings whose power was thought to come from God, those who embrace market fundamentalism want Americans to ignore how a powerful few have shaped the system for their own benefit. The creed doesn’t acknowledge that the rules of the free market come from government officials whose jobs increasingly depend on an oligarchy that benefits from those decisions. It doesn’t accept that laws are routinely violated by corporations and CEOs that treat fines as a cost of doing business. Adherents to market fundamentalism don’t see the ruthless profit-seeking behind the smooth public relations con of corporate social responsibility.

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Today’s oligarchs are not as rigidly doctrinaire, but they still regard the economy as a holy grail. As I’ve said, the oligarchy wants Americans to view the system as a neutral meritocracy in which anyone can make it with enough guts, gumption, and hard work. The standard platitudes of market fundamentalism are that people “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and that America is a nation of “self-made men” (and women), both of which translate into a moral code: People deserve whatever they earn in the market. Income and wealth are measures of worth. If you amass a billion dollars, then you must deserve it because that’s what the market awarded you.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

See also Fire Brigades Union (FBU); General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union (GMB); National Farmers’ Union (NFU); National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT); Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) breaking of/smashing of, 218, 220 Gordon Brown government and, 263–7 shaking off of, 190 subsidies and, 121 testing of, 264 and Tories, 265 Unison, 266 Unite, 265 United Kingdom (UK) abortion rate, 74 and age of criminal responsibility, 69 children’s well-being in, 22 consumer debt in, 217 income in, 191 market fundamentalism in, 16 neoliberalism in, 15 pay gap in, 187 taxation in, 276–7 teenage pregnancy rate, 75 wage of care workers in, 185 United States (US) abortion rate, 74 bridge inspections in, 217 cocaine use in, 33 Conservatives in, 288 crime rates in, 161 deaths caused by pollution from coal plants in, 170, 171 demands of blue-collar workers in, 285 and drone strikes. See drone strikes and illegal money transfers, 239 income in, 191, 205, 272 lead withdrawn from petrol, 161 market fundamentalism in, 16 neoliberalism in, 15 productivity in, 191 reforestation in, 97 shift of wealth in, 218 taxation in, 209–12 teenage pregnancy rate, 75 wage of care workers in, 185 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 196 universalism, 285 University of Milan, 11 University of Tasmania, 83 UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 32, 34 upland grazing, 121–2 US Congress, millionaires in, 24 utility, inverse relationship of with reward, 184 V values, importance of in changing political map, 288 van Valkenburgh, Blaire, 89 Verhaeghe, Paul, 14, 15, 17 vertebrate wildlife, loss of, 88 Victorians, 60, 61 Virgil, 120 Virunga national park (Africa), 177 W wages of care workers, 185 redistribution of, 187 Wales coal mining in, 147, 155 livestock farming in, 121 tree-planting grants in, 132 Walking Football, 13 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 234 WalMart, 193 Walton, Izaac, 22, 137 war of every man against every man/war of all against all, 9, 10, 12 Warwick agreement, 265, 267 Warwick University, 50 Washington, George, 230 wealth as ambition, 10–11, 12 correlation between global warming and, 105–6 global wealth, 12, 176 shift of in US, 218 wealth creators, 190, 221, 276 Weekly Standard, 230 Wellcome Trust, 182 Welz, Adam, 204 West Antarctic ice sheet, 176 whale poo, 79, 82, 83 whale pump, 82, 84 whales, as maintaining populations of animals they eat, 82–3 whaling, impact of on Californian condors, 84–5 What About Me?

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So few are the countervailing voices, and so thoroughly have they been excluded from most of the media, including the public broadcasters (now locked in a permanent state of terror and anticipatory compliance as they await the next assaults on their budgets), that the dominant forms of power remain almost unchallenged. Take, for example, the ideology that now governs our lives. Not only is it seldom challenged; it is seldom even identified. As a result, no one seems to know what to call it. Neoliberalism? Market fundamentalism? Laissez-faire economics? Though it is a clear and consistent belief system, though it is the ideology to which most governments and major opposition parties subscribe, and though it determines everything from the distribution of wealth to the treatment of the living planet, it has no standard or widely recognised name.

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We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identity is shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t. Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut and business should be freed from social control.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

However, central banks became more accommodating to the market with their monetary policies, believing in the rationality and the honesty of those who could get and use easy credit from the banks. The central banks did not believe that there could be “irrational exuberance,” or other phenomena that could lead to excessive borrowing and to eventual bursting of bubbles. In spite of the growth and popularity of what came to be called “market fundamentalism,” especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, and some other countries, the levels of public spending and of taxes, as shares of the countries’ GDPs, kept rising throughout much of the second half of the twentieth century, until the last decade of that century. An exception was the United States.

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Fiscal illusions are often easier to create with regulations than with taxes and spending. It can be concluded that, as the twentieth century came to an end, by and large, market forces had been allowed to play a larger role, in many, though not all, of the advanced countries, especially during the last decade of that century, the period of the Washington Consensus and of market fundamentalism, than they had played in earlier decades, in spite of the higher levels of taxes and of public spending in most countries, and in spite of various structural obstacles that continued to exist in the markets of many countries. At the same time the redistributive role that governments had played in the decades immediately after World War II was being reduced, in response to efficiency and incentive concerns that had led to important policy changes, especially in tax policy but also in spending policies such as the welfare reform of 1996 in the United States.

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The return of faith in the free operations of the market economy contributed to creating, in conservative circles and among an increasing number of economists, an almost ethical or religious belief that the market could not be wrong, that its results were always legitimate, and that it did not need to be (much) regulated, because it was able to regulate itself. The affinity of this view with religious beliefs merited the term that came to describe it: “market fundamentalism.” Fundamentalism can come in many colors and shapes! An implication of this view was that, if the government would just stay out of the way and let the market do its work, it would promote efficiency and would not make mistakes. The higher economic growth that it would generate would help solve many social problems, thus making it possible to reduce the social and redistributive role of the state.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

The ILO reports that across the world at least 197 million people are unemployed, and that this figure is set to rise by 2.3 million in 2016 and by another 1 million in 2017.42 Market fundamentalism – globalisation – failed catastrophically to provide meaningful work, incomes, dignity and respect to almost 200 million people in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia and Europe. In the United States, globalisation has undermined the living standards of millions of working people. Market fundamentalism has also failed to prepare for or tackle the grave threats now facing a range of societies around the world. As Karl Polanyi rightly predicted in his book The Great Transformation, it is no wonder that populist movements gathered strength everywhere, and strong leaders were called upon to defend whole societies from the utopian but destructive predations of market fundamentalism.

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Governments were urged to use ‘public investment to support growth’.6 But these new, late converts to fiscal expansion may just as well have banged their heads against a brick wall, for all the listening done by the US Congress and by neoliberal finance ministers such as Germany’s Wolfgang Schäuble, Finland’s Alexander Stubb, or Britain’s George Osborne. The ideology of ‘austerity’ – aimed at slashing and privatising the public sector – wedded to free market fundamentalism is now so deeply embedded in western government treasuries that tragically neither politicians nor policy-makers are capable of action. In desperation, some central banks (the European Central Bank and the central banks of Switzerland, Sweden and Japan) have crossed the Rubicon of the Zero Lower Bound, and made interest rates negative.

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The experience of financial deregulation has shown that capitalism insulated from popular democracy degenerates into rent-seeking, criminality and grand corruption. As Karl Polanyi predicted in his famous book The Great Transformation, societies are building resistance to the ‘self-regulating market comprising labour, land and money’ – or market fundamentalism, even when blind resistance appears irrational.9 In the US, as I write, the voters of the United States have sought protection from a demagogic president-elect who promised to defend them by erecting a wall between the United States and Mexico. In Europe, leaders that would impose authoritarian nationalist control over economies are gaining in popularity.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

Moreover, the founders of the euro were guided by a set of ideas, notions about how economies function, that were fashionable at the time but that were simply wrong.12 They had faith in markets and lacked an understanding of the limitations of markets and what was required to make them work. The unwavering faith in markets is sometimes referred to as market fundamentalism, sometimes as neoliberalism.13 Market fundamentalists believed, for instance, that if only the government would ensure that inflation was low and stable, markets would ensure growth and prosperity for all. While in most of the world, market fundamentalism has been discredited, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, those beliefs survive and flourish within the eurozone’s dominant power, Germany.

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But some of what has been agreed to so far is another halfway house, constructed such that it may be worse than nothing. We will explain in chapter 8 how current reforms in the banking system may actually exacerbate the problem of economic divergence noted earlier. THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM: MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM—IDEOLOGY RULES The problem is not only the lack of broad consensus as to what is required to ensure the healthy functioning of an economy and the eurozone. The problem is that Germany has used its economic dominance to impose its own views, and those views are not only rejected by large parts of the eurozone but also by the majority of economists.

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The problem is that Germany has used its economic dominance to impose its own views, and those views are not only rejected by large parts of the eurozone but also by the majority of economists. Of course, in some areas—like seeing the coming of the 2008 crisis—the majority of economists did not do well. But later in this book, I explain why they were especially right about the effects of austerity.32 Market fundamentalism, to which we referred earlier, assumed that markets on their own are efficient and stable. Adam Smith, often viewed as the godfather of this perspective, actually argued to the contrary: that there was an important role for government. Research in economics over the past half-century has shown that not only is there a presumption that markets are not efficient and stable; it has also explained why that is so and what governments can do to improve societal well-being.33 Today, even market fundamentalists (sometimes also referred to as “neoliberals”) admit that there is a need for government intervention to maintain macro-stability—though they typically argue that government interventions should be limited to a rules-based monetary policy focused on price stability—and to ensure property rights and contract enforcement.

Global Financial Crisis
by Noah Berlatsky
Published 19 Feb 2010

These lessons should lead to one simple conclusion: a rejection of failed and discredited neoliberal policies and the institutions that promoted them over the last three decades, namely the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank. 1) The collapse of market fundamentalism. The first important lesson is the collapse of market fundamentalism. The crisis shows that the emperor has no clothes anymore. Market fundamentalists claim that markets should 187 The Global Financial Crisis be left to their own devices because whatever happens, they have self-correcting mechanisms and that market failures are less costly than state failures.

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Demba Moussa Dembele, “The Global Financial Crisis: Lessons and Responses from Africa,” Pambazuka News, March 19, 2009. Reproduced by permission. 186 Solutions to the Global Financial Crisis T he international financial crisis reflects the collapse of laissez-faire economics and the growing discredit of market fundamentalism. What was being hailed yesterday as the only road to ‘growth and prosperity’ is now under fierce attack by the same countries and institutions that promoted it for years. In leading developed countries, states have drawn up massive rescue plans to bail out industries or nationalise banks and financial institutions.

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Even the most zealous market fundamentalists must have lost their illusions about the ability of markets to discipline themselves and correct their own mistakes. Markets are not impersonal forces, believed to be all powerful and placed above human beings. They are man-made forces whose decisions are ultimately influenced by selfish vested interests. With the collapse of market fundamentalism, it is the legitimacy of the entire neoliberal system that is being questioned. Even some of its most fervent ideologues are now in disarray. Some of its most sacred myths and dogmas are falling apart. Things that were unthinkable just a few months ago have become a daily reality. Nationalisations of banks and financial institutions, rescue plans for industrial companies, strong state intervention everywhere and attacks against ‘unbridled capitalism’; all this is being observed in Europe and even in the United States. . . .

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

I saw my great hopes for an open and free Internet corrupted by the simultaneous pressures of inadequate security (in the form of fraud, spam, viruses, and malware) and the attempts at a corporate lockdown of culture and technology.2 I saw that the resistance to openness, transparency, accountability, and democracy was stronger than I had imagined and present in parts of the world—including my own— where I thought the forces of light had triumphed long ago.3 I worried that the environment generated by the global reach of the Internet was pulling us in opposite directions—toward both anarchy and oligarchy— and draining the institutions and environments that would foster more P RE FAC E xiii reasonable, republican virtues, such as measured deliberation, critical thought, and mutual respect.4 I noted the ways in which those who promoted the digitization and networking of all things reverted to simplistic and wrongheaded views of how technology works in society.5 I grew weary of others’ attempts to describe technology as an irresistible force that young people have mastered and old people must conform to or wither away trying to resist.6 And I had an intellectual allergic reaction to the growing notion that one company—Google—could or would solve some of the greatest and most complex human problems simply by applying the principles of engineering.7 So I sought a way to explore both my disenchantment with and my approval of changes in our global information ecosystem. I wanted to embrace and champion values and goals such as liberty, creativity, and democracy while offering criticisms of trends and trajectories that I consider harmful or dangerous, such as blind faith in technology and market fundamentalism. And Google exemplifies all these trends. Because books move more slowly than large, rich Internet companies, I have not attempted to catalog or analyze the company’s recent initiatives. Instead, I have tried to discern broad and significant themes and patterns that should hold constant for some years.

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The Internet in the late twentieth century was too global, too messy, and too gestational to justify national or international regulation.49 Some illiberal states, such as the People’s Republic of China, chose to step in and aggressively perform those regulatory duties either through direct action or through proxies in the quasi-private sector.50 In the more liberal world of the United States and—to a lesser extent— Europe, a presumption that market forces can best solve problems and build structures so dominated political debate from about 1981 onward that even considering the possibility of state involvement in something so delicate and new as the Internet was implausible.51 After the recent collapse of the corrupt and disastrous command-and-control economies of Eastern Europe, it was difficult to propose a way of doing things 40 R END E R UNTO CAESA R that fell between the poles of triumphant market fundamentalism and incompetent, overbearing state control. Of course the market had survived and thrived. There seemed to be no other mechanism that could deliver positive results to a diverse, connected world.52 The notion of gentle, creative state involvement to guide processes toward the public good was impossible to imagine, let alone propose.

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This vision was known as neoliberalism. Although Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher championed it, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair mastered it. It had its roots in two prominent ideologies: techno-fundamentalism, an optimistic belief in the power of technology to solve problems (which I describe fully in chapter 3), and market fundamentalism, the notion that most problems are better (at least more efficiently) solved by the actions of private parties rather than by state oversight or investment.53 And it was not just a British and American concept. It was deployed from Hong Kong to Singapore, Chile, and Estonia.54 Neoliberalism went beyond simple libertarianism.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

The belief that this model approximates how markets operate in the real world is often referred to as ‘market fundamentalism’.3 4 Minimum wage laws, usury laws, truth-in-advertising laws, laws to regulate fraud, health-and-safety codes, anti-discrimination laws, building inspection codes, environmental laws, investor protection rules, and many other rules and regulations have each and severally been breezily, even haughtily, dismissed by market fundamentalists and the many columnists and politicians who invoke their arguments. It’s quite true that many qualifications to market fundamentalism can be found in the mainstream texts, but they are made in such a way that they appear of secondary, rather than primary, importance.

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.: 679) themselves cite the role of anti-trust policy in keeping the costs of monopoly power ‘modest’. Prasch (2008: 3) writes: ‘Since the late 1970s American economic policy has been almost exclusively informed by … market fundamentalism. For a remarkable range of issues … the “conventional wisdom” has been to aggressively promote deregulation and privatization.’ This trend began around the time that economists concluded that the social costs of monopoly power were ‘modest’. It was surely a contributing factor to the swing towards market fundamentalism. And this is surely ironic. Instead of concluding that perfect competition isn’t really an ideal market type, the result was sold as indicating that the actual economy was pretty close to being ideal!

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Instead, the texts offer a one-size-fits-all model – the theory of perfect markets – and apply it to any and every situation. It is this deeply ingrained training which leads even professional economists to reach for that theory when offering ‘a quick opinion on a policy issue’, as Rodrik observes. What’s wrong with this world-view? Market fundamentalism – the analysis that dominates the mainstream textbooks – assumes perfect and costless information. Much research in recent decades has explored the implications of relaxing this extreme assumption and con­ sidering what happens in a setting of imperfect information, where some people know more than others (termed ‘asymmetric’ information).

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham
Published 30 Oct 2009

SAPs have thus worked in many cases to ‘decimate public employment, destroy import-substitution industries, and displace tens of thousands of rural producers unable to complete against the heavily subsidized agri-capitalism of the rich countries.’12 Such processes have been a key driving force behind the global ratcheting-up of inequality within the past three decades. Across the world, social fissures and extreme polarization – intensified by the global spread of neoliberal capitalism and market fundamentalism – have tended to concentrate most visibly and densely in burgeoning cities. The urban landscape is now populated by a few wealthy individuals, an often precarious middle class, and a mass of outcasts. Almost everywhere, it seems, wealth, power and resources are becoming ever more concentrated in the hands of the rich and the super-rich, who increasingly sequester themselves within gated urban cocoons and deploy their own private security or paramilitary forces for the tasks of boundary enforcement and access control.

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At the same time, according to Philip Bond in the Independent, ‘the speculative capital that could be deployed or invested by the bottom 50 per cent of the British population fell from 12 per cent to just 1 per cent’.24 1.3 Radical growth in income inequality in the UK between 1961 and 2002/3 for income before housing costs (BHC) and after housing costs (AHC), as measured by the Gini coefficient. The imposition of market fundamentalism had particularly spectacular effects on the ex-Communist Comecon block after the collapse of communism in the late 1980s. Not only did this create a handful of billionaires and oligarchs but, at the same time, it increased the number of people living in poverty and deep insecurity from three million in 1988 to 170 million in 2004.25 Globally, by 2007, well over a billion people – a third of all urban dwellers – were leading a highly precarious existence in fast-growing slums and informal settlements.26 Increasingly, the developing world has come to be dominated by immiserized shanty-town populations whose daily insecurities encourage a receptivity to radical, violently anti-Western ideologies and movements.

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In this sense, all are imagined as combatants and all terrain the site of battle.’87 In the case of the United States, for example, this process allows the nation’s military to overcome traditional legal obstacles to deployment within the nation itself.88 As a consequence, the US military’s PowerPoint presentations talk of urban operations in Mogadishu, Fallujah or Jenin in the same breath as those during the Los Angeles riots, the anti-globalization confrontations in Seattle or Genoa, or the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Such a paradigm permits a host of transnational campaigns and movements – for social justice or ecological sustainability, against state oppression or the devastating effects of market fundamentalism – to be rendered as forms of ‘netwar’, in effect turning the ideas of the Zapatistas into the equivalent of the radical and murderous Islamism of al-Qaeda.89 Finally, this blurring means that the militarization and walling of national borders, such as that between the US and Mexico, not only involve the same techniques and technologies as the walling-off of neighbourhoods in Baghdad or Gaza, but sometimes actually involve lucrative contracts being awarded to the same military and technology corporations.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
by Quinn Slobodian
Published 16 Mar 2018

ENCASEMENT, NOT LIBERATION One of the obstacles to understanding neoliberals on their own terms has been an excessive reliance on a set of ideas borrowed from the Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi, who has become, as one scholar notes, “­after Michel Foucault, prob­ably the most popu­lar theorist among social scientists t­ oday.”24 Across many attempts to account for neo­ liberal globalization, the retroactive influence of Polanyi’s 1944 book The ­Great Transformation is marked. According to t­ hose who adapt Polanyi’s narrative, the “market fundamentalism” of neoliberals led them to seek to “disembed” the “natu­ral” market from society and thus realize their utopian dream of a “self-­regulating market.” It is noted routinely that Polanyi was actually writing about the nineteenth c­ entury, but critics often make the leap to say that this was a critique of neoliberalism before the fact.

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Like him, they saw the ­Great Depression as evidence that the old form of capitalism was unworkable, and they set about theorizing the broader conditions required for its survival. In the words of one scholar, both Hayek and Polanyi w ­ ere “concerned with socio-­institutional responses to the ­free market.”29 In fact, Hayek developed his own idea of “­free markets as socially embedded.”30 If we place too much emphasis on the category of market fundamentalism, we ­will fail to notice that the real focus of neoliberal proposals is not on the market per se but on redesigning states, laws, and other institutions to protect the market. L ­ egal scholars have been clear on the increasing “legalization” or “juridicization” of world trade.31 Focusing on Hayek and his collaborators allows us to understand this within the intellectual history of neoliberal thought.

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This is not a narrative of triumph—­the sputtering of the WTO is at best a pyrrhic victory for the specific strain of neoliberal globalism I describe in the following chapters. Instead the narrative shows that neoliberalism as a body of thought clearly originated in an early twentieth-­ century crisis about how to or­ga­nize the ­whole earth. MILITANT GLOBALISM, NOT MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM Ordoglobalism was haunted by two puzzles across the twentieth c­ entury: first, how to rely on democracy, given democracy’s capacity to destroy itself; and second, how to rely on nations, given nationalism’s capacity to “disintegrate the world.” The first tension is familiar to students of modern Eu­rope.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

We have argued in this chapter, and elsewhere in this book, that current rules are too favorable to corporate interests, supported by an ideology—a misguided theory—about how the economy functions. Almost a half century of research has exposed the flaws in this ideology, in what we have referred to elsewhere as market fundamentalism. And four decades of experimentation in economies around the world that have, to one extent or another, adopted rules guided by this ideology, have shown the ways in which it leads to a distorted economy marked by inequality and instability. In fact, market fundamentalism has not even produced the high growth that was promised. The fact that there are trade-offs makes the design of rules difficult. Accordingly, each country must choose rules that reflect its own values.

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Within the varied experiences of the countries of the EU, there were and are good ideas for maintaining a prosperous and equitable European economy. Economists dryly label the particular set of economic ideas about the efficiency and stability of unfettered markets that the European Union embraced in the early 1990s as “neoclassical economics.” Others have categorized these ideas as neoliberalism or market fundamentalism. Whatever we call this belief system, it eventually hardened into a blind faith in markets in the following decades. The financial upheavals of 2008, the harrowing recession and hapless government response that followed, and the sovereign debt crisis that nearly tore the Eurozone apart originated, in large measure, with this set of ideas.

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Firms can increase their profits by taking advantage of others, for example, through market manipulation or insider trading. These activities distort the economy both in the short run and the long. When these schemes are discovered, there is a loss of trust in financial markets, which means that markets will be even less able to perform their essential functions. Market fundamentalism simply ignored the implications of these pervasive market imperfections, these real-world deviations from a textbook ideal. The kind of exploitation that we have seen simply could not occur if everyone was perfectly informed. One of the central roles of financial markets is to gather and process information to best allocate scarce capital.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

Norway and Denmark also have high tax rates, some of the highest found anywhere. Taxes are lower in Switzerland, but the Swiss have a structure of government like no other: hugely {16} John Kay powerful and massively decentralized. Whatever else is true of Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland, they are not societies characterized by unrestrained greed, market fundamentalism, and a minimal state. Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland are small countries whose total population is less than that of California. But it may not be an accident that many prosperous societies are very small. 8 A small state with open borders can combine social cohesion with a dynamic economy in a manner that larger states find difficult to emulate.

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Nowhere is the contrast between the reality of the American economy and the caricature of the American business model more evident than in the management of fundamental research. American Culture and Prosperity { 21} dominance of advanced science is today almost complete. Yet the rise of American institutions in this sphere is not the result of any application of the principles of the American business model: selfinterest, market fundamentalism, and the minimal state. It is the product of institutional and financial pluralism and the powerful motivation of the thrill of discovery. These examples, drawn from the many that will systematically be presented in this book, have a common theme. Market institutions, characterized by disciplined pluralism, function because of the social context in which they are embedded.

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The supply cables of { 62} John Kay the unregulated Mercury Energy failed, blacking out the central business district of Auckland. Seven weeks elapsed before regular power supplies were restored. 18 No country has modeled its policies more deliberately on the American business model-applause for self-interest, market fundamentalism, and the rolling back of the economic and redistributive functions of the state-than New Zealand after 1984. 19 Not even the United States. When one branch of the U.S. government has maintained a strong ideological position-as under the Reagan presidency or the Republican congress of 1994-96-checks and balances operated within the U.S. system of government.

Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 16 Sep 2006

As officials there reflect on the lessons of that brutal experience, they have come to reject even more firmly the Washington Consensus market fundamentalism which opened their countries to the ravages of the speculators. And they have put more emphasis on equity and on policies to help the poor. Growth has recovered, but these students of the “class of’97” have not forgotten the lessons. Latin America East Asia demonstrated the success of a course markedly different from the Washington Consensus, with a role for government far larger than the minimalist role allowed by market fundamentalism. Meanwhile, Latin America embraced the Washington Consensus policies more wholeheartedly than any other region (indeed, the term was first coined with reference to policies advocated for that region).

…

When I came to the World Bank, I was troubled by what I saw: the Bank—and, even more, the IMF—pushing conservative economic policies (such as the privatization of social security) that were exactly the opposite of those for which I had fought so hard when I was at the White House. Worse, they were using models that my theoretical work had done so much to discredit. (I was, of course, even more troubled to learn that Clinton’s own Treasury was pushing these policies.) My economic research had shown the deep underlying flaws in IMF economics, in “market fundamentalism,” the belief that markets by themselves lead to economic efficiency. Intellectual consistency—consistency with my earlier academic work—impelled me to voice my concerns that the policies which they were pushing in, for instance, East Asia, might only make matters worse. To do any less would have been a dereliction of my responsibilities.

…

Even if they could admit that markets, by themselves, might not engender a socially acceptable distribution of income, they argued that issues of efficiency and equity should be separated. In this conservative view, economics is about efficiency, and issues of equity (which, like beauty, so often lies in the eyes of the beholder) should be left to politics. Today, the intellectual defense of market fundamentalism has largely disappeared.2 My research on the economics of information showed that whenever information is imperfect, in particular when there are information asymmetries—where some individuals know something that others do not (in other words, always)—the reason that the invisible hand seems invisible is that it is not there.3 Without appropriate government regulation and intervention, markets do not lead to economic efficiency.4 In recent years we have seen dramatic illustrations of these theoretical insights.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

When viewed in these terms, the mind-boggling scale and cost of the credit crunch – in total governments worldwide have so far spent $14 trillion on supporting their banking systems – is almost as big a crisis for market fundamentalism and financial capitalism as the collapse of the Soviet Union was for economic planning and communism. What happened between 1989 and 1992 did not just represent the triumph of liberal capitalism; it was claimed as the triumph of the market fundamentalist ideologues who believed that they had engineered it. If communism was the logical conclusion of left thinking, it had collapsed. Some twenty years later the same can be said of market fundamentalism, the logical conclusion of right thinking. The extremes of left and right alike have both been tried – and found wanting.

…

INDEX Aberdeen University, 263 ABN AMRO, 150 Abramovitch, Roman, 64, 65, 67 accountancy firms, 296 Acemoglu, Daron, 299 aerospace, 136, 219, 268 Afghanistan, 13, 102, 144, 322 Africa, 71–2, 322, 383, 385 AIG, 152, 175, 176 airline industry, 30, 91, 109, 134, 143 Akerlof, George, 43 Alcoa, 133 alcohol policy, 335 Alessandri, Piergiorgio, 151, 153 Amazon, 253 Anderson, Elizabeth, 79 angels, business, 244, 252 Anglo Irish Bank, 181 Apple Inc., 29–30, 65–6, 71, 253 apprenticeships, 10, 295 Arculus, Sir David, 180 Argentina, 368 Aristotle, 39, 274 ‘arms race’ effects, 105 Arup Group, 66, 67, 93 Asda, 93 Ashcroft, Lord, 344 Ashdown, Paddy, 141 Asian Tiger exports, 149, 208, 355 AT & T, 133–4 Atari, 30 BAA, 8, 257–8 baby boomer generation, 34, 372–3 ‘Baby P’ case, 10, 325–6 Bagehot, Walter, 156–7 Bailey, Bob, 16, 25 Baker, Kenneth, 276 Baldacci, Emanuele, 367 Baldwin, Stanley, 315 Balls, Ed, 138, 147, 338 Bank of America, 152, 158, 175, 192 Bank of England, 4, 7–8, 129, 148, 180, 208, 250, 339, 359; lender-of-last-resort function, 157, 158, 160; Monetary Policy Committee, 185, 186, 264; reserve requirements scrapped (1979), 161, 208 Bank of International Settlements (BIS), 169, 182 Bank of Scotland, 186, 251 bankers, 4–5, 25–6, 62, 63–4, 180, 188; errors that caused the crash, 188–96, 197–204; gambling culture, 7, 8; pay see pay of executives and bankers Bankers Trust (New York), 140, 167 banking and banks: see also under entries for individual organisations; bail-out of, 3, 7–8, 19, 24, 138, 152–3, 172, 175, 176, 181, 204–5, 210, 389, 392; balance sheets, 7, 160, 164, 165, 191, 208, 210; bank runs, 9, 156–7, 158, 175–6, 202; borrow short and lend long principle, 154, 155–6, 157, 158–9; capital ratios, 151, 158, 162–3, 169, 170, 207, 208; credit-rating agencies and, 151, 196, 207; deposit insurance and, 158, 160; diversification, 154–5, 157, 165, 199, 354; fairness/desert and, 64, 206–7; interbank money markets, 164, 170, 176, 187–8, 202, 204; investment banks, 6, 28, 42, 101, 103, 150–1, 158, 165, 166, 170, 172–6, 195–6, 207; maturity transformation, 155–6, 157, 158–9; need for network of specialist banks, 251–2, 265, 371; nineteenth-century collapses, 156–7; post-crunch deleverage pressures, 359; principles and strategies, 154–6, 157; regulation of see regulation; relationship finance, 244, 251–2, 256–7; remoteness of management, 173–4; required reforms of, 205–10, 251–2, 371; short-term structure of lending, 33; banking and banks – continued socially vital role of, 155, 157; subsidiaries and special purpose vehicles, 181; unproductive entrepreneurship and, 28, 101, 103; vast assets/loans/profits, 32, 138, 147, 170, 172, 201; zero loyalty of front-line staff, 174 Barclay brothers, 327 Barclays, 24, 176, 177–8, 181, 215, 296, 363 Barker, Kate, 185 Basel system, 158, 160, 163, 169, 170–1, 196, 385 Baumol, William, 101, 111, 116, 253, 256 Bayerische Landesbank, 196 Bear Stearns, 150, 152, 158–9, 166, 173–4, 187 Bebchuk, Lucian, 198 Becht, Bart, 82–3 Beckwith, John Lionel, 179 behavioural psychology, 44, 47–50, 59–61 Bekar, Clifford, 108, 263 Bell, Alexander Graham, 221 Ben & Jerry’s, 266 Benz, Matthias, 86 Berlusconi, Silvio, 317, 328 Bettelheim, Bruno, 86 Better Government Initiative, 313, 336–7 Better Regulation Task Force, 180 Bhagwati, Jagwad, 163 Big Bang (1986), 90, 162 bin Mahfouz, Khalid Salim, 333 biotechnology, 109, 229, 240, 263, 268 Birt, John, 324 Bischoff Inquiry, 178 BISTRO (broad index secured trust offering), 169, 170, 196 Black, Fisher, 191 Blair, Tony, 5, 17, 138, 141–3, 144, 148–9, 276–7, 313, 328, 342; centralisation of power, 14–15, 313, 334, 337, 341; Iraq War and, 14, 36, 144; Rupert Murdoch and, 318; neo-conservative economics and, 388; ‘third-way’ as enthronement of resignation, 389–90; welfare reforms, 81 Blanchflower, Danny, 264–5 Blanden, Jo, 283–4 Blankfein, Lloyd, 42, 63, 168 BMW, 91 Boeing, 136, 256 Bologna University, 261 Born, Brooksley, 182–3 Bowen, Jeremy, 323 Boyle, Susan, 314 BP, 216–17, 392 Branson, Richard, 30 Brazil, 354–5, 385 Bretton Woods system, 159 Brinkley, Ian, 233 Briscoe, Simon, 294 Bristol University, 263 British Airways (BA), 30, 91 British Broadcasting Company (BBC), 321, 322, 323, 329, 330–1, 350, 389 British National Party (BNP), 16, 24–5, 82 Britishness, 15–16, 124, 392–3, 395 Brompton folding bicycle, 103, 105 Brooks, Clem, 281, 282 Brown, Gordon, 5, 12, 141, 178, 302, 314, 328; centralisation of power, 14, 334, 337, 341; as Chancellor, 138, 143, 145–8, 215, 245; deal with Blair (1994), 148; Gillian Duffy blunder by, 394; general election (2010) and, 20, 378, 394; neo-conservative economics and, 144–8, 388; as visionless, 391; Where There is Greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future (1989), 144 Browne, John, 216 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 126 Buffett, Warren, 116, 173, 222 Building Schools for the Future programme, 371 building societies, demutualisation of, 156, 186 Buiter, Wilhelm, 172 Burrows, Paul, 59 Buscombe, Baroness, 332 Bush, George W., 17, 36, 135, 177 Cabinet Office, 218–19, 336, 337 Cable, Vincent, 220 Cambridge University, 9, 363 Cameron, David, 20, 179, 233–4, 235, 318, 338, 342; ‘Big Society’ policy, 19–20, 234, 271, 280 Campbell, Alastair, 141, 142, 224, 312 Canada, 121, 354, 358–9, 383 capital controls, abolition of, 32, 161 capitalism: see also entrepreneurs; innovation; amorality of, 16–19; ‘arms race’ effects, 105; boom and bust cycle, 181–7, 392; deregulation (from 1970s), 159–63, 388; fairness and, ix, x, 23–7, 41, 106, 122–3, 206–7, 210, 249, 385, 386, 394; as immutable force of nature, ix, 23, 40–2; incumbent firms, 29–30, 31, 105, 106, 110, 111–12, 253–5, 257, 297; interconnectedness of markets, 200–2, 204; knowledge-entrepreneurship dynamic, 27–8, 31, 103, 110–11, 112–13; liquidity as totemic, 199, 200, 202, 240, 243; need for ‘circuit breakers’, 197, 199, 202, 203; network theory and, 199–204, 206; required reforms of, 205–9, 215–16; stakeholder, x, 148–9; undue influence of, 32–3 Carlaw, Kenneth, 108, 263 Carnegie, Andrew, 195, 303 cars, motor, 91, 108, 109, 134, 269 Castells, Manuel, 317 Cayne, Jimmy, 173–4 CCTV cameras, 10 celebrity culture, 282, 314 central banks, 154, 157, 158, 160, 182, 185, 187, 208; see also Bank of England; Federal Reserve, 169–70, 176, 177, 183 Cerberus Capital Management, 177 Cervantes, Miguel de, 274 Channel 4, 330, 350 Charles I, King of England, 124–5 Charter One Financial, 150 chavs, mockery of, 25, 83, 272, 286–8 child poverty, 12, 21, 74–5, 83, 278, 279, 288–90, 291 China, x, 101, 112, 140, 144, 160, 226, 230, 354–5, 385; consumption levels, 375–6, 379, 380, 381; economic conflict with USA, 376–7, 378–80, 381, 382, 383; export led growth, 36, 169, 208, 226, 355–6, 375–7, 379–81, 382–3; rigged exchange rates, 36, 169, 355, 377, 378–9; surpluses of capital and, 149, 154, 169, 171, 208, 226, 375; unfairness of world system and, 383, 385 Christianity, 53, 54, 352, 353 Church of England, 128 Churchill, Winston, 138, 273, 313 Churchill Insurance, 150 Cisco, 253 Citigroup, 152, 158, 172, 177, 184, 202, 203, 242, 247 city academies, 278, 307 City of London, 34, 137, 138, 178–9, 252, 359; as incumbent elite, 14, 26, 31, 32–3, 210, 249, 355; in late nineteenth-century, 128–30; light-touch regulation of, 5, 32, 138, 145, 146–7, 151, 162, 187, 198–9; New Labour and, x–xi, 5, 19, 22, 142, 144–5, 355; remuneration levels see pay of executives and bankers civic engagement, 86, 313 civil service, 13, 221, 273, 312, 343 Clasper, Mike, 178 Clayton Act (USA, 1914), 133 Clegg, Nick, 22, 218, 318, 327–8, 342, 391 Clifton, Pete, 321 Clinton, Bill, 140, 177, 183 coalition government (from May 2010), 14, 20, 22, 37, 307, 311, 343, 346, 390–2; abolition of child trust fund, 302; capital spending cuts, 370–1; deficit reduction programme, xi, 19, 34, 214, 227, 357, 360–1, 364, 369–71, 373, 390–2; emergency budget (June 2010), 369–70; market fundamentalism and, 370; political reform commitment, 35, 341, 343–4, 346, 350, 390, 391; proposed financial reforms, 208, 209, 245, 252, 371; repudiation of Keynesian economics, xi, 390–1 Cohan, William, 158–9 Cohen, Ronald, 12, 245 collapse/crash of financial system, x, xi, 4, 9, 41, 144, 146, 152–4, 158–9, 168; costs of, 7, 19, 138, 152–3, 172, 214–15; errors responsible for, 136, 187–96, 197–204; global interconnectedness, 375, 382–3; lessening of internationalism following, 376–83; need to learn from/understand, 36–7; predictions/warnings of, 148, 153, 180, 182–5; recommended policy responses, 215–16; results of previous credit crunches, 358, 359–60, 361–2 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), 155, 167–8, 174 colonialism, 109, 124 Commodity Future Trading Commission, 182–3 communism, collapse of in Eastern Europe, 16, 19, 135, 140, 163 competition, 29, 30, 33, 51, 156, 185, 186, 207–8, 251; see also ‘open-access societies’; City of London and, 160, 178, 179, 198–9; deregulated banking and, 160, 161, 163, 164, 178, 179, 181; European Union and, 251, 258, 259; fairness and, 89–90, 99, 272; incumbent elites/oligarchs and, 104, 114, 129–30, 131–4, 257; innovation and, 40, 114, 257–60; national authorities/regimes, 201–2, 257–60, 316, 318; state facilitation of, 31 Competition Commission, 257–8 computer games, 233 Confederation of British Industry (CBI), 4, 6–7 Conservative Party, xi, 5, 11, 14, 97–8, 220, 343, 378; broken Britain claims, 16, 227, 271; budget deficit and, 19, 224, 357, 360–1, 368, 379; City/private sector funding of, 179, 257, 344; decline of class-based politics, 341; deregulation and, 32, 160, 161; fairness and, 83, 302, 374, 390; general election (1992) and, 140–1; general election (2010) and, 20, 97, 227, 234, 271, 357, 374, 379, 390; Conservative Party – continued government policies (1979-97), 32, 81, 275–6, 290; inheritance/wealth taxes and, 74, 302–3; market fundamentalism and, 5, 17, 138, 147, 160, 161; poverty and, 21, 279; reduced/small state policy, 20, 22, 233–4, 235 construction industry, 5, 33, 268 consumer goods, types of, 266–7 Continental Illinois collapse, 152, 162 Convention on Modern Liberty, 340 Cook, Robin, 142 Cootner, Paul, 194–5 Copenhagen climate change talks (2009), 226, 231, 385 Corporate Leadership Council, US, 93 Corzine, Jon, 177 county markets, pre-twentieth-century, 90 Coutts, Ken, 363 Cowell, Simon, 314, 315 ‘creative destruction’ process, 111, 112, 134 creative industries, 11, 71, 355 credit cards, 64, 354 credit crunch: see collapse/crash of financial system credit default swaps, 151, 152, 166–8, 170, 171, 175, 176, 191, 203, 207 Crédit Lyonnais collapse, 152 credit-rating agencies, 151, 165, 175, 196, 197, 248, 269, 362, 388; funding of, 151, 196, 207 criminal activity/allegations, 7, 101, 103, 104–5, 138, 167–8 Crosby, James, 178 Cuba, 61 culture, British, 12, 187, 282, 314 Dacre, Paul, 324, 326, 329 Daily Mail, 218, 286, 288, 315, 324, 325–7, 339, 342 Daily Telegraph, 288, 317, 319, 327 Darling, Alistair, 149, 204, 252 Darwin, Charles, 31 Data Monitor, 186 Davies, Howard, 198 Davies, Nick, Flat Earth News, 319, 321, 323–4, 326, 331–2 de Gaulle, Charles, 65 debt, 33, 155, 209, 351–63; corporate/commercial, 8, 29, 181, 245, 248, 352, 354, 359, 363, 374; moral attitudes towards, 351–4, 357, 360–1; necessity of, 155, 351, 353, 354; private, 5, 186, 187, 210, 226, 279–80, 354–7, 359, 363, 373; public, 9, 34, 164, 166, 167, 182, 203, 214, 224–6, 356–7, 362–3, 375, 388, 393; sustainable level of, 356–7, 368–9 Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 265 defence and armed forces, 34, 372 deficit, public, 4, 34, 213, 224–6, 335, 364–74; coalition’s reduction programme, xi, 19, 34, 214, 227, 357, 360–1, 364, 369–71, 373, 390–2, 393; need for fiscal policy, 224–5, 226, 357–8, 364, 365–9, 370, 374; speed of reduction of, 213, 224–5, 360–1, 368, 371 Delingpole, James, 287 Delong, Brad, 27, 106 democracy, 13–15, 235, 310–16, 333–48; centralisation of power and, 14–15, 35, 217, 313, 334, 337, 342; fair process and, 86, 89, 96–9; incumbent elites and, 35, 99; industrial revolution and, 128; media undermining of, 315–16, 317–18, 321–9, 333, 350; ‘open-access societies’ and, 136, 314 Democratic Party, US, 18, 140, 183, 379 Demos, 289 Deng Xiao Ping, 140 Denham, John, 21 deprivation and disadvantage, 10, 34, 288–93, 307–8, 393; low-earning households, 11–12, 13, 291, 361; weight of babies and, 13; young children and, 74–5, 83, 288–90 derivatives, 140, 145, 150–1, 164–8, 171, 175, 188, 207, 209; City of London and, 32, 137, 150–1, 157, 199; mathematical models (‘quants’) and, 188, 191; regulation and, 183, 197–8, 199 desert, due, concept of, 4, 24, 38–43, 45–7, 50–63, 64–8, 73–7, 80–2, 223, 395; see also effort, discretionary; proportionality; big finance and, 40–2, 82, 167, 174, 176, 210; debt and, 351–2; diplomacy/international relations and, 385–6; Enlightenment notions of, 53–6, 58–9, 112; luck and, 70, 73–7, 273; poverty relief systems and, 80–2, 277–8; productive entrepreneurship and, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 222, 392–3; taxation and, 40, 220, 266 Deutsche Bank, 170 developing countries, 71–2, 160, 354–5, 375, 376, 385 Diamond, Bob, 24 Dickens, Charles, 353 digitalisation, 34, 231, 320, 349, 350 Doepke, Matthias, 115–16 dot.com bubble, 9, 193 Drugs Advisory Panel, 11 Duffy, Gillian, 394 Durham University, 263 Dworkin, Ronald, 70 Dyson, James, 28, 33 East India Company, 130 Easyjet, 28, 233 eBay, 136 economic theory, 43–4, 188–9, 366; see also Keynesian economics; market fundamentalism economies of scale, 130–1, 254–5, 258 The Economist, 326, 330, 349 economy, British: see also capitalism; financial system, British; annual consumption levels, 375; balance of payments, 363–4; as ‘big firm’ economy, 254; change in landscape of trading partners, 230–1; coalition capital spending cuts, 370–1; collapse of tax base, 224, 368; cumulative loss of output caused by crash, 138, 153, 172, 214–15; desired level of state involvement, 234–5; domination of market fundamentalism, 16–17; economic boom, 3–4, 5–6, 12, 143, 173, 181–7, 244–5; fall in volatility, 365; fiscal deficit, 368; fiscal policy, 208, 224–5, 226, 357–8, 364–9, 370, 374; growth and, 9–10, 214–15, 218–19, 224, 359, 363; inefficient public spending, 335; investment in ‘intangibles’, 232–3; in late nineteenth-century, 128–30; ‘leading-edge’ sectors, 218–19; need for engaged long term ownership, 240–4, 249–51; as non-saver, 36, 354; potential new markets/opportunities, 231–3; public-private sector interdependence and, 219–22, 229–30, 261, 265–6, 391, 392; required reforms of, 20, 239–44, 249–52, 264–6, 371–4 see also national ecosystem of innovation; ‘specialising sectors’, 219; urgent need for reform, 36–7; volatility of, 297–8; vulnerability of after credit crunch, 358–64 economy, world: acute shortfall of demand, 375–6; Asian and/or OPEC capital surpluses and, 149, 153–4, 169, 171, 208, 226, 354, 375; conflicts of interest and, 137, 138; deregulation (from 1970s), 159–63; emerging powers’ attitudes to, 226; entrenched elites and, 137–8, 210; fall in volatility, 365; international institutions as unfair, 383, 385; London/New York axis, 149, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 187, 202; need for international cooperation, 357–8, 379–80, 381–3, 384, 385–6; post-crunch deleverage pressures, 359–60, 374–5; protectionism dangers, 36, 358, 376–7, 378, 379, 382, 386; savers/non-savers imbalance, 36, 169, 208, 222, 355, 356, 375–6, 378–83; shift of wealth from West to East, 36, 383–4; sovereign debt crises, 167, 203, 214; unheeded warnings, 182–5; wrecking of European ERM, 140, 144 Edinburgh University, 145 education, 10, 20–1, 128, 131, 272–4, 276, 278, 292–5, 304–8, 343; Building Schools for the Future programme, 371; cognitive and mental skills, 288–90, 304–6; private, 13, 114, 264–5, 272–3, 276, 283–4, 293–5, 304, 306 effort, discretionary, 50, 53, 54–5, 58–60, 80, 90–1, 114, 134; see also desert, due, concept of; fair process and, 91–4; indispensability and, 65–7; innovation and invention, 62, 65, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 117, 131, 223, 262–3, 392–3; luck and, 26–7, 65, 67, 70, 71, 73–4, 75–7; productive/unproductive, 43, 46–7, 51–2, 62, 64–5, 102–3, 392–3; proportionate reward for, 26, 39–40, 44, 47, 61, 74, 76–7, 84, 122, 272, 273, 2 84 egalitarianism, 27, 53–4, 55–6, 61, 75, 78–80, 144, 341, 343; Enlightenment equal worth concept, 53, 55, 59–60 Ehrenfeld, Rachel, 333 Eisman, Steve, 207 electoral politics: see also general election (6 May 2010); general elections, 97, 138, 277, 315; fair process and, 96–9; franchise, 128; general election (1992), x, 138, 140–1, 144, 148, 277; general election (1997), x, 138, 141 electricity, 134, 228, 256 electronic trading, 105 elites, incumbent, 23, 31–3, 99, 131; City of London, 14, 26, 31, 32–3, 210, 249, 355; competition and, 104, 113, 114, 129–30, 131–4, 257; democracy and, 35, 99; Enlightenment and, 122; history of (from 1880s), 131–4; history of in Britain (to 1900), 124–30; innovation and, 29–30, 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 115, 116; modern big finance and, 135, 137–8, 180, 210, 387–9; in ‘natural states’, 111, 113, 114–15, 116, 123–4, 127; New Labour’s failure to challenge, x–xi, 14, 22, 388, 389–90; world economy and, 137–8, 210 EMI, 28, 247, 248 employment and unemployment, 6, 75, 291–3, 295, 300, 373, 393; employment insurance concept, 298–9, 301, 374; lifelong learning schemes, 300, 301; lifelong savings plans, 300; unemployment benefit, 81, 281 Engels, Friedrich, 121–2 English language as lingua franca, 124 Enlightenment, European, 22, 30–1, 146, 261, 314–15; economics and, 104, 108–9, 116–17, 121–3; notions of fairness/desert, 53–6, 58–9, 112, 122–3, 394; science and technology and, 31, 108–9, 112–13, 116–17, 121, 126–7 Enron affair, 147 entrepreneurs: see also innovation; productive entrepreneurship; capitalist knowledge dynamic, 27–8, 31, 110–11, 112–13; challenges of the status quo, 29–30; Conservative reforms (1979-97) and, 275; private capital and, 241; public-private sector interdependence and, 219–22, 229–30, 261, 265–6, 391, 392; rent-seeking and, 61–2, 63, 78, 84, 101, 105, 112, 113–14, 116, 129, 135, 180; unproductive, 28–9, 33, 61–2, 63, 78, 84, 101–2, 103–5, 180 environmental issues, 35–6, 71–2, 102, 226, 228, 231, 236, 385, 390, 394; due desert and, 68; German Greens and, 269 Erie Railroad Company, 133 Essex County Council, 325, 332 European Commission, 298 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 140, 144, 166 European Union (EU), 11, 82, 179, 379–80, 383–4, 385; British media and, 15, 328, 378; Competition Commissioner, 251, 258, 259; scepticism towards, 15, 36, 328, 377, 378, 386 eurozone, 377 Fabian Society, 302–3 factory system, 126 fairness: see also desert, due, concept of; proportionality; abuse/playing of system and, 24–5, 27; asset fairness proposals, 301–3, 304; behavioural psychology and, 44, 47–50, 59–61; Blair’s conservative view of, 143; Britishness and, 15–16, 392–3, 395; capitalism and, ix, x, 23–7, 41, 106, 122–3, 206–7, 210, 249, 385, 386, 394; challenges to political left, 78–83; coalition government (from May 2010) and, 22, 37; commonly held attitudes, 44, 45–7; deficit reduction and, 226, 227, 374; economic and social determinism and, 56–8; Enlightenment notions of, 53–6, 58–9, 112, 122–3, 394; fair process, 84–94, 96, 98–9, 272; as foundation of morality, 24, 26, 45, 50; individual responsibility and, 39, 78–9; inequality in Britain, 78, 80, 275–6, 277–8, 342; international relations and, 226, 385–6; ‘Just World Delusion’, 83; luck and, 72–7; management-employee relationships, 90–2; models/frameworks of, 43–58; need for shared understanding of, 25, 37, 43; partisanship about, 42–3; politicians/political parties and, 22, 83, 271–2, 302–3, 374, 391–2; popular support for NHS and, 75, 77, 283; pre-Enlightenment notions, 52–3; shared capitalism and, 66, 92–3; state facilitation of, ix–x, 391–2, 394–5; welfare benefits to migrants and, 81–2, 282, 283, 284 Farnborough Sixth Form College, 294 Federal Reserve, 169–70, 176, 177, 183 Fees Act (1891), 128 Fertile Crescent, 106 feudalism, European, 53–4, 74, 104, 105 financial instruments, 103, 148, 157, 167–8 Financial Services and Markets Act (2001), 198 Financial Services Authority (FSA), 24, 147, 162, 178, 198–9, 208 financial system, British: see also capitalism; economy, British; Asian and/or OPEC capital surpluses and, 149, 154, 354; big finance as entrenched elite, 136, 137–8, 176, 178–80, 210, 387–9; declining support for entrepreneurship, 241; deregulation (1971), 161; fees and commissions, 33; importance of liquidity, 240, 243; lack of data on, 241; London/New York axis, 149, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 187, 202; massive growth of, 137, 138, 209, 219; need for tax reform, 209–10; regulation and see regulation; required reforms to companies, 249–50; savings institutions’ share holdings, 240–1; short termism of markets, 241, 242–3; unfairness of, 138, 210 Financial Times, 12, 149, 294, 330, 349, 361 Fink, Stanley, 179 fiscal policy, 208, 224–5, 226, 357–8, 364–9, 374; coalition rejection of, 370 fish stocks, conservation of, 394 Fitch (credit-rating agencies), 248 flexicurity social system, 299–301, 304, 374 Forbes’ annual list, 30 Ford, Henry, 195, 302 foreign exchange markets, 32, 161, 164, 165, 168, 363, 367; China’s rigged exchange rate, 36, 169, 355, 377, 378–9; currency options, 166, 191; eurozone, 377 foreign takeovers of British firms, 8, 388 Fortune magazine, 94 Foster, Sir Christopher, 313 foundation schools, 307 France, 51–2, 123–4, 163, 372, 375, 377 free trade, 163, 334, 379 Frey, Bruno, 60, 86 Friedman, Benjamin, 282–3 Fukuyama, Francis, 140 Fuld, Dick, 192 Future Jobs Fund, 373 G20 countries, 209, 358, 368, 374 Galliano, John, 143 Gardner, Howard, 274, 305–6 gated communities, 13 Gates, Bill, 71 Gates, Bill (Senior), 222 Gaussian distribution, 190–1, 194 ‘gearing’, 6 general election (6 May 2010), 97, 142, 179, 214, 217, 227, 234, 271, 314, 318, 327–8, 334, 378; Gillian Duffy incident, 394; result of, xi, 20, 345–6, 390 ‘generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasicity’ (GARCH), 194 genetically modified crops, 232 Germany, 36, 63, 244, 262, 269, 375–6, 379, 380; export led growth, 355–6, 375, 381–2; Fraunhofer Institutes, 252, 264; Greek bail-out and, 377; pre-1945 period, 128, 129, 134, 382, 383 Gieve, Sir John, 339–40 Gilligan, Andrew, 329 Gladwell, Malcolm, 76–7 Glasgow University, 323 Glass-Steagall Act, 162, 170, 202–3 Glastonbury festival, 143 globalisation, 32, 98, 140, 143, 144, 153–4, 163, 182, 297, 363, 366, 380 Goldman Sachs, 42, 63, 103, 150, 167–8, 174, 176, 177, 205 Goodwin, Sir Fred, 7, 150, 176, 340 Google, 131, 136, 253, 255, 258, 262 Goolsbee, Austin, 52 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 140 Gough, Ian, 79 Gould, Jay, 133 Gould, Philip, 142 government: see also democracy; political system, British; cabinet government, 312, 334, 337; centralisation of power, 14–15, 35, 217, 313, 334, 337, 341, 342; control of news agenda, 14, 224, 313; disregard of House of Commons, 14–15, 223, 339, 345; Number 10 Downing Street as new royal court, 14, 337, 338, 346, 347; press officers/secretaries, 14, 180, 224, 312; Prime Ministerial power, 337, 344, 345, 346 GPS navigation systems, 233, 265 Gray, Elisha, 221 Great Depression, 159, 162, 205, 362 Greece: classical, 25, 26, 38, 39, 44–5, 52–3, 59, 96, 107, 108; crisis and bail-out (2010), 167, 371, 377, 378 Green, Sir Philip, 12, 29, 33 Green Investment Bank, proposed, 252, 371 Greenhead College, Huddersfield, 294 Greenspan, Alan, 145–6, 165, 177, 183, 184, 197–8 Gregory, James, 277 growth, economic: Britain and, 9–10, 214–15, 219, 221, 359, 364; education and, 305–6; export led growth, 36, 169, 208, 226, 355–6, 375–7, 378–83; social investment and, 280–1 GSK, 219, 254 the Guardian, 319, 330, 349 Gupta, Sanjeev, 367 Gutenberg, Johannes, 110–11 Habsburg Empire, 127 Haines, Joe, 312 Haji-Ioannous, Stelios, 28 Haldane, Andrew, 8, 151, 153, 193, 214, 215 the Halifax, 186, 251 Hamilton, Lewis, 64, 65 Hammersmith and Fulham, Borough of, 167 Hampton, Sir Philip, 173 Hands, Guy, 28, 178, 246–8 Hanley, Lynsey, 291, 293, 302 Hanushek, Eric, 305–6 Hart, Betty, 289 Harvard University, 47, 62, 198 Hashimoto administration in Japan, 362 Hastings, Max, 217–18 Hauser, Marc, 47–50 Hawley, Michael, 65–6 Hayward, Tony, 216–17 HBOS, 157, 158, 178, 251 health and well-being, 9, 75, 77, 106, 232, 233, 290–1; see also National Health Service (NHS) Heckman, James, 290 hedge funds, 6, 21, 103, 157–8, 167–8, 172, 203, 205, 206, 240; collapses of, 152, 173–4, 187, 202; as destabilisers, 166–7, 168; destruction of ERM, 140, 144, 166; near collapse of LTCM, 169–70, 183, 193, 200–1 hedging, 164, 165–6 Heinz, Henry John, 302 Hermes fund management company, 242 Herrman, Edwina, 179 Herstatt Bank collapse, 152 Hetherington, Mark, 84 Hewitt, Patricia, 180 Hewlett-Packard, 30 Hills Report on social housing, 290 Hilton, Paris, 304 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 146 Hirst, Damien, 12 history, economic, 121–36, 166, 285–6, 353–4 Hobhouse, Leonard, 220, 222, 234, 235, 261, 266 Hobsbawm, Eric, 100 Hoffman, Elizabeth, 60 Holland, 113, 124, 230 Honda, 91, 269 Hong Kong, 168 Hopkins, Harry, 300 Horton, Tim, 277 House of Commons, 14–15, 223, 312–13, 337–9, 345 House of Lords, 15, 128, 129, 312, 334, 344, 346–7 housing, social, 10, 289, 290–1, 292, 308–9 housing cost credits, 308–9 HSBC, 181, 251 Huhne, Chris, 346 Hunt family, sale of cattle herds, 201 Hurka, Thomas, 45–6 Hutton, Will, works of, x; The State We’re In, x, 148–9 IBM, 29, 164, 254 Iceland, 7, 138 ICT industry, 9, 29–30, 109, 134, 135–6, 182, 229 immigration, 11, 143, 326, 328, 342, 343, 386, 394; from Eastern Europe, 82, 281–2, 283; welfare state and, 81–2, 281–2, 283, 284 incapacity benefit, 27 the Independent, 93, 330 Independent Safeguarding Authority, 339 India, 144, 226, 230, 254, 354–5 individual responsibility, 17, 38, 39, 78–9 individualism, 54, 57, 66, 111, 221, 281, 341, 366; capitalism/free market theories and, ix, 17, 19, 27, 40, 145, 221, 234–5 Indonesia, 168 Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (now 3i), 250 industrial revolution, 28, 112, 115, 121–3, 124, 126–8, 130, 315 inflation, 6, 32, 355, 364, 365; targets, 163, 165, 208, 359 Ingham, Bernard, 312 innovation: see also entrepreneurs; national ecosystem of innovation; as collective and social, 40, 131, 219–22, 261, 265–6, 388; comparisons between countries, 67; competition and, 40, 114, 257–60; development times, 240, 243; discretionary effort and, 62, 65, 102–3, 105–6, 131, 222, 392–3; dissemination of knowledge and, 110–11, 112–13, 219–22, 265–6; due desert and, 40, 62, 67, 112, 117; ‘financial innovation’, 63–4, 138, 147, 149, 153–4, 182; general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 107–11, 112, 117, 126–7, 134, 228–9, 256, 261, 384; high taxation as deterrent, 104, 105; history of, 107–17, 121–7, 131–4, 221; increased pace of advance, 228–9, 230, 266–7; incremental, 108, 254, 256; incumbent elites and, 29–30, 104, 106, 109, 111–12, 113, 114, 115, 116, 257; large firms and, 251–2, 254–5; as natural to humans, 106–7, 274; need for network of specialist banks, 251–2, 265, 371; in ‘open-access societies’, 109–13, 114, 116–17, 122–3, 126–7, 131, 136, 315; patents and copyright, 102, 103, 105, 110, 260–1, 263; private enterprise and, 100–1; regulation and, 268–70; risk-taking and, 6, 103, 111, 189; short term investment culture and, 33, 242–3, 244; small firms and, 252, 253–4, 255–6; universities and, 261–5 Innovation Fund, 21, 251, 252 Institute of Fiscal Studies, 275–6, 363, 368–9, 372 Institute of Government, 334, 335, 337, 343 insurance, 165–6, 187, 240, 242 Intel, 255, 256 intellectual property, 260–1 interest rates, 164, 191, 352–3, 354, 357, 359, 360, 361, 362, 367, 380 internal combustion engine, 28, 109, 134 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 9, 152–3, 177–8, 187, 207, 226, 383, 384; Asian currency crisis (1997) and, 168–9; proposed bank levy and financial activities tax, 209; support for fiscal policy, 367 internet, 11, 28, 52, 109, 134, 227, 256, 265; news and politics on, 316–17, 321, 349; pay-walls, 316, 349; as threat to print media, 324, 331, 349 iPods, 105, 143 Iraq War, 14–15, 18, 36, 144, 329 Ireland, 138 iron steamships, 126 Islam, 352, 353 Islamic fundamentalism, 283, 384 Israel, 251, 322–3 Italy, 101, 103, 317, 328 ITN, 330, 331 James, Howell, 180 Japan, 36, 67, 140, 163, 168, 244, 369, 375, 376, 385, 386; credit crunch (1989-92), 359–60, 361–2, 382; debt levels, 356, 362, 363; incumbent elites in early twentieth-century, 134; Tokyo Bay, 254; Top Runner programme, 269 Jenkins, Roger, 296 Jobcentre Plus, 300 Jobs, Steve, 29–30, 65–6, 71 John Lewis Group, 66, 67, 93, 246 Johnson, Boris, 179 Johnson, Simon, 177 Jones, Tom, 242 Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 21, 278–9 journalism, 318–21, 323–4, 326–7 Jovanovic, Boyan, 256 JP Morgan, 169, 191–2, 195–6 judges, 15 justice systems, 30–1, 44–5, 49; symbolised by pair of scales, 4, 40 Kahneman, Daniel, 94–5 Kant, Immanuel, 73, 112, 274 Kay, John, 175 Kennedy, Helena, 340 Keynesian economics, x, xi, 184, 190, 196–7, 354, 362, 390–1 Kindleberger, Charles, 184 King, Mervyn, 213 Kinnock, Neil, 142 kitemarking, need for, 267 Klenow, Peter, 52 Knetsch, Jack, 94–5 Knight, Frank, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921), 189, 191, 196–7 knowledge: capitalist advance of, 27–8, 31, 110–11, 112–13; public investment in learning, 28, 31, 40, 131, 220, 235, 261, 265 knowledge economy, 8, 11–12, 34, 135–6, 229–33, 258, 273–4, 341, 366; credit growth and, 355; graduate entry to, 295; large firms and, 251–2, 254–5; small firms and, 252, 253–4, 255–6, 261; state facilitation of, 219–22, 229–30 Koizumi administration in Japan, 362 Koo, Richard, 360, 361–2 Kuper, Simon, 352 Kwak, James, 64, 177 labour market, 52, 62, 83, 95; flexibility, 5, 275, 276, 299, 364–5, 387 laissez-faire ideology, 153, 198–9, 259 Laker, Freddie, 30 Lambert, Richard, 6–7 language acquisition and cognitive development, 288, 289 Large Hadron Collider, 263 Latin American debt crisis, 164 Lavoisier, Antoine, 31 Lazarus, Edmund, 179 Leahy, Sir Terry, 295 Learning and Skills Council, 282, 300 left wing politics, modern, 17, 38, 78–83 Lehman Brothers, 150, 152, 165, 170, 181, 192, 204 lender-of-last-resort function, 155, 158, 160, 187 Lerner, Melvin, 83 leverage, 6, 29, 154–6, 157, 158, 172, 179, 180, 198, 204, 209–10, 254, 363; disguised on balance sheet, 181, 195; effect on of credit crunches, 358, 359, 360, 361, 374–5; excess/massive levels, 7, 147–8, 149, 150–1, 158, 168, 170, 187, 192, 197, 203; need for reform of, 206, 207, 208; private equity and, 245–6, 247 Lewis, Jemima, 282, 287 Lewis, Joe, 12 libel laws, 332–3, 348–9 Liberal Democrats, xi, 11, 98, 141, 343, 360–1, 368; general election (2010) and, 97, 142, 179, 271, 390 libertarianism, 234 Likierman, Sir Andrew, 180 limited liability (introduced 1855), 353–4, 363 Lind, Allan, 85 Lindert, Peter, 280–1 Lipsey, Richard, 108, 263 Lisbon earthquake (1755), 54 Lisbon Treaty Constitution, 328 literacy and numeracy, 20–1 livestock fairs, pre-twentieth-century, 90 Lloyds Bank, 176, 178, 186, 202, 204, 251, 259 Lo, Andrew, 195 loan sharks, illegal, 291 local government, 307, 347–8 Locke, John, 54–5, 59 London School of Economics (LSE), 246 London Stock Exchange, 90, 162 London Underground, financing of, 336, 389 lone parent families, 292 Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), 169–70, 183, 193, 194, 200–1 long-term incentive plans (LTIPs), 6 Loomes, Graham, 59 luck, 23, 26–7, 38, 39, 40, 41, 67, 68, 69–77, 222, 273, 393–4; diplomacy/international relations and, 385–6; disadvantaged children and, 74–5, 83, 288–90; executive pay and, 138; taxation and, 73–4, 75, 78, 303 Luxembourg, 138 MacDonald, Ramsey, 315 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 62 Machin, Steve, 283–4 Macmillan Committee into City (1931), 179 Madoff, Bernie, 7 mafia, Italian, 101, 104–5 Major, John, 138, 180, 279, 334 Malaysia, 168 malls, out-of-town, 143 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 194, 195 Mandelson, Peter, 21, 24, 142, 148, 220 manufacturing sector, decline of, 5, 8, 219, 272, 292, 341, 363 Manza, Jeff, 281, 282 Marconi, 142–3 market fundamentalism, 9–19, 32–3, 40–2, 366; belief in efficiency of markets, 188–9, 190, 193, 194, 235–9, 366; coalition government (from May 2010) and, 370; collapse of, 3–4, 7–9, 19, 20, 219–20, 235, 392; Conservative Party and, 5, 17, 138, 147, 160, 161; domination of, 5–6, 14, 16–17, 163, 364–5, 387–90; likely resurgence of, 5, 8; New Labour and, x–xi, 5, 19, 144–9, 388, 389–90; post-communist fiasco in Russia, 135; rejection of fiscal policy, 224–5, 364–5, 367 mark-to-market accounting convention, 175 Marland, Lord Jonathan, 179 Marquand, David, 328 Marsh, Jodie, 64, 65 Marx, Karl, 56–8, 121–2 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 232, 274–5 mass production, 109, 134, 182 Masters, Blythe, 196 mathematical models (‘quants’), 105, 149, 151, 152, 165, 169, 188, 190–6, 203; extensions and elaborations, 194; Gaussian distribution, 190–1, 194; JP Morgan and, 195–6 Matthewson, Sir George (former chair of RBS), 25 Maude, Francis, 180 Mayhew, Henry, 285–6 McCartney, Paul, 247 McGoldrick, Mark, 174 McKinsey Global Institute, 253, 358–9, 360, 363 McQueen, Alexander, 143 media, mainstream, 6, 35, 312, 315–20, 321–32, 348–50; commoditisation of information, 318–20, 321; communications technology and, 316, 320, 349; domination of state by, 14, 16, 223–4, 338, 339, 343; fanatical anti-Europeanism, 15, 328, 378; foreign/tax exile ownership of, 218; hysterical tabloid campaigns, 10–11, 298, 319–20; ‘info-capitalism’, 317–18, 327, 328, 342; lauding of celebrity, 281, 314; modern 24/7 news agenda, 13, 224, 321, 343; regional newspapers, 331; as setter of agenda/narrative, 327–31, 342; television news, 330–1; undermining of democracy, 315–16, 317–18, 321–9, 333, 350; urgent need for reform, 35, 218, 344, 348–50, 391; view of poverty as deserved, 25, 53, 83, 281, 286; weakness of foreign coverage, 322, 323, 330 Mencken, H.L., 311 mergers and takeovers, 8, 21, 33, 92, 245, 251, 258, 259, 388 Merkel, Angela, 381–2 Merrill Lynch, 150, 170, 175, 192 Merton, Robert, 169, 191 Meucci, Antonnio, 221 Mexico, 30, 385 Meyer, Christopher, 332 Michalek, Richard, 175 Microsoft, 71, 114, 136, 253, 254, 258–9 Milburn, Alan, 273 Miles, David, 186–7 Milgram, Stanley, 200 millennium bug, 319 Miller, David, 70, 76, 77 minimum wage, 142, 278 Minsky, Hyman, 183, 185 Mirror newspapers, 319, 329 Mlodinow, Leonard, 72–3 MMR vaccine, 327 mobile phones, 30, 134, 143, 229, 349 modernity, 54–5, 104 Mokyr, Joel, 112 monarchy, 15, 312, 336 Mondragon, 94 monetary policy, 154, 182, 184, 185, 208, 362, 367 monopolies, 74, 102, 103, 160, 314; history of, 104, 113, 124, 125–6, 130–4; in the media, 30, 317, 318, 331, 350; modern new wave of, 35, 135–6, 137–8, 201–2, 258–9; ‘oligarchs’, 30, 65, 104 Monopolies and Mergers Commission, 258, 318 Moody’s (credit-ratings agency), 151, 175 morality, 16–27, 37, 44–54, 70, 73; see also desert, due, concept of; fairness; proportionality; debt and, 351–4, 357, 360–1 Morgan, JP, 67 Morgan, Piers, 329 Morgan Stanley, 150 Mulas-Granados, Carlos, 367 Murdoch, James, 389 Murdoch, Rupert, 317–18, 320, 327 Murphy, Kevin, 62, 63 Murray, Jim ‘Mad Dog’, 321 Myners, Paul, 340 Nash bargaining solution, 60 National Audit Office, 340 National Child Development Study, 289–90 national ecosystem of innovation, 33–4, 65, 103, 206, 218, 221, 239–44, 255–9, 374; state facilitation of, 102, 219–22, 229–30, 233, 251–2, 258–66, 269–70, 392 National Health Service (NHS), 21, 27, 34, 92, 265, 277, 336, 371–2; popular support for, 75, 77, 283 national insurance system, 81, 277, 302 national strategy for neighbourhood renewal, 278 Navigation Acts, abolition of, 126 Neiman, Susan, 18–19 neo-conservatism, 17–18, 144–9, 387–90 network theory, 199–201, 202–4, 206; Pareto curve and, 201–2 New Economics Foundation, 62 New Industry New Jobs strategy, 21 New Labour: budget deficit and, 224, 335, 360, 368, 369; business friendly/promarket policies, x–xi, 139–40, 142, 145, 146–7, 162, 198–9, 382; City of London and, x–xi, 5, 19, 22, 142–3, 144–5, 355; decline of class-based politics, 341; failure to challenge elites, x–xi, 14, 22, 388, 389–90; general election (1992) and, 138, 140–1, 144, 148, 277; general election (2005) and, 97; general election (2010) and, 20, 271, 334, 374, 378; light-touch regulation and, 138, 145, 146–7, 162, 198–9; New Industry New Jobs strategy, 21; one-off tax on bank bonuses, 26, 179, 249; record in government, 10–11, 19, 20–2, 220, 276–80, 302, 306, 334–6, 366–7, 389–90; reforms to by ‘modernisers’, 141; responses to newspaper campaigns, 11 New York markets, 140, 152, 162; Asian and/or OPEC capital surpluses and, 169, 171, 354; London/New York axis, 149, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 188, 202 Newsweek, 174 Newton, Isaac, 31, 127, 190 NHS Direct, 372 Nicoli, Eric, 13 non-executive directors (NEDs), 249–50 Nordhaus, William, 260 Nordic countries, 262; Iceland, 7, 138; Norway, 281; Sweden, 264, 281 North, Douglas, 113, 116, 129–30 Northern Rock, 9, 156, 157, 158, 186, 187–8, 202, 204, 251, 340–1 Norton Publishing, 93 Nozick, Robert, 234, 235 nuclear non-proliferation, 226, 384, 394 Nussbaum, Martha, 79 Obama, Barack, 18, 183, 380, 382–3, 394–5 the Observer, 141, 294, 327 Office for Budget Responsibility, 360 Office of Fair Trading (OFT), 257, 258 OFSTED, 276 oil production, 322; BP Gulf of Mexico disaster (2010), 216–17, 392; finite stocks and, 230, 384; OPEC, 149, 161, 171; price increase (early 1970s), 161; in USA, 130, 131, 132 Olsen, Ken, 29 Olympics (2012), 114 open markets, 29, 30, 31, 40, 89, 92, 100–1, 366, 377, 379, 382, 384; see also ‘open-access societies’; as determinants of value, 51–2, 62; fairness and, 60–1, 89–91, 94–6; ‘reference prices’ and, 94–6 ‘open-access societies’, 134, 135, 258, 272, 273, 275, 276, 280–1, 394; Britain as ‘open-access society’ (to 1850), 124, 126–7; democracy and, 136, 314; Enlightenment and, 30–1, 314–15, 394; innovation and invention in, 109–13, 114, 116–17, 122–3, 126–7, 131, 136, 315; partial political opening in, 129–30; US New Freedom programme, 132–3 opium production, 102 options, 166, 188, 191 Orange County derivatives losses, 167 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 180, 337, 373 Orwell, George, 37 Osborne, George, 147, 208, 224, 245, 302, 338 Overend, Gurney and Co., 156–7 Oxbridge/top university entry, 293–4, 306 Oxford University, 261 Page, Scott, 204 Paine, Tom, 347 Pareto, Vilfredo, 201–2 Paribas, 152, 187 Parkinson, Lance-Bombardier Ben, 13 participation, political, 35, 86, 96, 99 Paulson, Henry, 177 Paulson, John, 103, 167–8 pay of executives and bankers, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 22, 66–7, 138, 387; bonuses, 6, 25–6, 41, 174–5, 176, 179, 208, 242, 249, 388; high levels/rises of, 6–7, 13, 25, 82–3, 94, 172–6, 216, 296, 387, 393; Peter Mandelson on, 24; post-crash/bail-outs, 176, 216; in private equity houses, 248; remuneration committees, 6, 82, 83, 176; shared capitalism and, 66, 93; spurious justifications for, 42, 78, 82–3, 94, 176, 216 pension, state, 81, 372, 373 pension funds, 240, 242 Pettis, Michael, 379–80 pharmaceutical industry, 219, 255, 263, 265, 267–8 Phelps, Edmund, 275 philanthropy and charitable giving, 13, 25, 280 Philippines, 168 Philippon, Thomas, 172–3 Philips Electronics, Royal, 256 Pimco, 177 piracy, 101–2 Plato, 39, 44 Player, Gary, 76 pluralist state/society, x, 35, 99, 113, 233, 331, 350, 394 Poland, 67, 254 political parties, 13–14, 340, 341, 345, 390; see also under entries for individual parties political system, British: see also democracy; centralised constitution, 14–15, 35, 217, 334; coalitions as a good thing, 345–6; decline of class-based politics, 341; devolving of power to Cardiff and Edinburgh, 15, 334; expenses scandal, 3, 14, 217, 313, 341; history of (to late nineteenth-century), 124–30; lack of departmental coordination, 335, 336, 337; long-term policy making and, 217; monarchy and, 15, 312, 336; politicians’ lack of experience outside politics, 338; required reforms of, 344–8; select committee system, 339–40; settlement (of 1689), 125; sovereignty and, 223, 346, 347, 378; urgent need for reform, 35, 36–7, 218, 344; voter-politician disengagement, 217–18, 310, 311, 313–14, 340 Pommerehne, Werner, 60 population levels, world, 36 Portsmouth Football Club, 352 Portugal, 108, 109, 121, 377 poverty, 278–9; child development and, 288–90; circumstantial causes of, 26, 283–4; Conservative Party and, 279; ‘deserving’/’undeserving’ poor, 276, 277–8, 280, 284, 297, 301; Enlightenment views on, 53, 55–6; need for asset ownership, 301–3, 304; political left and, 78–83; the poor viewed as a race apart, 285–7; as relative not absolute, 55, 84; Adam Smith on, 55, 84; structure of market economy and, 78–9, 83; view that the poor deserve to be poor, 25, 52–3, 80, 83, 281, 285–8, 297, 301, 387; worldwide, 383, 384 Power2010 website, 340–1 PR companies and media, 322, 323 Press Complaints Commission (PCC), 325, 327, 331–2, 348 preventative medicine, 371 Price, Lance, 328, 340 Price, Mark, 93 Prince, Chuck, 184 printing press, 109, 110–11 prisoners, early release of, 11 private-equity firms, 6, 28–9, 158, 172, 177, 179, 205, 244–9, 374 Procter & Gamble, 167, 255 productive entrepreneurship, 6, 22–3, 28, 29–30, 33, 61–2, 63, 78, 84, 136, 298; in British history (to 1850), 28, 124, 126–7, 129; due desert/fairness and, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 223, 272, 393; general-purpose technologies (GPTs) and, 107–11, 112, 117, 126–7, 134, 228–9, 256, 261, 384 property market: baby boomer generation and, 372–3; Barker Review, 185; boom in, 5, 143, 161, 183–4, 185–7, 221; bust (1989-91), 161, 163; buy-to-let market, 186; commercial property, 7, 356, 359, 363; demutualisation of building societies, 156, 186; deregulation (1971) and, 161; Japanese crunch (1989-92) and, 361–2; need for tax on profits from home ownership, 308–9, 373–4; property as national obsession, 187; residential mortgages, 7, 183–4, 186, 356, 359, 363; securitised loans based mortgages, 171, 186, 188; shadow banking system and, 171, 172; ‘subprime’ mortgages, 64, 152, 161, 186, 203 proportionality, 4, 24, 26, 35, 38, 39–40, 44–6, 51, 84, 218; see also desert, due, concept of; contributory/discretionary benefits and, 63; diplomacy/ international relations and, 385–6; job seeker’s allowance as transgression of, 81; left wing politics and, 80; luck and, 73–7, 273; policy responses to crash and, 215–16; poverty relief systems and, 80–1; profit and, 40, 388; types of entrepreneurship and, 61–2, 63 protectionism, 36, 358, 376–7, 378, 379, 382, 386 Prussia, 128 Public Accounts Committee, 340 Purnell, James, 338 quantitative easing, 176 Quayle, Dan, 177 race, disadvantage and, 290 railways, 9, 28, 105, 109–10, 126 Rand, Ayn, 145, 234 Rawls, John, 57, 58, 63, 73, 78 Reagan, Ronald, 135, 163 recession, xi, 3, 8, 9, 138, 153, 210, 223, 335; of 1979-81 period, 161; efficacy of fiscal policy, 367–8; VAT decrease (2009) and, 366–7 reciprocity, 43, 45, 82, 86, 90, 143, 271, 304, 382; see also desert, due, concept of; proportionality Reckitt Benckiser, 82–3 Regional Development Agencies, 21 regulation: see also Bank of England; Financial Services Authority (FSA); Bank of International Settlements (BIS), 169, 182; Basel system, 158, 160, 163, 169, 170–1, 196, 385; big as beautiful in global banking, 201–2; Big Bang (1986), 90, 162; by-passing of, 137, 187; capital requirements/ratios, 162–3, 170–1, 208; dismantling of post-war system, 149, 158, 159–63; economists’ doubts over deregulation, 163; example of China, 160; failure to prevent crash, 154, 197, 198–9; Glass-Steagall abolition (1999), 170, 202–3; light-touch, 5, 32, 138, 151, 162, 198–9; New Deal rules (1930s), 159, 162; in pharmaceutical industry, 267–8; as pro-business tool, 268–70; proposed Financial Policy Committee, 208; required reforms of, 267, 269–70, 376, 377, 384, 392; reserve requirements scrapped (1979), 208; task of banking authorities, 157; Top Runner programme in Japan, 269 Reinhart, Carmen, 214, 356 Repo 105 technique, 181 Reshef, Ariell, 172–3 Reuters, 322, 331 riches and wealth, 11–13, 272–3, 283–4, 387–8; see also pay of executives and bankers; the rich as deserving of their wealth, 25–6, 52, 278, 296–7 Rickards, James, 194 risk, 149, 158, 165, 298–302, 352–3; credit default swaps and, 151, 152, 166–8, 170, 171, 175, 176, 191, 203, 207; derivatives and see derivatives; distinction between uncertainty and, 189–90, 191, 192–3, 196–7; employment insurance concept, 298–9, 301, 374; management, 165, 170, 171, 189, 191–2, 193–4, 195–6, 202, 203, 210, 354; securitisation and, 32, 147, 165, 169, 171, 186, 188, 196; structured investment vehicles and, 151, 165, 169, 171, 188; value at risk (VaR), 171, 192, 195, 196 Risley, Todd, 289 Ritchie, Andrew, 103 Ritter, Scott, 329 Robinson, Sir Gerry, 295 Rogoff, Ken, 214, 356 rogue states, 36 Rolling Stones, 247 Rolls-Royce, 219, 231 Rome, classical, 45, 74, 108, 116 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 133, 300 Rothermere, Viscount, 327 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56, 58, 112 Rousseau, Peter, 256 Rowling, J.K., 64, 65 Rowthorn, Robert, 292, 363 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 25, 150, 152, 157, 173, 181, 199, 251, 259; collapse of, 7, 137, 150, 158, 175–6, 202, 203, 204; Sir Fred Goodwin and, 7, 150, 176, 340 Rubin, Robert, 174, 177, 183 rule of law, x, 4, 220, 235 Russell, Bertrand, 189 Russia, 127, 134–5, 169, 201, 354–5, 385; fall of communism, 135, 140; oligarchs, 30, 65, 135 Rwandan genocide, 71 Ryanair, 233 sailing ships, three-masted, 108 Sandbrook, Dominic, 22 Sands, Peter (CEO of Standard Chartered Bank), 26 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 51, 377 Sassoon, Sir James, 178 Scholes, Myron, 169, 191, 193 Schumpeter, Joseph, 62, 67, 111 science and technology: capitalist dynamism and, 27–8, 31, 112–13; digitalisation, 34, 231, 320, 349, 350; the Enlightenment and, 31, 108–9, 112–13, 116–17, 121, 126–7; general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 107–11, 112, 117, 126–7, 134, 228–9, 256, 261, 384; increased pace of advance, 228–9, 253, 297; nanotechnology, 232; New Labour improvements, 21; new opportunities and, 33–4, 228–9, 231–3; new technologies, 232, 233, 240; universities and, 261–5 Scotland, devolving of power to, 15, 334 Scott, James, 114–15 Scott Bader, 93 Scott Trust, 327 Second World War, 134, 313 Securities and Exchanges Commission, 151, 167–8 securitisation, 32, 147, 165, 169, 171, 186, 187, 196 self-determination, 85–6 self-employment, 86 self-interest, 59, 60, 78 Sen, Amartya, 51, 232, 275 service sector, 8, 291, 341, 355 shadow banking system, 148, 153, 157–8, 170, 171, 172, 187 Shakespeare, William, 39, 274, 351 shareholders, 156, 197, 216–17, 240–4, 250 Sher, George, 46, 50, 51 Sherman Act (USA, 1890), 133 Sherraden, Michael, 301 Shiller, Robert, 43, 298, 299 Shimer, Robert, 299 Shleifer, Andrei, 62, 63, 92 short selling, 103 Sicilian mafia, 101, 105 Simon, Herbert, 222 Simpson, George, 142–3 single mothers, 17, 53, 287 sixth form education, 306 Sky (broadcasting company), 30, 318, 330, 389 Skype, 253 Slim, Carlos, 30 Sloan School of Management, 195 Slumdog Millionaire, 283 Smith, Adam, 55, 84, 104, 112, 121, 122, 126, 145–6 Smith, John, 148 Snoddy, Ray, 322 Snow, John, 177 social capital, 88–9, 92 social class, 78, 130, 230, 304, 343, 388; childcare and, 278, 288–90; continued importance of, 271, 283–96; decline of class-based politics, 341; education and, 13, 17, 223, 264–5, 272–3, 274, 276, 292–5, 304, 308; historical development of, 56–8, 109, 115–16, 122, 123–5, 127–8, 199; New Labour and, 271, 277–9; working-class opinion, 16, 143 social investment, 10, 19, 20–1, 279, 280–1 social polarisation, 9–16, 34–5, 223, 271–4, 282–5, 286–97, 342; Conservative reforms (1979-97) and, 275–6; New Labour and, 277–9; private education and, 13, 223, 264–5, 272–3, 276, 283–4, 293–5, 304; required reforms for reduction of, 297–309 social security benefits, 277, 278, 299–301, 328; contributory, 63, 81, 283; flexicurity social system, 299–301, 304, 374; to immigrants, 81–2, 282, 283, 284; job seeker’s allowance, 81, 281, 298, 301; New Labour and ‘undeserving’ claimants, 143, 277–8; non-contributory, 63, 79, 81, 82; targeting of/two-tier system, 277, 281 socialism, 22, 32, 38, 75, 138, 144, 145, 394 Soham murder case, 10, 339 Solomon Brothers, 173 Sony, 254–5 Soros, George, 166 Sorrell, Martin, 349 Soskice, David, 342–3 South Korea, 168, 358–9 South Sea Bubble, 125–6 Spain, 123–4, 207, 358–9, 371, 377 Spamann, Holger, 198 special purpose vehicles, 181 Spitzer, Matthew, 60 sport, cheating in, 23 stakeholder capitalism, x, 148–9 Standard Oil, 130–1, 132 state, British: anti-statism, 20, 22, 233–4, 235, 311; big finance’s penetration of, 176, 178–80; ‘choice architecture’ and, 238, 252; desired level of involvement, 234–5; domination of by media, 14, 16, 221, 338, 339, 343; facilitation of fairness, ix–x, 391–2, 394–5; investment in knowledge, 28, 31, 40, 220, 235, 261, 265; need for government as employer of last resort, 300; need for hybrid financial system, 244, 249–52; need for intervention in markets, 219–22, 229–30, 235–9, 252, 392; need for reshaping of, 34; pluralism, x, 35, 99, 113, 233, 331, 350, 394; public ownership, 32, 240; target-setting in, 91–2; threats to civil liberty and, 340 steam engine, 110, 126 Steinmueller, W.

…

To prosper in the economic sphere, human beings must put aside their instincts for morality and living a meaningful life. Instead, they must embrace self-interest and whatever response is forced on them by impersonal market judgements. Conservatives have been at the forefront of championing this amoral market fundamentalism. In this universe morality becomes a personal matter of conscience. It has no role in the economic sphere, and in social and interpersonal relationships individuals must accept personal responsibility. We are no longer social animals; to do things together collectively denies our essential individualism.

The Global Minotaur
by Yanis Varoufakis and Paul Mason
Published 4 Jul 2015

The Minotaur’s most unsightly handmaiden had been emancipated. The question that now remains is: how will it manage without the Global Minotaur? We shall leave such speculation to the end of the book. The return of predatory governance, vacuous economics and the curious tragedy of market fundamentalism Free market fundamentalism, at the levels both of political ideas and of economic theory, has already featured as one of our Minotaur’s handmaidens (see chapter 5, Toxic theory, parts A and B). In a sense, it functioned in ways not much different from the way in which Marxism was employed under the Soviet regime: more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

…

The top earners, the parts of American society that worked in or around the financial institutions, the fossil fuel industry, the industrial sectors attached to the military-industrial complex (mainly the electronics, IT-related, aeronautical and mechanical engineering sectors). It also benefited those lucky enough to own a part of Walmart-type, highly exploitative firms. The Minotaur worked for them. And free market fundamentalism was its ideological handmaiden. As for the actual ideals underpinning free market fundamentalism, their fate was identical to that of Marxism in Moscow: they became the first victims of its political champions’ rise to power. Indeed, when, in 1981, Ronald Reagan entered the White House, he spoke the language of supply-side economics, balanced budgets, the withering of big government (ironically, an expression first coined by Marx), etc.

…

ABN-Amro, takeover by RBS, 119–20 ACE (aeronautic–computer–electronics) complex, 83 Acheson, Dean, 68 Adenauer, Konrad, 74 Afghanistan, proposed US invasion, 106–7 Africa: colonization, 79; investment in, 214, 218, 252, 253 agriculture, 26, 31 AIG (American Insurance Group), 150, 153, 159 Akins, James, 97 Allied Control Council, 70 America see US (United States) American Civil War, 40 Anglo-Celtic model, 12–13, 23, 117, 199 Anglo-Celtic societies, 20, 128–9 Anglo Irish Bank, 158 Angola, effect of China on, 214–15 AOL-Time Warner, 117 apartheid, in the US, 84 aporia, 1, 3–4, 25, 33, 146 Argentina: Crash of 2008, 163; currency unions, 61, 65; effect of China on, 215, 218; financial crisis, 190; trade with Asia, 215 asabiyyah (solidarity), 33–4 Asia: investment in, 191, 215; investors from, 175; reaction to the Crash of 2008, 13; surplus output, 184; US-controlled, 78 see also East Asia; South East Asia; specific countries ATMs (automated telling machines): virtual, 8, 9; Volcker on, 122 Australia: effect of China on, 214; house prices, 128, 129, 129; Reserve Bank, 160 balance, global, 22 Bank of America, 153, 157, 158 Bank of Canada, 148, 155 Bank of Denmark, 157 Bank of England: and Barings Bank, 40; and the Crash of 2008, 151, 155, 156, 158; and Northern Rock, 148; rates, 148, 159 Bank of Japan, 148, 187, 189 Bank of Sweden, 157 bankruptocracy, 164–8, 169, 191, 230, 236, 237, 250 banks: bonuses, 8; and the EFSF, 175; main principle of, 130; nationalization, 153, 154, 155, 158; Roosevelt’s regulations, 10; runs on, 148; zombie, 190–1 see also specific banks Barclays Bank, 151, 152 Barings Bank, 40 bauxite, prices, 96 Bear Stearns, 147, 151 Belgium, 75, 79, 120, 154, 196 Berlin crisis, 71 Berlin Wall, demolition, 201 Bernanke, Ben, 147, 148, 164, 230, 231, 233, 234 Big Bang, 138 bio-fuels, 163 biological weapons, 27 Black Monday, 2, 10 Blake, William, 29 BNP-Paribas, 147–8 boom to bust cycle, 35 Bradford and Bingley, 154 Brazil: Crash of 2008, 163; effect of China on, 215, 217, 218, 253; trade with Asia, 215 Bretton Woods conference, 58–61, 62, 64, 254–5 Bretton Woods system, 60, 62, 63, 67, 78, 92–3; end, 94, 95–6 Britain: Crash of 2008, 2, 159; crisis of 1847, 40; devaluing of the pound, 93; economy under Thatcher, 136–7; Global Plan, 69; gold request, 94; Gold Standard, 44; Icelandic bank nationalization, 155; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; stance on Cyprus, 79; stance on India, 79; unemployment rate, 160 British Academy, 4, 5, 6 Buffet, Warren, 8 bureaucracies, rise of, 27 Bush, George W., 149, 156, 157 Byrnes, James, 68 capital, and the human will, 18–19 capitalism: dynamic system, 139–40; free market, 68; generation of crises, 34; global, 58, 72, 114, 115, 133; Greenspan and, 11–12; Marxism, 17–18; static system, 139; supposed cure for poverty, 41–2; surplus recycling mechanisms, 64–5 capitalists, origin of, 31 car production, 70, 103, 116, 157–8 carry trade, 189–90 Carter, Jimmy, 99, 100 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), 141–2, 147–8, 149, 150, 153; for crops, 163; eurozone, 205; explanation, 6–9; France, 203; function, 130–2; Greece, 206 see also EFSF; Geithner–Summers Plan CDSs (credit default swaps), 149, 150, 153, 154, 176, 177 CEOs (chief executive officers), 46, 48, 49 Chamber of Commerce, British, 152 cheapness, ideology of, 124 Chiang Kai-shek, 76 Chicago Commodities Exchange, 120 Chicago Futures Exchange, 163 China: aggregate demand, 245; Crash of 2008, 156, 162; currency, 194, 213, 214, 217, 218, 252; economic development, 106–7; effects of the Crash of 2008, 3; financial support for the US, 216; global capital, 116; Global Plan, 76; growth, 92; rise and impact, 212–18, 219–20 Chrysler, 117, 159 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 69 Citigroup, 149, 156, 158 City of London: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 148, 152; debt in relation to GDP, 4–5; financialization, 118–19; under Thatcher, 138; wealth of merchants, 28 civilization, 27, 29–30, 128 Clinton, Hillary, 212, 215–16 Cold War, 71, 80, 81, 86 collateralized debt obligations see CDOs commodification: resistance to, 53–4; rise of, 30, 33, 54; of seeds, 175 commodities: global, 27–8; human nature not, 53; labour as, 45, 49, 54; money as, 45, 49; prices, 96, 98, 102, 125; trading, 31, 175 common market, European, 195 communism, collapse of, 22, 107–8 complexity, and economic models, 139–40 Condorcet, Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de, 29, 32 Congress (US): bail-outs, 77, 153–4, 155; import tariff bill, 45 Connally, John, 94–5 council houses, selling off, 137, 138 Crash of 1907, 40 Crash of 1929, 38–43, 44, 181 Crash of 2008, 146–68; aftermath, 158–60; chronicle, 2007, 147–9; chronicle, 2008, 149, 151–8; credit default swaps, 150; effects, 2–3; epilogue, 164–8; explanations, 4–19; in Italy, 237; review, 160–4; in Spain, 237; warnings, 144–5 credit crunch, 149, 151 credit default swaps (CDSs), 149, 150, 153, 154, 176, 177 credit facilities, 127–8 credit rating agencies, 6–7, 8, 9, 20, 130 crises: as laboratories of the future, 28; nature of, 141; pre-1929, 40; pre-2008, 2; proneness to, 30; redemptive, 33–5, 35 currency unions, 60–1, 61–2, 65, 251 Cyprus, Britain’s role in, 69, 79 Daimler-Benz, 117 DaimlerChrysler, 117 Darling, Alistair, 159 Darwinian process, 167 Das Kapital (Marx), 49 de Gaulle, Charles, 76, 93 Debenhams, takeover of, 119 debt: and GDP, 4–5; unsecured, 128; US government, 92; US households, 161–2 see also CDOs; leverage debt–deflation cycle, 63 deficits: in the EU, 196; US budget, 22–3, 25, 112, 136, 182–3, 215–16; US trade, 22–3, 25, 111, 182–3, 196, 227 Deng Xiao Ping, 92, 212 Depressions: US 1873–8, 40; US Great Depression, 55, 58, 59, 80 deregulations, 138, 143, 170 derivatives, 120, 131–2, 174, 178 Deutschmark, 74, 96, 195, 197 Dexia, 154 distribution, and production, 30, 31, 54, 64 dollar: devaluing, 188; flooding markets, 92–3; pegging, 190; reliance on, 57, 60, 102; value of, 96, 204; zone, 62, 78, 89, 164 dotcom bubble, 2, 5 Draghi, Mario, 239 East Asia, 79, 143, 144, 194 see also Asia; specific countries East Germany, 201, 202 see also Germany Eastern Europe, 108, 198, 203 ECB (European Central Bank): aftermath of Crash of 2008, 158; bank bail-outs, 203, 204; Crash of 2008, 148, 149, 155, 156, 157; European banking crisis, 208, 209–10; Greek crisis, 207; LTRO, 238; Maastricht Treaty, 199–200; toxic theory, 15 economic models, 139–42 Economic Recovery Advisory Board (ERAB), 180, 181 Economic Report of the President (1999), 116 ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), 74, 75–6 Edison, Thomas, 38–9 Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), 15 EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility), 174, 175–7, 207, 208–9 EIB (European Investment Bank), 210 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 82 Elizabeth II, Queen, 4, 5 ERAB (Economic Recovery Advisory Board), 180, 181 ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism), 197 EU (European Union): economies within, 196; EFSF, 174; European Financial Stability Mechanism, 174; financial support for the US, 216; origins, 73, 74, 75; SPV, 174 euro see eurozone eurobonds, toxic, 175–7 Europa myth, 201 Europe: aftermath of Crash of 2008, 162; bank bail-outs, 203–5; Crash of 2008, 2–3, 12–13, 183; end of Bretton Woods system, 95; eurozone problems, 165; Geithner–Summers Plan, 174–7; oil price rises, 98; unemployment, 164 see also specific countries European Central Bank see ECB European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 74, 75–6 European Commission, 157, 203, 204 European Common Market, 195 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 197 European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), 174, 207, 208–9 European Financial Stability Mechanism, 174, 175–7 European Investment Bank (EIB), 210 European Recovery Progam see Marshall Plan European Union see EU eurozone, 61, 62, 156, 164; crisis, 165, 174, 204, 208–9, 209–11; European banks’ exposure to, 203; formation of, 198, 202; France and, 198; Germany and, 198–201; and Greek crisis, 207 exchange rate system, Bretton Woods, 60, 63, 67 falsifiability, empirical test of, 221 Fannie Mae, 152, 166 Fed, the (Federal Reserve): aftermath of Crash of 2008, 159; Crash of 2008, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157; creation, 40; current problems, 164; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173, 230; Greenspan and, 3, 10; interest rate policy, 99; sub-prime crisis, 147, 149; and toxic theory, 15 feudalism, 30, 31, 64 Fiat, 159 finance: as a pillar of industry, 31; role of, 35–8 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 166 financialization, 30, 190, 222 First World War, Gold Standard suspension, 44 food: markets, 215; prices, 163 Ford, Henry, 39 formalist economic model, 139–40 Forrestal, James, 68 Fortis, 153 franc, value against dollar, 96 France: aid for banks, 157; colonialism criticized, 79; EU membership, 196; and the euro, 198; gold request, 94; Plaza Accord, 188; reindustrialization of Germany, 74; support for Dexia, 154 Freddie Mac, 152, 166 free market fundamentalism, 181, 182 French Revolution, 29 G7 group, 151 G20 group, 159, 163–4 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 73 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 78 GDP (Gross Domestic Product): Britain, 4–5, 88, 158; eurozone, 199, 204; France, 88; Germany, 88, 88; Japan, 88, 88; US, 4, 72, 73, 87, 88, 88, 161; world, 88 Geithner–Summers Plan, 159, 169–83; in Europe, 174–7; results, 178–81; in the US, 169–74, 170, 230 Geithner, Timothy, 170, 173, 230 General Motors (GM), 131–2, 157–8, 160 General Theory (Keynes), 37 geopolitical power, 106–8 Germany: aftermath of the Second World War, 68, 73–4; competition with US, 98, 103; current importance, 251; and Europe, 195–8; and the eurozone, 198–201, 211; global capital, 115–16; Global Plan, 69, 70; Greek crisis, 206; house prices, 129; Marshall Plan, 73; reunification, 201–3; support for Hypo Real Estate, 155; trade surplus, 251; trade surpluses, 158 Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 93 Glass–Steagall Act (1933), 10, 180 global balance, 22 global imbalances, 251–2 Global Plan: appraisal, 85–9; architects, 68; end of, 100–1, 182; geopolitical ideology, 79–82; Germany, 75; Marshall Plan, 74; origins, 67–71; real GDP per capita, 87; unravelling of, 90–4; US domestic policies, 82–5 global surplus recycing mechanism see GSRM global warming, 163 globalization, 12, 28, 125 GM (General Motors), 131–2, 157–8, 160 gold: prices, 96; rushes, 40; US reserves, 92–3 Gold Exchange Standard, collapse, 43–5 Goodwin, Richard, 34 Great Depression, 55, 58, 59, 80 Greece: currency, 205; debt crisis, 206–8 greed, Crash of 2008, 9–12 Greek Civil War, 71, 72, 79 Greenspan, Alan, 3, 10–11 Greenwald, Robert, 125–6 Gross Domestic Product see GDP GSRM (global surplus recycling mechanism), 62, 66, 85, 90, 109–10, 222, 223, 224, 248, 252–6 HBOS, 153, 156 Heath, Edward, 94 hedge funds, 147, 204; LTCM, 2, 13; toxic theory, 15 hedging, 120–1 history: consent as driving force, 29; Marx on, 178; as undemocratic, 28 Ho Chi Minh, 92 Holland, 79, 120, 155, 196, 204 home ownership, 12, 127–8; reposessions, 161 Homeownership Preservation Foundation, 161 Hoover, Herbert, 42–3, 44–5, 230 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 73 house prices, 12, 128–9, 129, 138; falling, 151, 152 human nature, 10, 11–12 humanity, in the workforce, 50–2, 54 Hypo Real Estate, 155 Ibn Khaldun, 33 IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) see World Bank Iceland, 154, 155, 156, 203 ICU (International Currency Union) proposal, 60–1, 66, 90, 251 IMF (International Monetary Fund): burst bubbles, 190; cost of the credit crunch, 151; Crash of 2008, 155–6, 156, 159; demise of social services, 163; on economic growth, 159; European banking crisis, 208; G20 support for, 163–4; Greek crisis, 207; origins, 59; South East Asia, 192, 193; Third World debt crisis, 108; as a transnational institution, 253, 254 income: distribution, 64; national, 42; US national, 43 India: Britain’s stance criticized, 79; Crash of 2008, 163; suicides of farmers, 163 Indochina, and colonization, 79 Indonesia, 79, 191 industrialization: Britain, 5; Germany, 74–5; Japan, 89, 185–6; roots of, 27–8; South East Asia, 86 infinite regress, 47 interest rates: CDOs, 7; post-Global Plan, 99; prophecy paradox, 48; rises in, 107 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) see World Bank International Currency Union (ICU) proposal, 60–1, 66, 90, 253 International Labour Organisation, 159 International Monetary Fund see IMF Iran, Shah of, 97 Ireland: bankruptcy, 154, 156; EFSF, 175; nationalization of Anglo Irish Bank, 158 Irwin, John, 97 Japan: aftermath of the Second World War, 68–9; competition with the US, 98, 103; in decline, 186–91; end of Bretton Woods system, 95; financial support for the US, 216; global capital, 115–16; Global Plan, 69, 70, 76–8, 85–6; house prices, 129; labour costs, 105; new Marshall Plan, 77; Plaza Accord, 188; post-war, 185–91; post-war growth, 185–6; relations with the US, 187–8, 189; South East Asia, 91, 191–2; trade surpluses, 158 joblessness see unemployment Johnson, Lyndon B.: Great Society programmes, 83, 84, 92; Vietnam War, 92 JPMorgan Chase, 151, 153 keiretsu system, Japan, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191 Kennan, George, 68, 71 Kennedy, John F., New Frontier social programmes, 83, 84 Keynes, John Maynard: Bretton Woods conference, 59, 60, 62, 109; General Theory, 37; ICU proposal, 60, 66, 90, 109, 254, 255; influence on New Dealers, 81; on investment decisions, 48; on liquidity, 160–1; trade imbalances, 62–6 Keynsianism, 157 Kim Il Sung, 77 Kissinger, Henry, 94, 98, 106 Kohl, Helmut, 201 Korea, 91, 191, 192 Korean War, 77, 86 labour: as a commodity, 28; costs, 104–5, 104, 105, 106, 137; hired, 31, 45, 46, 53, 64; scarcity of, 34–5; value of, 50–2 labour markets, 12, 202 Labour Party (British), 69 labourers, 32 land: as a commodity, 28; enclosure, 64 Landesbanken, 203 Latin America: effect of China on, 215, 218; European banks’ exposure to, 203; financial crisis, 190 see also specific countries lead, prices, 96 Lebensraum, 67 Left-Right divide, 167 Lehman Brothers, 150, 152–3 leverage, 121–2 leveraging, 37 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), 187 liberation movements, 79, 107 LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate), 148 liquidity traps, 157, 190 Lloyds TSB, 153, 156 loans: and CDOs, 7–8, 129–31; defaults on, 37 London School of Economics, 4, 66 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund collapse, 13 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) hedge fund collapse, 2, 13 Luxembourg, support for Dexia, 154 Maastricht Treaty, 199–200, 202 MacArthur, Douglas, 70–1, 76, 77 machines, and humans, 50–2 Malaysia, 91, 191 Mao, Chairman, 76, 86, 91 Maresca, John, 106–7 Marjolin, Robert, 73 Marshall, George, 72 Marshall Plan, 71–4 Marx, Karl: and capitalism, 17–18, 19, 34; Das Kapital, 49; on history, 178 Marxism, 181, 182 Matrix, The (film), 50–2 MBIA, 149, 150 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 73 mercantilism, in Germany, 251 merchant class, 27–8 Merkel, Angela, 158, 206 Merrill Lynch, 149, 153, 157 Merton, Robert, 13 Mexico: effect of China on, 214; peso crisis, 190 Middle East, oil, 69 MIE (military-industrial establishment), 82–3 migration, Crash of 2008, 3 military-industrial complex mechanism, 65, 81, 182 Ministry for International Trade and Industry (Japan), 78 Ministry of Finance (Japan), 187 Minotaur legend, 24–5, 25 Minsky, Hyman, 37 money markets, 45–6, 53, 153 moneylenders, 31, 32 mortgage backed securities (MBS) 232, 233, 234 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 214 National Bureau of Economic Research (US), 157 National Economic Council (US), 3 national income see GDP National Security Council (US), 94 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (US), 106 nationalization: Anglo Irish Bank, 158; Bradford and Bingley, 154; Fortis, 153; Geithner–Summers Plan, 179; General Motors, 160; Icelandic banks, 154, 155; Northern Rock, 151 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 76, 253 negative engineering, 110 negative equity 234 neoliberalism, 139, 142; and greed, 10 New Century Financial, 147 New Deal: beginnings, 45; Bretton Woods conference, 57–9; China, 76; Global Plan, 67–71, 68; Japan, 77; President Kennedy, 84; support for the Deutschmark, 74; transfer union, 65 New Dealers: corporate power, 81; criticism of European colonizers, 79 ‘new economy’, 5–6 New York stock exchange, 40, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19 Nixon, Richard, 94, 95–6 Nobel Prize for Economics, 13 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 214 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 76 North Korea see Korea Northern Rock, 148, 151 Obama administration, 164, 178 Obama, Barack, 158, 159, 169, 180, 230, 231 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 73 OEEC (Organisation for European Economic Co-operation), 73, 74 oil: global consumption, 160; imports, 102–3; prices, 96, 97–9 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 96, 97 paradox of success, 249 parallax challenge, 20–1 Paulson, Henry, 152, 154, 170 Paulson Plan, 154, 173 Penn Bank, 40 Pentagon, the, 73 Plaza Accord (1985), 188, 192, 213 Pompidou, Georges, 94, 95–6 pound sterling, devaluing, 93 poverty: capitalism as a supposed cure for, 41–2; in China, 162; reduction in the US, 84; reports on global, 125 predatory governance, 181 prey–predator dynamic, 33–5 prices, flexible, 40–1 private money, 147, 177; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; toxic, 132–3, 136, 179 privatization, of surpluses, 29 probability, estimating, 13–14 production: cars, 70, 103, 116, 157–8; coal, 73, 75; costs, 96, 104; cuts in, 41; in Japan, 185–6; processes, 30, 31, 64; steel, 70, 75 production–distribution cycle, 54 property see real estate prophecy paradox, 46, 47, 53 psychology, mass, 14 public debt crisis, 205 quantitative easing, 164, 231–6 railway bubbles, 40 Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH), 15–16 RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Reagan, Ronald, 10, 99, 133–5, 182–3 Real Business Cycle Theory (RBCT), 15, 16–17 real estate, bubbles, 8–9, 188, 190, 192–3 reason, deferring to expectation, 47 recession predictions, 152 recessions, US, 40, 157 recycling mechanisms, 200 regulation, of banking system, 10, 122 relabelling, 14 religion, organized, 27 renminbi (RMB), 213, 214, 217, 218, 253 rentiers, 165, 187, 188 representative agents, 140 Reserve Bank of Australia, 148 reserve currency status, 101–2 risk: capitalists and, 31; riskless, 5, 6–9, 14 Roach, Stephen, 145 Robbins, Lionel, 66 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 165; attitude towards Britain, 69; and bank regulation, 10; New Deal, 45, 58–9 Roosevelt, Theodore (‘Teddy’), 180 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 6, 151, 156; takeover of ABN-Amro, 119–20 Rudd, Kevin, 212 Russia, financial crisis, 190 Saudi Arabia, oil prices, 98 Scandinavia, Gold Standard, 44 Scholes, Myron, 13 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19 Schuman, Robert, 75 Schumpter, Joseph, 34 Second World War, 45, 55–6; aftermath, 87–8; effect on the US, 57–8 seeds, commodification of, 163 shares, in privatized companies, 137, 138 silver, prices, 96 simulated markets, 170 simulated prices, 170 Singapore, 91 single currencies, ICU, 60–1 slave trade, 28 SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), 186 social welfare, 12 solidarity (asabiyyah), 33–4 South East Asia, 91; financial crisis, 190, 191–5, 213; industrialization, 86, 87 South Korea see Korea sovereign debt crisis, 205 Soviet Union: Africa, 79; disintegration, 201; Marshall Plan, 72–3; Marxism, 181, 182; relations with the US, 71 SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), 174 see also EFSF stagflation, 97 stagnation, 37 Stalin, Joseph, 72–3 steel production, in Germany, 70 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 60, 254, 255 Summers, Larry, 230 strikes, 40 sub-prime mortgages, 2, 5, 6, 130–1, 147, 149, 151, 166 success, paradox of, 33–5, 53 Suez Canal trauma, 69 Suharto, President of Indonesia, 97 Summers, Larry, 3, 132, 170, 173, 180 see also Geithner–Summers Plan supply and demand, 11 surpluses: under capitalism, 31–2; currency unions, 61; under feudalism, 30; generation in the EU, 196; manufacturing, 30; origin of, 26–7; privatization of, 29; recycling mechanisms, 64–5, 109–10 Sweden, Crash of 2008, 155 Sweezy, Paul, 73 Switzerland: Crash of 2008, 155; UBS, 148–9, 151 systemic failure, Crash of 2008, 17–19 Taiwan, 191, 192 Tea Party (US), 162, 230, 231, 281 technology, and globalization, 28 Thailand, 91 Thatcher, Margaret, 117–18, 136–7 Third World: Crash of 2008, 162; debt crisis, 108, 219; interest rate rises, 108; mineral wealth, 106; production of goods for Walmart, 125 tiger economies, 87 see also South East Asia Tillman Act (1907), 180 time, and economic models, 139–40 Time Warner, 117 tin, prices, 96 toxic theory, 13–17, 115, 133–9, 139–42 trade: balance of, 61, 62, 64–5; deficits (US), 111, 243; global, 27, 90; surpluses, 158 trades unions, 124, 137, 202 transfer unions, New Deal, 65 Treasury Bills (US), 7 Treaty of Rome, 237 Treaty of Versailles, 237 Treaty of Westphalia, 237 trickle-down, 115, 135 trickle-up, 135 Truman Doctrine, 71, 71–2, 77 Truman, Harry, 73 tsunami, effects of, 194 UBS, 148–9, 151 Ukraine, and the Crash of 2008, 156 UN Security Council, 253 unemployment: Britain, 160; Global Plan, 96–7; rate of, 14; US, 152, 158, 164 United States see US Unocal, 106 US economy, twin deficits, 22–3, 25 US government, and South East Asia, 192 US Mortgage Bankers Association, 161 US Supreme Court, 180 US Treasury, 153–4, 156, 157, 159; aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 160; Geithner–Summers Plan, 171–2, 173; bonds, 227 US Treasury Bills, 109 US (United States): aftermath of the Crash of 2008, 161–2; assets owned by foreign state institutions, 216; attitude towards oil price rises, 97–8; China, 213–14; corporate bond purchases, 228; as a creditor nation, 57; domestic policies during the Global Plan, 82–5; economy at present, 184; economy praised, 113–14; effects of the Crash of 2008, 2, 183; foreign-owned assets, 225; Greek Civil War, 71; labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188; profit rates, 106; proposed invasion of Afghanistan, 106–7; role in the ECSC, 75; South East Asia, 192 value, costing, 50–1 VAT, reduced, 156 Venezuela, oil prices, 97 Vietnamese War, 86, 91–2 vital spaces, 192, 195, 196 Volcker, Paul: 2009 address to Wall Street, 122; demand for dollars, 102; and gold convertibility, 94; interest rate rises, 99; replaced by Greenspan, 10; warning of the Crash of 2008, 144–5; on the world economy, 22, 100–1, 139 Volcker Rule, 180–1 Wachowski, Larry and Andy, 50 wage share, 34–5 wages: British workers, 137; Japanese workers, 185; productivity, 104; prophecy paradox, 48; US workers, 124, 161 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (documentary, Greenwald), 125–6 Wall Street: Anglo-Celtic model, 12; Crash of 2008, 11–12, 152; current importance, 251; Geithner–Summers Plan, 178; global profits, 23; misplaced confidence in, 41; private money, 136; profiting from sub-prime mortgages, 131; takeovers and mergers, 115–17, 115, 118–19; toxic theory, 15 Wallace, Harry, 72–3 Walmart, 115, 123–7, 126; current importance, 251 War of the Currents, 39 Washington Mutual, 153 weapons of mass destruction, 27 West Germany: labour costs, 105; Plaza Accord, 188 Westinghouse, George, 39 White, Harry Dexter, 59, 70, 109 Wikileaks, 212 wool, as a global commodity, 28 working class: in Britain, 136; development of, 28 working conditions, at Walmart, 124–5 World Bank, 253; origins, 59; recession prediction, 149; and South East Asia, 192 World Trade Organization, 78, 215 written word, 27 yen, value against dollar, 96, 188, 193–4 Yom Kippur War, 96 zombie banks, 190–1

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

But while Reagan and Thatcher clearly worked to shrink and change the welfare systems in their countries, they never sought to completely eliminate them. Market fundamentalism is a theoretical condition—a society with capitalism, but without welfare—that doesn’t exist in reality. Few people think that it should, outside of a few right-wing pundits in America (as the antitax crusader Grover Norquist said in 2001, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”). Market fundamentalism is still a useful concept, though, because it anchors one end of the spectrum of belief about how much a government should rely on capitalism to ensure the well-being of its people.

…

As I said in the previous chapter, all of the rich countries that meet my definition of capitalist have welfare systems that include support for the poor and unemployed, subsidized health care for at least some groups, child and elder care, and so on. Advanced capitalist countries have tremendous variations in their social safety nets—Norway’s, for example, is very different from America’s—but all such countries have one. Much of the confusion stems from a caricature. Market fundamentalism describes the belief that capitalism alone is sufficient to ensure well-being of all members of a society, and that social safety nets are wasteful and unnecessary. Or, even worse, that they’re counterproductive because they reduce people’s incentive to work. The term is associated with the writings of the mid-twentieth-century novelist and political theorist Ayn Rand.

…

There would be no inequality, no money, no private property, no companies, no bosses, no governments, and no borders between nations. Marx provided few details on how a planetary communist economy would work—how goods and services would be produced and allocated to people—but he was sure that it would arise. He considered communism a historical inevitability, and socialism a kind of stepping-stone on the way to it. Market fundamentalism and communism are as different as it’s possible to imagine, but they do have one important thing in common: neither has ever existed in the real world. Countries that adopted Marx’s ideas never reached full communism; they instead remained at socialism (the full name of the Soviet Union—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—acknowledges this).

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

The three-decades-old assault on the public sector that has accompanied market fundamentalism has made the battle against inequality and injustice at every level of government more difficult.24 In the city, taking on the privatization ideology is both less practical (its causes lie well beyond the city in national political ideologies and divisive party principles) and yet also more doable because slurs against “big government” have less traction in municipal politics. The corrosive de-democratization in the political sphere that attends market fundamentalism nationally makes much less sense where government is neither big nor bureaucratic and where mayors are seen as fellow citizens struggling to address common problems.

…

Citizens deride a theoretical “it”—an abstract sovereign “we” from which they have allowed themselves to become distanced. Not so the concrete municipal “we.” In the end, then, the antidote to market fundamentalism and political alienation is not less government but more transparency, more accountability, more public oversight and regulation; also more public interaction and consultation. In a word, more democracy. Strengthen the bonds with city government so that civic alienation is not an option. After all, it is not markets themselves but market fundamentalism with its animus to all public goods and government regulation that is the problem. Joseph E. Stiglitz has noted that a “more efficient economy and fairer society will also come from making markets work like markets—more competitive, less exploitative—and tempering their excesses.”27 Given the city’s scale, its immediacy, and the local character of city politics, cities have a better chance to do this temperately than any other level of government, both through intervention and public employment, and through public-private partnerships and collaboration with the business and NGO sectors.

…

I will not try to convince fans of Charles Murray he is mistaken in insisting that the word capitalist “has become an accusation” or that too many capitalists are themselves left-wingers who “appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia.”6 Miring ourselves in a fundamentalist critique of capitalism or the big-government/small-government quandary makes little sense. Instead of wrestling in the political mud, I want to explore pragmatic best practices that can affect segregation and inequality, and perhaps even ameliorate market fundamentalism down the line. I will be satisfied if we can achieve an outcome less inegalitarian and more democratic than any alternatives, and hence ensure that mayors do not in the first instance become planetary slumlords. Mayor Nenshi of Calgary worries that “great cities have inequality and wealth by definition: the reason they are cities is because people come from different parts of the income scale.”

Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It
by Vivek Chibber
Published 30 Aug 2022

Beyond Capitalism Guide to Further Reading Acknowledgments Notes This eBook is licensed to , @gmail.com on 08/31/2022 Introduction Across the advanced capitalist world, something very significant has been unfolding over the past five years or so—the ideological legitimacy of the neoliberal model of capitalism has collapsed. After almost four decades of unchallenged hegemony, free market fundamentalism is under attack, not just among marginal left groupings, but in the political mainstream. Working people of all races and ages, who for years labored with the conviction that “there is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, have issued a very clear warning that they are fed up with the untrammeled rule of capital.

…

I have also tried to keep to the essentials, so as not to get ensnared in Talmudic debates around sacred texts, and have also steered clear of more arcane analytical debates. Readers wishing to pursue the latter can consult the Guide to Further Reading at the end of the book. After more than forty years of neoliberalism, the road back to sanity is going to be a long one. And it is by no means certain that we will achieve it. Even while free market fundamentalism is ideologically weakened, it is still a strong political force. For the latter to change, the Left will have to gather up its strength at a scale we have not seen since midcentury. At present, even as the socialist Left gains its ideological footing, it is in political disarray. It is my hope that this book, and other efforts like it, help advance the project of renewal.

…

For what seems like a lifetime, it looked like people saw no choice but to hunker down and try to just get through, even if they had doubts about what their TVs and their teachers told them about how society works. The idolatry of the market seemed to drown out every other voice. But in the past few years, it’s become pretty clear that people aren’t buying the message anymore. Whereas it seems it was only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher proclaimed there was “no alternative” to the market fundamentalism that she espoused and implemented, that ideology is now in a shambles. Whereas politicians openly touted the virtues of a free market and open trade, this is no longer so. The debate is no longer on whether the market should be tamed, but how much it ought to be. Socialism, once taboo in public discourse, has exploded onto the political scene.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

Such developments also underscored the shortcomings of globalism and the neoliberal framework promoted by the United States and embraced by the Western establishment for the last four decades. The rise of neoliberalism began in the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s promotion of free-market fundamentalism and a constellation of related ideas that rolled back New Deal protections and the Keynesian economic policies in place since World War II. Deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the privatization and outsourcing of public services became the order of the day—all with deepening political and fiscal consequences.

…

As for the spectacular fall of the former British prime minister Liz Truss—who resigned after just forty-five days in office—it read like a farcical morality play about the hazards of hubris and ideological blindness. In defiance of economic realities and the welfare of the public, Truss and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng—both hard-core believers in trickle-down economics and free-market fundamentalism—announced sweeping unfunded tax cuts for the rich (worth some £45 billion). The plan was like a parody of neoliberal budgetary policy: It would have massively increased inequality and simultaneously led to soaring interest and mortgage rates. Even the markets, which Truss had courted, responded with contempt.

…

* * * — Many of the younger people who joined protest movements during the Trump era had come of age in the aftermath of the crash of 2008 and instinctively adopted the view, promoted by the Occupy Wall Street movement, that many twenty-first-century social and economic problems existed not in isolation, but were rooted in structural inequalities that were the legacy of racism, neocolonialism, and free-market fundamentalism. Occupy’s influence would have been hard to imagine in 2011, when the original encampment of several hundred ragtag protesters in New York City’s Zuccotti Park was cleared out by police after fifty-nine days. Hundreds of other protests against corporate power and income inequality erupted across the country and across the world, but few substantial changes to banking practices or corporate regulation resulted at the time, and the influence of money in politics only continued to grow.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Published 10 Mar 2009

And yet, throughout human history, all sorts of terrible things have been freely traded—from slaves to tropical hardwoods to dictatorship debt. Today, if you want to buy dictatorship debt, you can do so. Most who own dictatorship debt, including Brazilians themselves, do not know of its connection to the hunger of Rio’s street children or the destruction of the greatest forest in the world. Market fundamentalism depends on masking the ways in which markets always rely on government and human values. Market fundamentalists will insist that erasing Brazil’s dictatorship debt is a human intrusion into the natural functioning of markets. But because those debts were incurred illegally, the dictatorship debts must not be respected.

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These wars could turn liberal democratic governments into military dictatorships and return humankind to a state of barbarism—thereby restarting history. Fukuyama insists we cannot do anything to overcome global warming and that trying to do something would inevitably “kill the economic goose that is laying our technological golden eggs.” Fukuyama’s version of modernization theory is in this way inseparable from his market fundamentalism. For Fukuyama, the Mechanism is indivisible from the market, the means by which human societies most efficiently create the wealth and technology that allow us to dominate nature. Both the Mechanism and the market depend upon reductive views of human nature. The Mechanism depends on the idea that the human drive to dominate nature is an essential aspect of our nature, and the market depends on the idea that the rational pursuit of our self-interest is essential.

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See clean energy development Environics social values survey, 33 environmentalism, 17, 21 Apollo proposal and, 9, 259–60 birth of, 21–41 debt-for-nature idea, 57–61 essentialism of, 219–22, 233 grassroots groups and, 99–101 (see also NIMBY) impacts in the Amazon and, 52–54, 55–57, 64–65 limits approach and, 16–17 market fundamentalism and, 232–36 nature as separate and, 24–26, 133–35 poverty and, 37–39 (see also environmental justice groups; poverty) preparedness approach and, 223–25 racism in, 84–86 science and, 138–45 social context and, 87–88 environmental justice (EJ) groups, 145 concerns of poor Americans and, 75–76 Foreman’s study and, 68–70 genocide claims and, 66–68 Harlem Children’s Zone project and, 78–80, 81–82 lifestyle risks and, 72–75 narrow focus of, 80–83, 86–88, 298 (n42) National Law Journal study and, 70–72 problems with research by, 293 (n15) racial disparities in asthma rates and, 77–78 WE ACT group and, 80–82 environmental law.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
by Dani Rodrik
Published 12 Oct 2015

The policy economists in Latin America and their advisers in Washington were convinced that government intervention had crushed growth and brought about the debt crisis of the 1980s. The remedy could be summarized in three words: “stabilize, privatize, and liberalize.” Williamson would frequently protest that his own list had described modest reforms that fell far short of “market fundamentalism,” the blanket term for the view that markets are the solution to all public policy problems. But the term “Washington Consensus” fit the zeitgeist of the era only too well. Advocates of the Washington Consensus—whether in its original or expanded versions—presented it as good economics. For them, the policies reflected what sound economics teaches: Free markets and competition enable the efficient allocation of scarce resources.

…

As three economists, themselves critics, put it, standard accounts “tend to miss the diversity that exists within the profession, and the many new ideas that are being tried out,” and they often overlook the reality that “one can be part of the mainstream and yet not necessarily hold ‘orthodox’ ideas.”1 The critics do have a point when they say economists act in ways that suggest otherwise, by preaching universal solutions or market fundamentalism. But critics also need to understand that economists who do this are, in fact, not being true to their own discipline. Such economists deserve their fellow economists’ rebuke as much as outsiders’ reproach. Once this point is recognized, many of the standard criticisms are nullified or lose their bite.

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Arthur, 32–33 “Life among the Econ” (Leijonhufvud), 9–10 Lincoln, Abraham, 52 Lipsey, Richard, 59 liquidity, 134–35, 155, 185 liquidity traps, 130 locational advantages, 108 London, England, congestion pricing and, 3 Lucas, Robert, 130, 131–32, 134–36 “Machiavelli’s Mistake: Why Good Laws Are No Substitute for Good Citizens” (Bowles), 71n macroeconomics, 39–40, 87, 102, 107, 143, 157n, 181 business cycles and, 125–37 capital flow and, 165–66 classical questions of, 101 demand-side view of, 128–30, 136–37 globalization and, 165–66 Madison, James, 187 Mäki, Uskali, 22n malaria, randomized testing and, 106, 204 Malthus, Thomas, 118 Manchester University, 197 Mankiw, Greg, 149, 150, 171n, 197 manufacturing: economic growth and, 163–64 exchange rate and, 100, 163 income inequality and, 141 marginal costs, 121, 122 marginalist economics, 119–22 marginal productivity, 120–21, 122–25 marginal utility, 121, 122 Mariel boatlift (1980), 57 market design models, 5 “Market for ‘Lemons’, The” (Akerlof), 69n market fundamentalism, 160, 178 markets: asymmetric information in, 68–69, 70, 71 behavioral economics and, 69–71, 104–7, 202–4 economic models and, see models economics courses and, 198 economists’ bias toward, 169–71, 182–83 efficiency in, xiii, 14, 21, 34, 48, 50, 51, 67, 98, 125, 147, 148, 150, 156–58, 161, 165, 170, 192–95, 196 general-equilibrium interactions in, 41, 56–58, 69n, 91, 120 in Great Recession, 156–59 imperfectly competitive types of, 67–69, 70, 136, 150, 162 incentives in, 7, 170, 172, 188–92 institutions and, 98, 161, 202 likely outcomes in, 17–18 multiple equilibria in, 16–17 perfectly competitive types of, 21, 27, 28, 47, 69n, 71, 122, 180 prisoners’ dilemma in, 14–15, 20, 21, 61–62, 187, 200 self-interest in, 21, 104, 158, 186–88, 190 social cooperation in, 195–96 supply and demand in, 13–14, 20, 99, 119, 122, 128–30, 136–37, 170 values in, 186–96 Washington Consensus and, 159–67, 169 Marshall, Alfred, 13n, 32, 119 “Marshallian Cross Diagrams and Their Uses before Alfred Marshall: The Origins of Supply and Demand Geometry” (Humphrey), 13n Marx, Groucho, 26 Marx, Karl, xi, 31, 116, 118 Massachusetts, University of (Amherst), 77 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 107, 108, 165, 206 mathematical economics, 35 mathematical optimization, 30, 101, 202–3 mathematics: economic models and, 29–37, 47 social sciences and, 33–34 Maxwell’s equations, 66n Meade, James, 58 methodological individualism, 181 Mexico: antipoverty programs in, 3–4, 105–6 globalization and, 141, 166 microeconomics, 125–26, 131 microfounded models, 101 Miguel, Ted, 106–7 Milan, Italy, congestion pricing and, 3 Milgrom, Paul, 36n minimum wages, employment and, 17–18, 28n, 114, 115, 124, 143, 150, 151 Minnesota, University of, 131 Mishel, Lawrence, 124n models: authority and criticism of, 76–80 big data and, 38–39, 40 causal factors and, 40–41, 85–86, 99–100, 114–15, 179, 184, 200, 201, 204 coherent argument and clarity in, 80–81 common sense in, 11 comparative advantage principle and, 52–55, 58n, 59–60, 139, 170 compensation for risk and, 110 computers and, 38, 41 contextual truth in, 20, 174 contingency and, 25, 145, 173–74, 185 coordination and, 16–17, 42, 200 critical assumptions in, 18, 26–29, 94–98, 150–51, 180, 183–84, 202 criticisms of, 10–11, 178, 179–85 decision trees and, 89–90, 90 diagnostic analysis and, 86–93, 90, 97, 110–11 direct implications and, 100–109 dual economy forms of, 88 efficient-markets hypothesis and, 156–58 empirical method and, xii, 7, 46, 65, 72–76, 77–78, 137, 173–74, 183, 199–206 endogenous growth types of, 88 experiments compared with, 21–25 fables compared with, 18–21 field experiments and, 23–24, 105–8, 173, 202–5 general-equilibrium interactions and, 41, 56–58, 69n, 91, 120 goods and services and, 12 Great Recession and, 155–59 horizontal vs. vertical development and, 64n, 67, 71 hypotheses and, 46, 47–56 imperfectly competitive markets and, 67–69, 70, 136, 150, 162 incidental implications and, 109–11 institutions and, 12, 98, 202 intuition and, 46, 56–63 Keynesian types of, 40, 88, 101, 102, 127–30, 131, 133–34, 136–37 knowledge and, 46, 47, 63–72 main elements of, 31 mathematics and, 29–37, 47 neoclassical types of, 40, 88, 90–91, 121, 122 new classical approach to, 130–34, 136–37 parables and, 20 partial-equilibrium analysis and, 56, 58, 91 perfectly competitive markets and, 21, 27, 28, 47, 69n, 71, 122, 180 predictability and, 26–28, 38, 40–41, 85, 104, 105, 108, 115, 132, 133, 139–40, 184–85, 202 principle-agent types of, 155 questions and, 114–16 rationality postulate and, 202–3 real world application of, 171–72 rules of formulation in, 199–202 scale economy vs. local advantage in, 108 scientific advances by progressive formulations of, 63–72 scientific character of, 45–81 second-best theory and, 58–61, 163–64, 166 selection of, 83–112, 136–37, 178, 183–84, 208 simplicity and specificity of, 11, 179–80, 210 simplicity vs. complexity of, 37–44 social reality of, 65–67, 179 static vs. dynamic types of, 68 strategic interactions and, 61–62, 63 of supply and demand, 3, 13–14, 20, 99, 119, 122, 128–30, 136–37 theories and, 113–45 time-inconsistent preferences in, 62–63 tipping points arising from, 42 in trade agreements, 41 unrealistic assumptions in, 25–29, 180–81 validity of, 23–24, 66–67, 112 variety of, 11, 12–18, 26, 68, 72, 73, 114, 130, 198, 202, 208, 210 verbal vs. mathematical types of, 34 verification in selection of, 93–112 see also economics; macroeconomics; markets “Models Are Experiments, Experiments are Models” (Mäki), 22n monetary policies, 87 monopolies, 161 in imperfectly competitive markets, 67–68 in perfectly competitive markets, 122 price controls and, 28, 94–97, 150 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de, 196 mortality rates, 206 mortgage-backed securities, 155 mortgage finance, 39, 155 mosquito nets, randomized testing of, 106, 204 “Mr.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2020

That said, if we see them as irreconcilably opposed, we’ll miss important parts of the larger picture. Go back in the archive and look at Tony Blair’s Home Secretary David Blunkett’s comments on migrants to see that the themes of today’s rightists did not emerge in a magical vacuum. Even if representatives of Budapest sometimes express dissatisfaction with market fundamentalism, the two have more in common than simplistic media narratives reveal. Look no further than the relationship between the “woke” Justin Trudeau government in Canada and the decidedly unwoke government of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. In particular, these two agendas have found ways to not only co-exist but cross-pollinate in emergent forms of right-wing politics—particularly in new and social media.

…

Again, though Peterson’s approach is lacking, the themes he’s dealing with should not be dismissed but should be addressed in more integrated and sound ways. The work of anthropologist Scott Atran and depth psychologist James Hillman provide potent contrasts to Peterson’s mythology-enhanced market fundamentalism. Unlike Peterson’s dreck, Atran’s ethnographic research on terrorism has actually been used in real-world situations, and not just in thought experiments and podcasts. Namely, what he’s done is connect the rise and discourses of both jihadism and the alt-right to the alienation and lack of shared purpose endemic to hyper-consumerist societies like the United States of America and Saudi Arabia.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS * * * Epigraph Introduction  One Way or Another, Everything Changes PART ONE BAD TIMING 1. The Right Is Right: The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change 2. Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet 3. Public and Paid For: Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy 4. Planning and Banning: Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a Movement 5. Beyond Extractivism: Confronting the Climate Denier Within PART TWO MAGICAL THINKING 6. Fruits, Not Roots: The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green 7.

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Much has been written about the real-world costs of these policies—the instability of financial markets, the excesses of the super-rich, and the desperation of the increasingly disposable poor, as well as the failing state of public infrastructure and services. Very little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change, a threat that came knocking just as this ideology was reaching its zenith. The core problem was that the stranglehold that market logic secured over public life in this period made the most direct and obvious climate responses seem politically heretical.

…

Instead, large parts of the climate movement wasted precious decades attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of deregulated capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the market itself. (Though it was only years into this project that I discovered the depths of collusion between big polluters and Big Green.) But blocking strong climate action wasn’t the only way that the triumph of market fundamentalism acted to deepen the crisis in this period. Even more directly, the policies that so successfully freed multinational corporations from virtually all constraints also contributed significantly to the underlying cause of global warming—rising greenhouse gas emissions. The numbers are striking: in the 1990s, as the market integration project ramped up, global emissions were going up an average of 1 percent a year; by the 2000s, with “emerging markets” like China now fully integrated into the world economy, emissions growth had sped up disastrously, with the annual rate of increase reaching 3.4 percent a year for much of the decade.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

As an example, one Apple executive mendaciously justified his Chinese labor force this way: “The US has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”12 Well, it’s theoretically possible that Apple is really responding to the superior training of Chinese workers, rather than their $145 per month salaries, but I seriously doubt it. In contrast, the family capitalism countries were proactive, prospering despite the tumult of global integration. They rejected trade controls, the commoditization of workers, and market fundamentalism in favor of canny mechanisms to maximize productivity and family income growth. Unhampered by ideology and buttressed with centuries of vigorous economic debate between the likes of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, they focused on meeting election mandates demanding family prosperity. It wasn’t that difficult to accomplish, because these rich democracies came armed to the existential struggle with better tools than America.

…

Indeed, their rejection of mainstream economics was more far-reaching than just ignoring greed; it went to the heart of how gains from growth should be allocated within capitalism. I suspect President Reagan never actually understood this point. In the place of the carefully regulated market capitalism envisioned by Adam Smith and Keynes, his advisors urged with fervor a return to nineteenth-century market fundamentalism. That appeal was politically alluring to conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, who coalesced in the 1960s around the late Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and his inspiring themes of small government, low taxes, and self-regulation of industries. Their notion was that history was wrong and markets don’t require adult supervision, after all.

…

New York University professor Nouriel Roubini—one of the few who predicted the Wall Street meltdown—concluded that: “… the Anglo-Saxon model of supervision and regulation of the financial system has failed…. [it] “relied on self-regulation that, in effect, meant no regulation; on market discipline that does not exist when there is euphoria and irrational exuberance; on internal risk management models that fail….”42 Behind Friedman’s Influence Market fundamentalism was pretty thin gruel for economists schooled in history. It quickly attracted as sharp critics the British economist Andrew Smithers and Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, who as early as 1984 judged the underlying theory “one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought.”43 It actually faded in popularity quickly as the profession came to terms with its unreal assumptions.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

The Founding Fathers also recognized that a critical and independent media is an essential part of any healthy democracy. Still another essential feature of a successful democracy is transparency. Many critics of the views I’ve put forward in this book combine a skepticism about government with an overarching—and unjustified—faith in markets. Earlier, I referred to the notion of market fundamentalism (sometimes also referred to as neoliberalism): the ideas that unfettered markets on their own were efficient and stable, and that if we just let markets work their wonders and grow the economy, everybody would benefit (called trickle-down economics). Previous chapters have debunked these ideas—as if the 2008 crisis, the episodic high levels of unemployment, and our massive inequality weren’t proof enough.

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The ongoing debate over the role of government The real politik of twenty-first-century America is that those who seek to preserve our standards of living and the values I articulate in this book will have to persuade the rest of the country that there are alternative policies more consistent with their interests and values than the course the country is currently on, that is, Trump’s nativism and protectionism, or the “market fundamentalism” course that Reagan set the country on some four decades ago. Unfortunately, too often, social issues, like abortion and gay rights, have gotten in the way of our ability to address the basic economics—of how we can get to growth with equality.23 Today, though, a major impediment to the acceptance of the ideas I’ve put forward is the lack of trust in government.

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We didn’t understand the true foundations of our well-being—the increases in our standard of living as well as the fulfillment of our highest ideals—rested on the foundations of science, rational enquiry, and discourse, and the social institutions derived from them, including the rule of law based on democratic processes. The internationalism and free markets of neoliberalism with its false promises are now being replaced with primitive protectionism and nativism, whose promise of restoring the United States to prosperity is even less likely to be fulfilled. For an economist, it is easy to attack the market fundamentalism/neoliberalism that came to dominate in the years after Reagan. It was based on a set of refutable (and refuted) hypotheses. But at least one could have a rational discussion about neoliberalism, ascertaining whether there is a grain of truth in some of the arguments and empirical hypotheses.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay
by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
Published 14 Oct 2019

The taxes the wealthy don’t pay, the rest of us must cover. It’s always possible to argue that everybody receives the market income they deserve; that the rich, who were unfairly treated in the 1960s and 1970s, are now getting their just deserts from ever more unfettered and global markets. We don’t agree with this ideology—sometimes known as market fundamentalism—but at least it’s a consistent world view. However, what argument can justify that billionaires should pay less than each of us, and pay less and less as they get wealthier and wealthier? What principle could justify such an obviously perverse situation? But probably the most fundamental reason to oppose America’s current tax regime is the inequality spiral that it feeds.

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Successive administrations since the 1980s have made deliberate choices in this regard, including letting the federal minimum wage erode, cutting taxes on the wealthy, restricting the power of unions, and increasing the costs of access to public universities.8 France and most other rich countries have experienced some of the same policy changes themselves, but the turn to market fundamentalism has been more drastic in America. IS GROWTH UNDERESTIMATED? The stagnation of working-class income over more than a generation is perhaps the most fundamental development in the US economy, one with profound political and economic implications. It is so striking that to some observers, it must be wrong.

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The “beneficiaries” of this largess cannot choose to spend it as they see fit. The money is not flowing to their bank account. It’s flowing to the bank accounts of health care providers, some of whom are comfortably in the top 1%. Are we sure the services provided in exchange are worth every penny? In the end, the most striking indictment of market fundamentalism emerges from what has happened to life expectancy in the United States. Life expectancy is easier to measure than income; in many ways it is also more informative than the more materialistic notions of well-being discussed so far. Most people care about living a long, healthy life more than anything else.

Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling
Published 14 Sep 2020

It is entrenched in the current mainstream conservative movement, as seen in former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s concern that the safety net is “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”3 And while Trump may be at loggerheads with conservative market fundamentalism in the area of trade, when it comes to programs that benefit the less fortunate, he clings tightly to this orthodoxy while stressing its worst divisive racial undertones. His administration’s use of this simplistic transactional approach is perhaps best exemplified by the Trump administration’s Council of Economic Advisers’ July 2018 report on work requirements and the safety net.4 The report sets self-sufficiency as the main goal of economic policy and then analyzes it on two dimensions: “receipt of benefits from Medicaid, SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], housing assistance or TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] at some point during the year” and “whether non-disabled working-age recipients work.”5 In other words, any receipt of government benefits is harmful because it detracts from self-sufficiency.

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The United States is an outlier in the OECD for its lack of universal paid leave and uniquely expensive childcare, both of which create barriers to work, as discussed elsewhere in this book. Unfortunately, conservatives miss these potential solutions—and ways to further their stated goal of self-sufficiency—because their market fundamentalism prevents them from even considering policy options that would require some increase in government involvement. C. MISSING WHERE MORE GOVERNMENT WOULD ENCOURAGE RISK-TAKING AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP The ideological commitment to less government also prevents conservatives from seeing those situations where more government can mean more risk-taking, more entrepreneurship, and more market innovation.

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The era of bigger government responsibility is the obligation to ensure that an economic dignity compact is real in the lives of ordinary Americans. If our policy—or lack of policy—has led to or allowed gaping economic dignity gaps, then there is a responsibility to fix them, to make things work. It is an invitation to be open to more expansive government policies—to not be constrained by worship of market fundamentalism and small-government libertarianism, especially when they have come up short—but it is still a perspective that keeps our eyes on the end goal, on what works. It is consistent with FDR’s famous exhortation to policymakers, from a 1932 commencement speech, to focus with force on the end economic goal and to engage in continuous “bold, persistent experimentation” to achieve that end without limiting the range of measures for potential experimentation and ultimate success.47 A.

Does Capitalism Have a Future?
by Immanuel Wallerstein , Randall Collins , Michael Mann , Georgi Derluguian , Craig Calhoun , Stephen Hoye and Audible Studios
Published 15 Nov 2013

There was ideological attachment by old regimes to laissez-faire economics, a stock market bubble, and an uncompleted transition from old to new forms of manufacturing, all of which lowered the employment potential of the economy. In America, the eye of the storm, grave policy mistakes were also made by Congress and by the Federal Reserve Board rooted in the market fundamentalism of this period which reached its ghastly climax in what was called “liquidationism”–the pursuit of austerity measures in order to destroy inefficient firms, industries, investors, and workers. Absent any two or three of these varied causes cascading on top of each other and we would have been labeling this a cyclical recession.

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The Republicans are more united over economic policies than are the Democrats, whose main problem is internal divisions. This has allowed the Republicans to dictate recent policy agendas. Republican leaders used to be ideological in their rhetoric but pragmatic in their actual policies. But free-market fundamentalism is more resonant in American popular culture than is state interventionism. In the postwar boom period real economic policy took the form of “commercial Keynesianism,” state-steered markets, a compromise between market and state. But the political rhetoric of the time, especially on the Republican side, focused almost entirely on free markets and free enterprise.

…

The political reaction flew the colors of identity, which introduced into politics a nastily passionate charge because matters of identity tend to be uncompromising and nonnegotiable. The New Right came in two varieties, though often meshing in practice: ethnopatriotic or religious-patriotic fundamentalism and libertarian market fundamentalism. Both called for the militant defense of fundamental matters of faith—or whatever was claimed to be the founding identities in their societies. Notice that both fundamentalisms directed their ire at state bureaucracies, blaming them for being too secular, removed, devious and taxing. It tells us something important about Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and other contemporary fundamentalisms that their suspicions and phobias virtually everywhere went hand-in-hand with extolling the virtues of small business, small town life, and the patriarchal family.

The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals
by Daniel R. Solin
Published 7 Nov 2006

Commenting on her stunn ing victory over the highly credentialled "independent analyst," the five-year-old, Tia Roberts, thought it was "wicked." She has a point there. Studies thar show the merit, or Jack of merit, of analyst recommendations are nicely summarized in a paper entitled "An Empirical Model of Stock Analysts' Recommendations: Market Fundamentals, Conflicts of Interest, and Peer Effects," written by Patrick Bajari and John Krainer. You can find this paper online at http://ideas.repcc.orglp/nbrlnbenvo/t0665.html. Chapter 2: An Unbelievable True Story An anicle written by Jonathan C hevreau in the Financial Post on November 5, 2005. stated mat $554 billion was invested in all murual funds in Canada as of September 2005.

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Security Analyst Recommendations and Stock Returns," by Brad Barber, Reuvan Lehavy, Maureen McNichols and Brett Trueman, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, available at https:11 gsba pps.stanford.ed ul researchpapers/Li brary/RP 154 1. pd f#search ",' anal ys t%2 0 recom m enda t i a ns% 20 under perform%20market. The study by Patrick Bajari and John Krainer is "An Empirical Model of Stock Analysts' Recommendations: Market Fundamentals, Conflicts of lmercst, and Peer Effects." This paper is available at htrp:llideas.repec.orglp/nbrlnberwol I0665.html. 158 The Real Way Smart In~·estors Beat 95%of the ·Pros· Chapter 16: Nobody Can Pick "Hot" Fund Managers The shon holding periods of investors in hyperactivcly traded mutual funds has been noted in a series of private studies done by Dalbar, Inc.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Inspired by the pro-market writings of classical liberals such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo they established what they called a ‘neoliberal’ agenda. Its aim, they said, was to push back hard against the threat of state totalitarianism, which was spreading fast thanks to the growing reach of the Soviet Union. But that aim gradually morphed into a hard push for market fundamentalism, and the meaning of ‘neoliberal’ morphed along with it. What’s more, when Paul Samuelson’s diagram appeared – depicting which actors were at the heart of the economy and which were pushed into the wings – it provided the perfect setting for their play. Scriptwriting began in the late 1940s with the launch of the Mont Pelerin Society, which lives on to this day.5 But Friedman, Hayek and the other hopeful playwrights knew they might have to wait some decades before their play could be performed.

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That crucially depends, argue the economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson, on whether, in each country, the state’s economic and political institutions are inclusive or extractive. Put simply, inclusive institutions give many people a say in decision-making, unlike extractive ones that privilege the voice of the few and allow them to exploit and rule over others.44 The threat of the authoritarian state is very real, but so too is the danger of market fundamentalism. To avoid the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of the market alike, democratic politics are key – thus reinforcing the foundational role played by society in generating the civic engagement needed for participation and accountability in public and political life. FINANCE, which is in service – so make it serve society Three long-held myths make up the traditional story of finance: that commercial banks work by turning people’s savings into investments; that financial trading smoothes out the economy’s fluctuations; and that, therefore, the financial sector provides a valuable service to the productive economy.

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Fälth, A. and Blackden, M. (2009) Unpaid Care Work, UNDP Policy Brief on Gender Equality and Poverty Reduction, Issue 01, New York: UNDP, available at http://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/gender/Gender%20and%20Poverty%20Reduction/Unpaid%20care%20work%20English.pdf 36. Chang, H.J. (2010) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. London: Allen Lane, p. 1. 37. Block, F. and Somers, M. (2014) The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s critique. London: Harvard University Press, pp. 20–21. 38. Ostrom, E. (1999) ‘Coping with tragedies of the commons’, Annual Review of Political Science 2, pp. 493–535. 39. Rifkin, J. (2014) The Zero Marginal Cost Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 4. 40. Milton Friedman Speaks.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice
by Molly Scott Cato
Published 16 Dec 2008

Schumacher (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, London: Abacus. H. Braverman (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Press. M. S. Cato (2007) ‘Climate change and the bioregional economy’, in A. Cumbers and G. Whittam (eds) Reclaiming the Economy: Alternatives to Market Fundamentalism in Scotland and Beyond, Glasgow: Scottish Left Review Press. Milani, Designing, p. 113. Hutchinson, What Everybody, p. 168. H. Henderson (1988) The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics, Indianapolis, IN: Knowledge Systems, p. 101. D. Boyle, S. Clark and S. Burns (2006) Hidden Work: Co-Production by People Outside Paid Employment, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. www.timebanks.co.uk.

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Cato (2006) Market, Schmarket: Building the Post-Capitalist Economy, Gretton: New Clarion Press, p. 102. 24 Schumacher, D. (1998) ‘Introduction’, in This I Believe, Totnes: Green Books. 25 M. S. Cato (2007) ‘Climate change and the bioregional economy’, in A. Cumbers and G. Whittam (eds) Reclaiming the Economy: Alternatives to Market Fundamentalism in Scotland and Beyond, Glasgow: Scottish Left Review Press. 26 R. Douthwaite (2004) ‘Why localisation is essential for sustainability’, in Feasta Review 2: Growth: The Celtic Cancer, Dublin: Feasta, pp. 114–24, pp. 116–17. 10 Green Taxation When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

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Because the tax relates to the wealth of the inheritor rather than the bequeather the system Table 10.1 Share of UK wealth owned by different sectors of the population Most wealthy 1% 5% 10% 25% 50% 1976 1986 1996 2001 2002 2003 29 47 57 73 88 25 46 58 75 89 26 49 63 81 94 34 58 72 88 98 37 62 74 87 98 34 58 71 85 99 Note: Percentages represent marketable wealth less the value of dwellings. Source: P. Sikka (2007) ‘Reclaiming the economy: Taming the corporations’, in A. Cumbers and G. Whittam (eds) Reclaiming the Economy: Alternatives to Market Fundamentalism in Scotland and Beyond, Glasgow: Scottish Left Review Press; data from UK Office for National Statistics. GREEN TAXATION 161 provides an incentive for those making bequests to choose poorer inheritors, thus ensuring redistribution. A similar policy was adopted by the Fabian Society in the UK.8 For green economists the most glaring inequality in today’s world is that between the rich nations of the West and the poor nations of the South.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

The problem of corporate harm is one of the reasons why early political economists such as Smith, Burke and Tocqueville called for government regulation of industry activities. Today, their beliefs have been turned upside-down; Smith and his followers have been romanticized as being far more laissez-faire than they actually were, a tendency that helps to confer respectability today on the illiberal ideas of later economists who espouse more extreme forms of market fundamentalism than Smith ever voiced himself. This book is the first to examine the role of strategic and elite ignorance in distorting the legacy of Smith and his peers. My focus on the 18th and 19th centuries is important for a few reasons. As well as being a time when economics first grew into a formal academic discipline, the 19th century is the earliest time when legal cases centred on the problem of ‘deliberate ignorance,’ also known as the ‘Ostrich instruction,’ first appeared in modern legal settings, introduced in British courts during the 1860s and applied in the US from the late 19th century on.

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‘We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.’22 Reagan’s providential allusions (greatness was ‘thrust upon us’) are, as Princeton sociologist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out, ‘wholly contingent on the erasure or rewriting of three central themes in American history – genocide, slavery and the massive exploitation of waves of immigrant workers.’ Reagan’s market fundamentalism veiled the reality of ‘massive government subsidies’ that benefited white recipients more than other groups, hiding ‘the state’s role in the development of the American middle class.’23 Reagan’s religious triumphalism hasn’t died today. Military theorist Andrew Bacevich suggests that a problem facing the effort to rein in America’s military expenditures and to force the nation’s military elite to accept accountability for military failures in the Middle East is the fact that many citizens see the nation’s global leadership as ‘indispensable’ and ‘exceptional’ and in all likelihood bequeathed by God.

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, 108–9 inherited privilege, 182–4 inherited wealth, 200 institutional ignorance, 33–4, 294–5 International Monetary Fund, 33–4, 137 Iraq war, 17, 31–2, 52 Jews, anti-Semitism, 79–81, 97–8 Johann-Liang, Rosemary, 273 judiciary, 199 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 308–9, 318–19 Kelsey, Frances Oldham, 254, 255–8 Kendall, Tim, 249–52, 286–7 Kerviel, Jérôme, 120 Ketek, 269–77; adverse reactions, 253–4, 271, 272–4; drug trial irregularities, 271–2, 274–7; FDA failings, 269–70, 272–3; labelling, 273; reliance on expert ignorance, 276–7; withdrawal, 253 Keynes, John Maynard, 31, 167, 170, 172–3 Khurana, Rakesh, 118–19 Kim, Jim Yong, 219–20 Kirkman-Campbell, Anne, 270–2, 274–6, 276–7 Knight, Frank, 133–4, 152 knowledge: derived from torture, 74–5; equal unknowers, 47–9; low desire for knowledge of life events, 38–9; political knowledge, 66–7, 95–6 known unknowns, 52 Koch, Charles and David, 65, 237, 238, 244 Kuttner, Stuart, 103–4 labour: Adam Smith’s wage labourers, 139; domestic labour, 125; exploitation, 129–30; weakened labour protection, 134, 137, 218–20; see also servitude; slavery laissez-faire economy, 20, 21, 126–7, 194–5, 200 The Lancet, 252, 259, 286 language, in ignorance pathways, 168, 169, 200–1 Lay, Kenneth, 235 Leeson, Nick, 120 Leveson inquiry, 109, 110–11 Lippmann, Walter, 16 List, Friedrich, 188–91 Liverpool Football Club, 88–9 Lorde, Audre, 18, 163, 317–18, 319–21, 326–8 Loveland, Douglas, 274, 275 Macdonald, John A., 26–7, 28, 313 McIntosh, Glenn, 288–90 macro-ignorance, 12–15, 169, 225–6 Madison, James, 47 Mandeville, Bernard, 248 Mankiw, Gregory, 132; Macroeconomics, 152–3, 216 marginal productivity theory, 76, 130–5, 152–3 market fundamentalism, 4–5, 6–7, 13 Mason, Paul, 43 Mazzucato, Mariana, 152, 304; The Value of Everything, 134–5 meat industry, 255 medical experiments, 72 Medicines Act (1968) (UK), 291–2 Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA): antidepressant reviews, 282–6; dependence on pharmaceutical companies, 278, 284–5; GlaxoSmithKlein investigation, 252, 290, 291–2; non-prosecutions, 252, 253, 278, 291, 292; unpublished medical trials, 251–2, 286; useful unknowns, 51 Meikson Woods, Ellen, 296 Mens Rea Reform Act (US), 236–44 mental health: National Collaborating Centre, 249–50; see also antidepressants Mercer, Robert, 85–6, 87 Merck, 258–61 Merrell, 256, 257 Meyer, Eugene, 219 MHRA see Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) micro-ignorance, 12–15, 141–2, 168, 225–6 Middle East, 14–15, 68–9, 202–3 Mill, George, 159 Mill, James, 161 Mill, John Stuart, 37, 41; as an ‘unknower’, 156–7, 162, 299; Autobiography, 157–60; Britain’s peaceful global dominance, 202, 203; co-authorship with wife and stepdaughter, 7, 60–1, 153, 157–60; Considerations on Representative Government, 161; and the coolie trade, 155–6; On Liberty, 7, 60–1, 153, 158, 166; Principles of Political Economy, 158; The Subjection of Women, 202, 203; voter franchise limitations, 156 Mills, Charles, 45, 304 mining companies, 185, 222–4 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 193 Mishra, Pankaj, 44, 304 Monod, Jacques, 6 Montesquieu, Albert de Secondat, 29 Mosholder, Andrew, 287–8 Mulcaire, Glenn, 104, 105, 106, 112–13 multinational companies, 185, 219, 222–4 Murdoch, Elisabeth, 101, 115–16, 117 Murdoch, James, 100, 102 Murdoch, Lachlan, 102 Murdoch, Rupert: ignorance of phone hacking, 19; and racist news outlets, 85–6; select committee appearance, 99, 100–1, 114; Sun office meeting, 114–15; wilful blindness, 101–2 Muttitt, Greg, 32 Nasaw, David, 207, 208, 210 Nazism, 72, 74 neoclassical theory, 130–3, 303 Nevsun Resources, 223–4 New York Times, 54–5, 87, 238 News Corporation, 115–16, 117, 119–20, 274–5; see also phone hacking News of the World: Gordon Taylor lawsuit, 105–6; phone hacking, 19, 99, 101, 102–3; use of private investigators, 103–4 Nobel prize, 60–1 Nuremberg Code, 72 Obama, Barack, 82, 91–2, 148–9 oil companies: and Iraq war, 31–2; Standard Oil, 4, 211–14 On Liberty (Mill), 7, 60–1, 153, 158, 166 Open Society (Popper), 164 Operation Motorman, 107–8 oracular power: Brennan’s ‘simulated oracle’ test, 66–7, 95–6; concept, 16, 61–2; divine providence, 67–9; financial advisors, 67; historical context, 62–4; mainstream economic theories, 217; natural and social scientists, 64–7 Orwell, George, 129, 131–2, 164, 168, 225, 309–10 Ostrich instruction, 21, 228, 231–2; see also wilful ignorance Owens, Alec, 109–11 Paine, Thomas: ‘Agrarian Justice’, 183–4; blame-shifting, 180, 307; on divine providence, 174; and elite ignorance, 18–19; on hereditary privilege, 182–4, 308; Rights of Man, 149, 183 Patnaik, Utsa, 44, 304 pharmaceutical industry: damage settlements, 261; distortion of evidence, 11–12, 75; fear of reputational damage, 263–4; fraud, 22; medical trial data, 250–2, 259–60, 262; Merck settlement, 261; presumption of innocence, 291, 292–3; regulation seen as barrier to progress, 257–8; UK’s weak regulatory system, 252–3, 278, 291, 292; useful unknowns, 51, 257; Vioxx and heart failure, 258–62; see also drug trials; drugs philanthropy, 97–8, 204, 308 phone hacking: Caryatid Operation, 112–13; and corporate ignorance, 19; Culture, Media and Sport Committee report, 99–101; Gordon Taylor lawsuit, 105–6; ICO failure to pursue journalists, 109–12; method, 104–5; News of the World, 19, 99, 101, 102–3; victims, 19, 100, 105–6, 112 Pinker, Steven: Bannon-Pinker conundrum, 34–5; Enlightenment Now, 20, 36, 37, 135–6, 142, 202, 203, 224; globalization, 175; information avoidance theories, 37–8; poverty and in-country inequality, 36–7; on wealth distribution, 147–8 Plato, 164, 296, 297 plausible deniability, 56, 120 political deceptions, 30–1 political liberalism, 41 Popper, Karl, 163–5, 297–8; Open Society, 164 positive-sum theory, 123, 136, 147 Powell, Enoch, 68 press freedom, 199 Preston, Lewis, 219 prisoners of war, 72–3 private investigators, 103–4, 107–8 Proctor, Robert, 11 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 79–81 Prozac, 280–1, 289, 290 Pulquero, Ramiro Obrajero, 272 Puri, Poonam, 222–3, 304 race realism, 48 racial exploitation, 304 racism, 45, 48, 84–7, 319 Rampell, Catherine, 171, 217 rational ignorance, 46–7 Rawls, John, ‘veil of ignorance’, 8–9, 46 Reagan, Ronald, 68 reckless ignorance, 54–6, 235, 304 regulation: Adam Smith legacy, 20–1, 121, 126–7, 136–7, 140–1; anti-regulation stance, 246–8, 258, 303, 307; Hayek’s disdain, 248, 301, 303; pharmaceutical industry, 252–3, 257–8, 278, 291, 292; Tocqueville’s recommendations, 20–1, 197–200, 301 rent, 128 rent-seeking, 127–8, 131, 132 Rhodes, Cecil, 313 Ricardo, David, 186–7 Robbins, Lionel, 146 Robins, Nick, 180–1 Robinson, Joan, 133, 135, 147, 152 Rockefeller, John D.: belief in self-made success, 205, 214; beneficiary of laissez-faire practices, 205–6; deceitful opposition to anti-monopoly legislation, 4; master of ignorance, 20; new cooperation principle, 215; philanthropy, 204; secretive railroad deals, 211–13; South Improvement Company cartel, 213; Standard Oil, 4, 211–14; strategic ignorance of business takeovers, 213–14 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 196 Rosenfeld, Sophia, 58 Ross, David, 269–70, 272–3 Rumsfeld, Donald, 52 Samuelson, Paul, 134, 152 sanctioned ignorance, 40–2 Sand, George, 166–7, 324–6 Sanofi-Aventis, 269–77 Sarch, Alexander, 231–2, 233–5, 304 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 293–4 Schiebinger, Londa, 11 Schwartz, Anna, 54–5, 59–61 science, 8, 64–7 scientific racism, 48, 319 Scotland Yard, 112–14 Scott, Tom, 207, 212 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 53–4 self-interest, 125–6, 126, 136, 139–40 Seroxat, 250–2, 282 servitude, 41–2, 44, 155–6 Shapiro, Aaron, 79 shared prosperity theory, 123, 136, 147 Sherman, Rachel, 117–18 Shine lawsuit, 115–16, 117 Simons, Henry, 246 Simpson, Jeffrey, 28 Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam James, 27 Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle, 255 slavery, 43–4, 205; see also servitude Smarsh, Sarah, 84 smarts see strong/smart groups Smith, Adam, 9; Britain a nation of shopkeepers, 192; criticism of monopoly protections, 127–9; criticisms of merchants, 247, 320; economic classes of society, 138–40, 143; and economic inequality, 136; on government regulation, 20–1, 121, 126–7, 136–7, 140–1; his mother’s influence, 125; inevitability of conflict, 186; misrepresentation of his ideas, 142–6, 310–12; on relative poverty, 142–3; on self-interest, 126, 136; strategic and wilful ignorance of, 122–3; tiered justice system, 121; timing and motives for helping the poor, 245; trade protectionism, 186, 190–1; on wealth distribution, 142–4, 191; Wealth of Nations, 6–7, 121, 125–6, 136, 169, 189, 245; Wealth of Nations abridged versions, 144–6 Smith, David, 109–10 snowmobile fallacy, 241–3 social silence, 53 Société Générale, 120 Socrates, 45, 63 Somin, Ilya, 94–5, 96 Sorel, Georges, 17 Soviet Union, uncomfortable facts, 5, 13 Spivak, Gayatri, 40–1 SSRI drugs see antidepressants Standard Oil, 4, 211–14 Steinzor, Rena, 244–5 Stewart, Maria W., 130–1 Stigler, George, 133, 246–7, 248 strategic ignorance: autocratic exploitation, 69–71; business practices, 20, 205; Carnegie, 208–10; corporate anonymity, 45–6; definition, 3; of drone strikes, 91–2; economic theory, 122–3; emancipatory nature, 315–17; exposure efforts treated as inexcusable, 269–70; Ford, 79–81, 98; MHRA’s non-prosecution record, 291–2, 293–4; and political networks, 22; Rockefeller, 213–14 strong/smart groups, 16–17, 69–71, 77, 173–4, 312–13 student loans, 185 Suez crisis, 31 suicide rates, 307 Sun, 114–15 Sutherland, Kathryn, 145–6, 159 Syll, Lars, 187 Symons, Baroness, 32 taxation, Paine’s proposals, 184, 308 Taylor, Gordon, 105–6 Taylor, Harriet, 7, 60–1, 153, 157–60, 166, 299 Taylor, Helen, 157–60 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 68 Teicher, Martin, 280 Temple, Robert, 287–8 Tett, Gillian, 53 Thalidomide, 254, 256–8 think tanks, 65 Thomas, Richard, 110, 111 Tillerson, Rex, 214 tobacco industry, 51 Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in America, 197–200, 309, 322–3; and divine providence, 322–4; French workers, 325–6; government regulation of industry, 20–1, 197–200, 301; prejudice against women, 166–7, 324–6 torture, 72–5 trade: free trade, 17–13, 57, 200–1; mercantilism, 169–70, 171; protectionism, 186, 188, 190–1; Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory, 186–8; US policy, 171, 188, 190, 217 Trefgarne, George, 179–80 Trump, Donald: class myths of voter support, 81–4, 162, 163; elite ignorance, 90–1, 93–4; on history, 314; on Obama, 82, 148–9; presidential election, 19; selective use of facts, 92–4; on torture, 73–4; and truth, 17; wealthy backers, 83–4 truth, liberating potential, 9–10 United Kingdom: male enfranchisement, 42; market interventionism, 43–4; military interventions, 14–15; Suez crisis, 31; trade policies, 44, 57, 186, 190–1; weak regulation of pharmaceutical companies, 252–3, 278, 291–2 United States: conscription, 14–15; drone strikes, 91–2; in-country inequality, 14–15, 36–7; labour oppression, 129–30; laissez-faire policies, 194–5; military interventions, 14–15, 68–9, 185; New Deal, 196; origins myths, 169; suicide rates, 307; trade policies, 171, 188, 190, 217; War Crimes Act (1996), 73; workplace deaths, 219–20 United States Department of Justice, 102, 238, 252, 261 Unser, Bobby, 242–3 unwitting ignorance, 42, 122–3 useful unknowns, 51–6, 257, 277 utilitarianism, 8, 155 ‘veil of ignorance’, 8–9, 46 Viner, Jacob, 300, 302–3 Vinson and Elkins, 235 Vioxx, 258–62 von Eschenbach, Andrew, 273 voter ignorance: Brexit, 82–3, 89–90, 162; collective, shared problem, 243–4; definition, 94; justification for disenfranchisement, 70, 156, 174; political knowledge test, 66–7, 95–6; solutions, 94–5; Trump election, 19, 162; see also democracy, and disenfranchisement War Crimes Act (1996) (US), 73 Washington Consensus, 34 Washington Post, 89, 171, 217, 257 Watkins, Sherron, 235 Watson, Mathew, 187, 188 wealth: evidence of intelligence, 77, 81; financial oligarchy, 65; ignorance and inherited wealth, 139; inherited wealth, 117–18; and morality, 162–3; and racism, 84–7; US voter support for Trump, 83–4, 162, 163 wealth inequality: effect on social wellbeing, 135, 147; God’s will, 75–7; growth, 137; in-country inequality, 36–7; India-England, 129; legitimisation, 75–6; as natural law, 71; relative poverty, 143 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 6–7, 121, 125–6, 136, 169, 189; abridged versions, 144–6 Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 67 welfare systems, 185–6 wellbeing, and inequality, 135, 147 whistle-blowers, 40, 262–3 White, William Allen, 81, 97, 111–12 white-collar crime, Mens Rea Reform Act, 236–44 Whittam Smith, Andreas, 102 Whittamore, Steve, 107–8, 109, 110 wilful ignorance: definition, 21–2, 228–9; difficult to prove, 22; Enron, 21–2; equal culpability thesis, 233–5; financial law, 239–40; first court appearances, 227–8; Grenfell Tower fire, 24–6; ‘ignorance doesn’t excuse’ principle, 231–3, 239–40; News International, 274–5; and reckless ignorance, 235; Rupert Murdoch, 101–2; suspected fraud Ketek trials fraud, 271–2, 274–7 Williams, Zoe, 90 Williamson, Kevin, 83 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 20–1, 163, 317; economic fairness, 122; family background and social norms, 268, 269; legacy, 151–2; on mixed education, 312; ‘Rights of Men’ rebuttal of Burke, 149, 150–1 women: domestic violence, 59; ignorance of co-authorship, 7, 60–1; minority women, 59 Woods, Kent, 285–6, 290–1, 292 workplace health and safety, 217, 218–19, 238 World Bank: disputed assumption of neutrality, 221–2; Employing Workers Indicator, 225; institutional ignorance, 33–4; presidents, 219–20; weakened labour protection, 137, 218–20 Zinn, Howard, 196

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly
by John Kay
Published 30 Apr 2010

In Keynes’s lifetime the one big idea most commonly used by hedgehogs to provide a unified explanation of economic and political events was Marxist socialism. Later in the century, as the appeal of socialism crumbled with the failed regimes that claimed to implement it, other ideologies, such as market fundamentalism and environmentalism, arose to fill the gap. But as Keynes emphasized in his exchange with Planck, most useful economic and political knowledge is simply not of this simple, universal kind. Churchill, the hedgehog, won his place in history by being presciently and ultimately triumphantly right about one big thing—perhaps the biggest thing of the twentieth century.

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leprosy Levitt, Theodore Lewis, Michael Liar’s Poker (Lewis) life expectancy Lincoln, Abraham Lindblom, Charles literacy rate Litton Industries Lives of the Painters (Vasari) loans lobsters local goals logic London Business School London Underground Long-Term Capital Management McDonnell Douglas Machiavelli, Niccolò MacIntyre, Alasdair McKeen, John McNamara, Robert Maginot Line Malaya Mallory, George Malthusianism management management consultants man-and-dog problem manuals maps market capitalization market economies market fundamentalism market research market segments Marks, Simon Marks & Spencer marriage Marxism mass production materialism mathematics Mean Business (Dunlap) Merck Merck, George Merton, Robert C. Messner, Reinhold metaphors Microsoft military affairs military contracts milk Mill, John Stuart misers mission statements Mobutu Sese Seko monetary targets monocultures “moral algebra” Morita, Akio mortgages Moses, Robert motorcycles mountain climbing Mount Everest “muddling through” Munger, Charles Munich Agreement (1938) music nail factories Napoleon I, emperor of France Nash equilibrium National Park Service, U.S.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

Democracy, Suspended until Further Notice Koch brothers: “libertarians” Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations,” New Yorker, August 30, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2010/​08/​30/​covert-operations. Doing It Fast and All at Once Machiavelli: “For injuries ought to be done all at one time…” Niccolò Machiavelli. The Prince, trans. W.K. Marriot, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/​files/​1232/​1232-h/​1232-h.htm. Joseph Stiglitz: “market fundamentalism” D. Joseph Stiglitz, “Moving beyond Market Fundamentalism to a More Balanced Economy,” Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 80, 3 (2009): 345–60, https://sipa.columbia.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​j.1467-8292.2009.00389.x.pdf. Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), ix.

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I was challenging a rosy version of history that many of us have grown up with—the version which tells us that deregulated markets and democracy advanced together, hand in hand, over the second half of the twentieth century. The truth, it turns out, is much uglier. The extreme form of capitalism that has been remaking our world in this period—which Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has termed “market fundamentalism”—very often could advance only in contexts where democracy was suspended and people’s freedoms were sharply curtailed. In some cases, ferocious violence, including torture, was used to keep rebellious populations under control. The late economist Milton Friedman called his most famous book Capitalism and Freedom, presenting human liberation and market liberation as flip sides of the same coin.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

And since Bismarck’s creation of social insurance in late nineteenth-century Germany, the state has been there to help manage these risks, extending much further the size of the group which provides reciprocal assistance. Thus the association of evolution with far right causes, including racism and extreme market fundamentalism, and with the aggressive selfishness which tramples others underfoot to make way for ourselves and our offspring, could hardly be further from the mark. Human evolution gave us the capacity – exceptional among species – to communicate with each other, learn from each other, persuade each other.

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And for many people it still is, and today is mainly a benign force, providing a moral code and a sense of direction for its adherents. In the geographies and segments of societies in which religious beliefs have declined, the space left by the receding tide of religious faith was filled for many, first by Marxism, and more recently by market fundamentalism and environmentalism. George Eliot memorably caricatured the narrative of the pompous and pedantic Edward Casaubon, who imagined he had found the Key to All Mythologies. 7 Our individual lives are often centred on personal narratives – ‘metaphors we live by’. 8 The term ‘narrative paradigm’ originates with the American communication scholar Walter Fisher.

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Importers were emphasising the superior quality of their product at a time when US consumers talked of ‘Friday’ or ‘Monday morning’ cars (see Coleman 2009). 7 Clapham (1913) p. 401. 8 Burns (1787). 9 Arrow and Debreu (1954). 10 We have reservations: Smith’s text does not sustain the market fundamentalism which some modern admirers, not necessarily his readers, attribute to him. And Arrow and Debreu were no market fundamentalists either. 11 Spence (1973). 12 Grossman and Stiglitz (1980). 13 That he made a fortune is certain; that part of it came from the incident outlined above is not.

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy
by Richard Duncan
Published 2 Apr 2012

If it were, the families who were wealthy 200 years ago would still be wealthy today—and generally, they are not. In the very harsh economic environment that is likely to prevail over the next ten years, it is likely that a great deal of wealth is going to be destroyed. The economic system is in crisis and government policy, rather than market fundamentals, will determine the direction of asset prices. If the government fails to borrow and spend enough, the economy will collapse into a deflationary spiral. If it borrows, prints, and spends too much, there will be very high rates of inflation. Future government policy simply cannot be foretold with any degrees of precision.

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Government attempts to prevent that outcome, or political developments that drive policy in a harmful direction, could go astray and produce the opposite effect, very high rates of inflation. Given that the price level could either collapse or surge higher, it is necessary to be prepared for either scenario. It is also important to keep in mind that “market fundamentals” are no longer the only determinants of price movements. In the twenty-first century, various forms of government intervention frequently have an even greater impact. Supply and demand are still the ultimate arbitrators of value. Today, however, governments often have an extraordinary influence on both.

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 15 Feb 2000

If all or most of these particular indicators point the same way on a given day, even if no single one of them is of any substantive importance by itself, their combined effect will be noteworthy. Both of these interpretations of the tenuous relationship between news and market movements assume that the public is paying continuous attention to the news—reacting sensitively to the slightest clues about market fundamentals, constantly and carefully adding up all the disparate pieces of evidence. But that is just not the way public attention works. Our attention is much more quixotic and capricious. Instead, news functions more often as an initiator of a chain of events that fundamentally change the public’s thinking about the market.

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Moreover, Siegel himself does not claim that his evidence suggests that all prices are right, and he argues that today many Internet stocks have indeed been overpriced.12 Likewise, Peter Garber, in his analysis of the tulip mania, also stops short of a complete rejection of the evidence for mispricing. Noting that in January 1636 even common tulip bulbs, not only those infected with the mosaic virus, increased twentyfold in price and then underwent a precipitous decline, he confesses that he is “hard pressed to find a market fundamental explanation” for this event.13 Statistical Evidence of Mispricings It is difficult to make any solid judgments about market efficiency based on a few anecdotes about alleged extreme mispricing of assets. But in fact there is no shortage of systematic evidence that firms that are “overpriced” by conventional measures have indeed tended to do poorly afterward.

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The trouble with such exercises of moral authority is that, although views that the market is either very overpriced or very underpriced may become commonplace among the experts, they are never universally held. The leaders who make such statements find themselves doing so based on personal opinion: an intuitive judgment about the state of market fundamentals and psychology, a judgment that is so hard to prove that they probably feel that it takes an act of courage to make such a statement in the first place. There probably is a role for such actions by opinion leaders, but it is only a minor one. If they are genuinely disinterested in their pronouncements and are perceived as true moral leaders, their pronouncements may have a small stabilizing effect on the market.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

A good chunk of the business world turned against big government starting in the 1970s, amid fears of a growing regulatory state, which led to the alliance between business and conservatives that remade U.S. politics during the Age of Reagan. Now the pendulum is swinging back. After years of enfeebled government and festering national problems, more business leaders are souring on market fundamentalism and see the need to revive the partnership between the public and the private sector. Bill Gates, for instance, has repeatedly called for a vast increase in spending on scientific research. “In the past, federally funded research helped spark industries that today provide hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Gates reminded a congressional committee in 2008.

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The global outlook seemed grimmer, too: climate change was happening faster than anticipated; the AIDS epidemic was accelerating, killing two million people a year; and rapid globalization had barely made a dent in entrenched global poverty. In these darker times, it became harder for the upper class to lead insulated lives. It also became harder for anyone to believe that the free market could solve the worst problems facing the United States and humanity. Market fundamentalism had few upper-class critics in the 1990s, when a rising tide was lifting all boats (more or less) and most of the affluent were still focused on building their fortunes. Things changed during the Bush years. Around the same time that more wealthy people stepped back from business—both the young who’d scored quick paydays and the old who’d had enough—the problems of capitalism were becoming more apparent.

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This was particularly true of the Millennial generation, which tends to be more liberal than Gen Xers or baby boomers. Thus, even as the conservative movement reached a high-water mark under Bush, with control of both branches of the federal government, the public was fast turning against a key idea of market fundamentalism, namely, Milton Friedman’s narrow view of corporate obligation. This change has left executives with little choice but to evolve in their own outlook—or risk punishment in the marketplace. And that is exactly what many have done. Surveys of business leaders show a large-scale shift in attitudes about corporate responsibility in recent years.

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth
by Fred Pearce
Published 28 May 2012

Department of Agriculture echoed the common view of experts that “this kind of price spike happens only once in every three decades or so. It’s highly unlikely a price spike will be repeated especially in the next four to five years.” Around the same time, the UN’s food trade guru Hafez Ghanem insisted that “the market fundamentals are sound and very different from 2007–2008 . . . We don’t believe we are headed for a new food crisis.” But by the end of the year, prices were surging all over again. So if the “market fundamentals” were sound, what was the problem? Perhaps it was the markets themselves. For a while, some economists had been arguing that the freer markets that Zoellick saw as the solution to high food prices were in fact part of the problem.

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In an aside, he agreed that “empirical evidence” does not allow him to assess the importance of market speculators in pushing up prices during those dangerous months. But he absolves them anyway, by concluding that “improving the functioning of commodity markets can reduce the element of volatility that does not reflect underlying market fundamentals.” As we saw in chapter 2, not many people in the financial markets seem to agree with the professor’s sanguine assessment of how more and freer international trade will stabilize prices and feed the world. Several said so in their responses to Beddington’s report. “In reality, open markets do not necessarily deliver either affordability or balance to the market for food,” said Nick Tapp, the head of agribusiness at Bidwells, the London-based international property consultants.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices
by Robert McNally
Published 17 Jan 2017

(One solution would be to invest in infrastructure to inject fully saturated brine instead of freshwater, although this would require expensive capital expenditures.64) Officials may not have sufficient information to inform decisions on when and how to add or subtract from the global market to keep prices stable, and could well run out of supplies before they managed to flatten prices. Moreover, even assuming political interference could be excluded, officials could try to defend price levels or ranges that are inconsistent with actual market fundamentals. If they tried to hold prices below levels justified by fundamentals, they would expend all of the reserves, giving them away at cheap prices to market participants. If SPR use failed to stabilize prices, it would reduce or eliminate whatever psychological impact having the untapped option conferred.65 Conversely, if officials were really willing to gut against the grain and attempt to prop up prices above levels justified by market supply and demand, they would have to buy and fill until capacity was reached, at which point prices would collapse below the official target levels.

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June trading opened at $127 and ended the month just under $140 per barrel.85 Saudi and other OPEC officials continued to insist that supply was adequate and that speculators were driving up prices. U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman would hear none of that, tartly telling reporters on the eve of a June 22 emergency summit of oil-producing and oil-consuming countries in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: “Market fundamentals show us that production has not kept pace with growing demand for oil, resulting in increasing prices and increasingly volatile prices. There is no evidence that we can find that speculators are driving futures prices” for oil.86 And United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined U.S. officials in calling for Saudi Arabia to increase production so that “instead of uncertainty and unpredictability, there is greater certainty, and instead of instability, there is greater stability.”87 Under tremendous international pressure, Saudi Arabia announced another production hike at the June 22 emergency summit.88 Saudi production was headed up to 9.7 mb/d, the highest level since 1981.

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CNN Money, November 23, 2015. http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/the-cost-to-produce-a-barrel-of-oil/. Petroleum Centre Daily Record. “One Million Dollars Subscribed to the Petroleum Producers’ Agency.” November 6, 1872, 2. Pettengill, Samuel B. Hot Oil: The Problem of Petroleum. New York: Economic Forum Co., 1936. Plante, Michael D., and Mine K. Yücel. “Did Speculation Drive Oil Prices? Market Fundamentals Suggest Otherwise.” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Economic Letter, 6, no. 11 (October 2011). Platt’s Oilgram News. “Giusti: OPEC Must Shift.” November, 21, 1996, 4. Plumer, Brad. “How Far Do Oil Prices Have to Fall to Throttle the US Shale Oil Boom?” Vox.com, December 3, 2014. http://www.vox.com/2014/12/3/7327147/oil-prices-breakeven-shale.

Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
by Adom Getachew
Published 5 Feb 2019

At the core of this shift from equality to subsistence was on the one hand the view that global equality was either too far off or impractical, and on the other hand, an intuition that in the absence of a minimal standard, a Rawlsian difference principle could still leave the basic needs of the worst-­off individuals unmet.145 As the neoliberal counterrevolution instilled market fundamentalism in economic practice, social justice was globalized, individualized, and minimized in moral and political theory.146 In this context, returning to the NIEO’s welfare world reminds us of the anti-­imperial origins of contemporary debates about global justice. As one observer noted in the late 1970s, “whatever the other consequences of the demands by the Third World for a new, more egalitarian economic order, one thing is clear: those demands have given rise to an unprecedented debate on the subject of global distributive justice.”147 Just as striking, however, are the departures of this contemporary debate from the Third World’s vision of a welfare world.

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Manley, 152; multilateral aid for, 162; and nationalism, 143–­44; and Nkrumah, 148–­51; and organi­zation [ 254 ] economic development (continued ) of African states, 132; and self-­ determination, 4, 93, 143, 214n4; and self-­reliance, 153; and state, 150; and Union of African States, 132; universality of, 150, 151; and Williams, 111, 127 “Economic Future of the Caribbean” conference, 111 economics, 54, 146, 152; cumulative causation thesis in, 149; market fundamentalism in, 175; neoliberal, 12, 162, 171, 174, 175, 180; and Nkrumah, 101, 148–­51; and politics, 138, 139; supply-­ side, 173 Economics of Nationhood report, 127, 129, 130, 134 economy: agricultural, 143; and anticolonial struggles, 111; and Azikiwe, 136; and balance of payments crises, 171; of colonialism, 54, 111–­12, 157; and decolonization, 143; and development model, 146–­51; domestic as analogous to international, 12, 145, 158, 159, 160, 167–­70; equilibrium between rural and urban sectors of, 153; of Ethiopia, 55, 56–­57, 61–­62; of Europe, 126; and exploitation of black labor, 81; and federations, 11, 109, 141; of Ghana, 148–­51; global, 25, 30–­31, 32, 92, 113; and imperialism, 3, 24, 25, 108; and indirect forms of coercion, 32; and Iraq, 62; of Jamaica, 152–­53, 156–­58, 171–­72, 180; and Lewis, 148; of Liberia, 54, 55, 60; and local elites, 155; and M.

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A., 217n48 Lugard, Frederick, 56–­57, 62–­63, 64 Lumumba, Patrice, 100 Macmillan, Harold, 16 Mali, 107–­8, 109, 136, 206n8 Mali Federation, 206n8 mandates, 22, 40, 55, 86; and Du Bois, 67–­68; and Iraq, 62; and League of Nations, 41–­42, 51; over Ethiopia, 53–­ 54, 56–­57, 58, 61; over Liberia, 53–­54; and presumed backward peoples, 41; and Second Pan-­African Congress, 52; and Smuts, 49–­50, 72; as trustees, 71; and UN Charter, 71; and unequal integration, 41–­42 Manela, Erez, 192n19 Manley, Michael, 2, 5, 145, 171–­72, 181; background of, 8–­9; and delinking, 157, 158; and democratic socialism, 151, 180; and economy, 12, 24–­25; on foreign corporations and local elites, 216–­17n46; and GATT, 164; and neoliberalism, 180; and New World Group, 152; and NIEO, 173; and Nye­ rere, 151; and politics of change, 151–­52; as prime minister, 151; and redistribution, 159; and self-­determination, 12; [ 262 ] Manley, Michael (continued ) and self-­reliance, 153–­54, 155–­57; and socialism, 168; and West Indian Federation, 8 Manley, Norman, 110, 125, 128–­29, 130, 151 market fundamentalism, 175 market(s), 157; domestic, 11, 131; free, 164; global, 55; and imperialism, 3, 82; and James, 69; and M. Manley, 180; mechanisms of, 174; and NIEO, 144; and poor nations, 164; regional, 131, 143 Martinique, 116 Marx, Karl: Capital, 3; Communist Man­ ifesto, 3, 73 Marxism, 4, 68, 76, 77, 81, 83, 145, 167 Marxists, 168 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 76 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), 104 metropole, 49, 78, 82, 111, 112 mines, 72, 82 Mitchell, Timothy, 50 Mobutu, Joseph, 100 modernization, 28, 148, 214n4 modernization theory, 147, 148, 152 Monroe Doctrine, 118 Mont Pèlerin Society, 174 most favored nation standard, 164, 165 Movement for Black Lives, 181 Moyn, Samuel, 92 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 176–­77, 178 Mozambique, 87 Mussolini, Benito, 69 Myrdal, Gunnar, 144, 159, 160–­62, 218n77; Beyond the Welfare State, 149, 161; Eco­ nomic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions, 148–­49; “The Equality Issue in World Development,” 162 Nardal, Paulette, 5, 184n16 nationalism, 159; and Berlin, 76; as compatible with internationalism, 170; congenital defects of, 30; and democratic state, 27; and economic development, 143–­44; good vs. bad, 27; and Habermas, 27; and Lenin, 37–­ 38; and liberalism, 26, 27; and liberal universalism, 28; as necessary for national independence, 24; pathological character of, 26; and postcolonial di- index lemmas, 25; and regional federations, 110; and United States of Europe, 113 National Party (South Africa), 48 nation-­building, 2, 11; and dependen­ cies after decolonization, 17; and ex­ ternal forces, 12; and internal instability, 29; international conditions for, 24; and international market, 144, 157; and NIEO, 167, 174; and self-­ determination, 15, 180; socialist, 154, 156, 157, 163; and worldmaking, 4, 15, 17, 22, 24, 28, 106, 154, 180 nation-­state, 96, 181; and anticolonial nationalism, 25; and decolonization, 112; decolonization as diffusion of, 26; decolonization as globalization of, 16; empirical and normative limits of, 30; as majoritarian, homogenizing, and exclusionary, 179; as normative, 4; rights of, 29; rise of, 3; and self-­ determination, 16; territorial form of, 25; universalization of, 1, 16, 112 Native Americans, 19–­20, 118 native rulers, 83–­84 natural resources, 89, 90, 91–­92, 144, 153, 170, 180, 215n17.

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 4 Apr 2011

Recent criticism of the EMH Besides “anomalies” (patterns of return predictability that are not easily explained by rational models), the crash of 1987, the 1999–2002 tech bubble and bust, and the 2006–2009 boom–bust period have been major challenges to the EMH. In 2008–2009 some critics went further and blamed the EMH for being one cause of the crisis. They blamed widespread belief in the EMH, and more loosely “market fundamentalism”, for the laissez faire attitude of policymakers and regulators: letting leverage and asset booms grow unchecked and allowing ever more complex financial instruments and questionable sales practices flourish without restraint, under the cover that the market would inevitably get the prices of these securities right.

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That is how reflexivity gives rise to initially self-fulfilling but eventually self-defeating prophesies and processes” (Soros, 2003, p. 5). Soros (2008) argues that 2007–2008 is not only an end to a cyclical housing bubble but also to a more secular super-bubble—decades-long trends of credit creation, globalization of finance, and deregulation—whose underlying misconception was excessive reliance on the market mechanism (“market fundamentalism”). When Soros’s The Alchemy of Finance was first published in 1987, academics ignored or dismissed the reflexivity idea, partly because the practitioner-oriented book was written “in a different language”. Yet, it has found a large following among investors and it may have also influenced later academic work on positive-feedback trading and on bubbles.

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With hindsight, we know that the inflation process underwent a structural change (higher, more volatile, more persistent inflation) and that the process was later reversed, but real-time bond investors could only learn about this development gradually. The long bull trend in emerging market assets amidst a gradual improvement in emerging market fundamentals is another example where data are consistent with investor irrationality as well as rational learning. Peso problems and learning stories help in interpreting past return predictability but contain no lessons about future profit opportunities. Market frictions Most academic predictability evidence is presented without taking into account trading costs and other market frictions.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream
by Arianna Huffington
Published 7 Sep 2010

Starting with the New Deal, we began constructing a social safety net to help the most vulnerable among us. But who needed a safety net when the laws of supply and demand were there to protect us, when the trickle-down theory would provide sustenance for us all? The missing tenet in this new free-market fundamentalism was the recognition, central to capitalism, that businessmen have responsibilities above and beyond the bottom line. Alfred Marshall, one of the founding fathers of modern capitalism, in an address to the British Economics Association in 1890, called it “economic chivalry.”15 He explained that “the desire of men for approval of their own conscience and for the esteem of others is an economic force of the first order of importance.”

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Given how close we were in 2008 to the complete collapse of our economic and financial system, anyone who continues to make the case that markets do best when left alone should be laughed off his bully pulpit.17 Despite the fact that many banks, car companies, and so on would be defunct without government intervention, the free-market fundamentalists continue to live in denial, trying to convince the world that if only left alone, free markets would right themselves. Free-market fundamentalism didn’t fail because our leaders didn’t execute it well enough. In fact, during his time in office (until the economic house of cards finally collapsed at the end of his presidency), President George W. Bush and his team did a bang-up job executing a defective theory. The problem isn’t just the bathwater; the baby itself is rotten.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
by Carlota Pérez
Published 1 Jan 2002

To him, it is impossible for national institutions, however effective they might be at their level, to properly regulate a global economy. 175 174. This is the core point of Susan Strange’s Mad Money (1998). 175. The need for global regulation is advocated by Soros in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998) where he presents ‘market fundamentalism’ as a threat to capitalism, the possible source of a serious crash and a danger to the ‘open society’. In his later book he emphasizes this need even further by incorporating it as a subtitle: Reforming Global Capitalism (Soros 2000). 114 Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital 11.

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This made it easier for finance capital to make a systematic assault on state intervention and regulation and for the monetarists to move to pre-eminence in the economics profession.229 Soon, the successful flourishing of the microelectronics revolution and the wave of real competition that characterizes the early installation period, facilitated the unearthing of the laissez-faire philosophies and the neo-classical theories in economics, championed by the Thatchers and the Reagans. The process of creative destruction taking place in the economy was accompanied by the demolition of the old edifice of state intervention and regulation, which had stopped being effective in that specific form. In the frenzy phase, the reign of market fundamentalism was supreme, to the benefit of the new technological entrepreneurs and especially of the violently growing financial capital, but to 226. See, for example, Negroponte (1995). 227. See, for example, Soete (2000). 228. While Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963:1971) held it never could work, there are Keynesians, such as Dow (1998), who hold that the policies were never properly applied. 229.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

What Jain wants, as we see repeatedly with the powerful, is to socialise the losses of publicly funded research and privatise the gains. Even the wording ‘liberated through private investment’ grates, as if millionaires piggy-backing publicly funded research were acting for the greater good. Yet that is in keeping with market fundamentalism and, as Marx writes, the likes of Jain have viewed the bounty of nature as somehow the result of capitalism for centuries: Natural elements entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing … do not enter as components of capital, but as a free gift of Nature to capital, that is, as a free gift of Nature’s productive power to labour, which, however, appears as the productiveness of capital, as all other productivity does under the capitalist mode of production.

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But while its intended purpose is laudable, there can be little doubt it is failing. That is because its understanding of development is built on an ideological commitment to free trade and a worldview which, in the context of the Third Disruption, makes increasingly little sense. As our technologies move to extreme supply, such fidelity to market fundamentalism will only serve to entrench poverty rather than eliminate it. Without recognising this problem, global capitalism will under-develop these regions more acutely than ever, meaning that what should be the energy powerhouses of tomorrow will remain unable to even guarantee access to electricity for their citizens.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

And then the terror attacks of September 11 made it clear that, contrary to the Fukuyama thesis, history had not ended, and ideological combat continued in a particularly brutal manner. The faith in markets that characterized the last decade of the twentieth century suddenly seemed shaken. It was the financial crisis of 2007–2008 that really rocked market fundamentalism to its core. It was a market failure on a grand scale, and countless players bought into the notion that fancy new securities based on shaky home mortgages could somehow be treated as risk-free as government securities. The resulting Wall Street bailouts fed the impression that capitalism was a rigged game that elites would win regardless of the outcome.

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Sanders launched two presidential campaigns that, while ultimately unsuccessful, harnessed the impressive energy and influence of the younger population and pulled the Democratic party in his direction. Corporations were viewed as bastions of privilege, with CEOs who were paid hundreds of times more than their average worker. A slow rage was building in the public. THE CHANGING ARENA The growing backlash against market fundamentalism, however, is only half the story. At the same time, technology was transforming the fundamental structure of business, in some profound ways. The corporation of the twenty-first century increasingly had little in common with that of the twentieth. And the economic rules that applied to it were dramatically changed.

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell
Published 14 Oct 2014

And while the Chinese government is certainly attempting to secure energy supplies by investing in the tar sands, the list of profiteers extracting bitumen is full of the names of US, Canadian, and European corporations, like Suncor/PetroCanada, Syncrude, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil, TOTAL, and ExxonMobil, that receive Western state support. All of these companies are driving tar sands projects. China, Canada, and much of the rest of the world are in the grip of market fundamentalism—the promotion of economic growth, and the relentless pursuit of profits. This has led corporations to secure ideal investment climates by any means necessary. When the Free Trade Area of the Americas was defeated, national governments pursued bilateral trade agreements on behalf of their corporate sponsors.

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The lives of two Chinese migrant workers who died working in the tar sands in 2007 serve as a stark reminder of how the demonization of people of colour and other nationalities assists in creating brutally unsafe working environments that would be deemed unsuitable for Canadian workers. With the economic recession and a documented rise in white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations throughout the West, any legitimacy given to these polarizing attitudes is extremely worrying. It seems that market fundamentalism and extreme racism have been making inroads together. How should we understand statements about how Canada is for sale? Public institutions, such as the health care system and water infrastructure, are threatened with privatization; international investors want in. While people resist the dictates of global finance to privatize the public, we must also recognize that the establishment of the Canadian state itself is based on one of the largest acts of violence and land grabs.

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See also treaty rights Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign, 74 industrial genocide, 64, 69 “in situ extraction,” 9 “insourcing,” 84 institutional disruption, 293–94 institutional ecology, 298, 353n3; “green jobs” and, 301–4 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 218 International Energy Agency (IEA), 27, 28, 101, 304 International Labour Organization, 303, 335n13, 353n10; Convention 169: 251 International Transport Workers’ Federation, 307 Inuit, 258, 316 Iraq: oil imports from, 31; US invasion of, 99 Israel: “extreme” tar sands extraction in, 105–7; trade agreement with, 93; Zionism in, 105–7 Israel Chemicals, 106 Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI), 105–7 Italy, 102 Jacobsen, David, 56 Jewish National Fund (JNF), 106–7 Jimisawaabandaaming, 237 Johanson, Reg, 163 Jonas, Howard, 107 Jones, Van, 244, 284 Jordan, “extreme” tar sands extraction in, 107–8 Jordan Energy and Mines Limited, 108 Journal of Power Sources, 283 jurisdictional contestation, 295–96; Indigenous form of, 295 Kalamazoo (Michigan), 116, 137, 182; Enbridge pipeline spill in, 195–206 Kalamazoo River, 17 Karak International Oil, 108 kerogen-infused oil shale, 105–7 kerogen shale, 6, 100–101 Keynesianism, 298, 302 Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline, 5, 12, 17, 18, 30, 41, 62–63, 77–79, 91, 102, 116, 149, 162, 165, 204–5, 232–36, 250, 282, 314, 315; direct action at White House to stop, 166–80, 279–81, 284, 312; Gulf Coast resistance to, 181–94; jobs and energy security brought by, 233; labour movement and, 219–23 Kihci Pikiskwewin (Speaking the Truth), 118–26 Kinder Morgan, 11, 116, 160, 260; Trans Mountain Pipeline, 11, 91, 95, 125, 149, 162 Klamath River Native organizing, 168 Klare, Michael, 313 Klein, Naomi, 170, 173, 246, 284 Klein, Ralph, 38, 51 Kluane people (Yukon), 153 Kyoto Protocol, 29, 53, 124, 218 La Boétie, Étienne de, 286 Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), 220–22 Labor Network for Sustainability, 220 Laboucan-Massimo, Melina, 209, 248 labour, intersection of with colonialism, the state, capital, and impoverishment, 87 labour movement, 287; and climate change, 217–25, 244; and environmental movement, 86, 88, 90 Lac-Méantic (Quebec), 81, 182 LaDuke, Winona, 246 Lakehead pipelines, 231 Lakota Nation, 235–36 Lameman, Alphonse, 122 Lax Kw’alaams Nation, 264 lead, 136 learning disabilities, 140 Leclerc, Christine, 163–64 Leduc #1, 40 Leggett, Sheila, 148–49, 156 Lenape people, 253 Lepine, Lionel, 208, 248 Levant, Ezra, 50–51 Lickers, Amanda, 265 Liepert, Ron, 56 Life of Mine permit, 169 liquefied natural gas (LNG), 241 Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, 280 Lockridge, Ada, 144 logging, protection of forests from industrial, 70 London Rising Tide, 209 Louisiana, 102, 183 Lovins, Amory, 356n25 Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), 60–62 Lubicon Cree: land settlement agreement, 115; struggle of, 113–17; undermining sovereignty of, 114 Lukacs, Martin, 57 LyondellBasell, 189 Mabee, Holly Spiro, 71–72 Machado, Antonio, 75 Mackenzie Basin, 33 Madagascar, “extreme” tar sands extraction in, 104–5 Madagascar Oil, 104–5 Maisonneuve magazine, 60 Malaysia, 102 Manitoba: destruction of treaty lands in, 125; soil and lake acidification in, 33 Marathon, 60 Marcellus Shale formation, 283, 314–15 “market ecology,” 46, 298, 302, 304, 309; green growth and, 300–301 market fundamentalism, 95 Marois, Pauline, 82 Marx, Karl: Grundrisse, 309 Masten, Scott, 202 Mathias Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan), 74 Matthews, Hans, 149 Mayflower (Arkansas), 17, 182, 189 McKibben, Bill, 169, 170, 173, 220, 311 McMichael, Philip, 68 “megaload” corridor, 11 Mercredi, Mike, 248 mercury, 136, 254 methane, 15, 241, 324n33 Métis people, 4, 128, 131, 254, 258 Mexico, poverty in, 89 Meyer, John M., 316 Michif people, 253, 259 Michigan.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover
by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider
Published 9 Jan 2009

This collection, compiled from articles published in the magazine and on thenation.com, proceeds from the roots of crisis through its early stages to its alarming escalation, and it concludes with a series of pieces that tackle that age-old question, What is to be done? As none other than Milton Friedman, the father of free-market fundamentalism, once wrote, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Friedman was right that ideas are important, but actions depend even more on who controls the levers of power, which segments of society they represent and what kind of pressure can be brought to bear on them from the outside.

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We just wish that the Men in Black would draw inspiration from something besides the anachronistic language of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which tried to make Treasury’s decisions about the Exchange Stabilization Fund unreviewable by anyone else. (See the new plan’s incredible Section 8, something you would think only Dick Cheney could love.) And who can deny it? All the “Comrade Paulson” jokes should at least be good for a decent respite from Market Fundamentalism—the notion that unregulated markets automatically give you full employment and economic stability. Right now every individual financial institution is deleveraging—that is, reducing its use of borrowed money—at a terrifying pace. Financial houses are trying to recapitalize themselves by gouging depositors, borrowers, investors and credit card holders.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

These orders were, some argued, in violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, since an occupying power is mandated to guard the assets of an occupied country and not sell them off.4 Some Iraqis resisted the imposition of what the London Economist called a ‘capitalist dream’ regime upon Iraq. A member of the US-appointed Coalition Provisional Authority forcefully criticized the imposition of ‘free market fundamentalism’, calling it ‘a flawed logic that ignores history’.5 Though Bremer’s rules may have been illegal when imposed by an occupying power, they would become legal if confirmed by a ‘sovereign’ government. The interim government, appointed by the US, that took over at the end of June 2004 was declared ‘sovereign’.

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The Reagan administration, which had seriously thought of withdrawing support for the IMF in its first year in office, found a way to put together the powers of the US Treasury and the IMF to resolve the difficulty by rolling over the debt, but did so in return for neoliberal reforms. This treatment became standard after what Stiglitz refers to as a ‘purge’ of all Keynesian influences from the IMF in 1982. The IMF and the World Bank thereafter became centres for the propagation and enforcement of ‘free market fundamentalism’ and neoliberal orthodoxy. In return for debt rescheduling, indebted countries were required to implement institutional reforms, such as cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labour market laws, and privatization. Thus was ‘structural adjustment’ invented. Mexico was one of the first states drawn into what was going to become a growing column of neoliberal state apparatuses worldwide.24 What the Mexico case demonstrated, however, was a key difference between liberal and neoliberal practice: under the former, lenders take the losses that arise from bad investment decisions, while under the latter the borrowers are forced by state and international powers to take on board the cost of debt repayment no matter what the consequences for the livelihood and well-being of the local population.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It
by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
Published 3 Oct 1989

After discussing the deal and the market, my student and his boss decided that the asking price of $4.3 million was about $450,000 too high. At that point, my student called the broker again to discuss pricing and next steps. After initial pleasantries, the broker asked my student what he thought of the property. “It looks like an interesting property,” he said. “Unfortunately, we don’t know the market fundamentals. We like downtown and King Street in particular, but we have a lot of questions.” The broker then told him that he had been in the market for more than fifteen years, so he was well informed. At this point, my student pivoted to calibrated “How” and “What” questions in order to gather information and judge the broker’s skills.

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A little befuddled but still in the negotiation mindset, my student constructed a label. Inadvertently he mislabeled the situation, triggering the broker to correct him and reveal a Black Swan. “If he or she is selling such a cash cow, it seems like the seller must have doubts about future market fundamentals,” he said. “Well,” he said, “the seller has some tougher properties in Atlanta and Savannah, so he has to get out of this property to pay back the other mortgages.” Bingo! With that, my student had unearthed a fantastic Black Swan. The seller was suffering constraints that, until that moment, had been unknown.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

I hope that after reading Trend Following, the confusion and hesitation associated with making money in down markets, markets that are dropping or crashing, will dissipate. 7 Trend followers are traders, so I generally use the word “trader” instead of “investor” throughout. Fundamental Versus Technical There are two basic theories that are used to trade in the markets. The first theory is fundamental analysis. It is the study of external factors that affect the supply and demand of a particular market. Fundamental analysis uses factors such as weather, government policy, domestic and foreign political and economic events, price-earnings ratios, and balance sheets to make buy and sell decisions. By monitoring “fundamentals” for a particular market, one can supposedly predict a change in market direction before that change has been reflected in the price of the market with the belief that you can then make money from that knowledge.

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Instead of trying to predict a market direction, their strategy is to react to the market’s movements whenever they occur. This enables them to focus on the market’s actual moves and not get emotionally involved with trying to predict direction or duration. Chapter 1 • Trend Following 11 One trend follower summarized the conundrum: “I could not analyze 20 markets fundamentally and make money. One of the reasons [trend following] works is because you don’t try to outthink it. You are a trend follower, not a trend predictor.”14 Discretionary Versus Mechanical I have established the concept that you can be an investor or trader. I have established that trading can be fundamentally or technically based.

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Trend Following Critics My interviews with the top traders confirmed what I have always believed and repeatedly say to be the primary reason people After word are confused about trend following. Their confusion is linked directly to a trading and investing culture familiar and therefore comfortable with only one approach to the markets: fundamental analysis (buy and hold, long only, etc.). Fundamental traders and investors think the only way to beat the market is to gather all the information you can find. They want news, they want CNBC, they want Jim Cramer, they want crop reports, they want OPEC rumors, they want Bernanke’s shoe size—they believe extraneous information will help them to make profitable trading decisions.

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
by Eric Hobsbawm
Published 5 Sep 2011

This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. Not surprisingly, this 10 Marx Today ‘market fundamentalism’, closer to theology than economic reality, also failed. The disappearance of the centrally planned state economies and the virtual disappearance of a fundamentally transformed society from the aspirations of the demoralised social-democratic parties have eliminated much of the twentieth-century debates on socialism.

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On the other hand there has been an enormous and accelerating progress of globalisation and the sheer wealth-generating capacity of humans. This has reduced the power and scope of economic and social action by nation-states and therefore the classical policies of social-democratic movements, which depended primarily on pressing reforms on national governments. Given the prominence of market fundamentalism it has also generated extreme economic inequality within countries and between regions and brought back the element of catastrophe to the basic cyclical 11 How to Change the World rhythm of the capitalist economy, including what became its most serious global crisis since the 1930s. Our productive capacity has made it possible, at least potentially, for most human beings to move from the realm of necessity into the realm of affluence, education and unimagined life choices, although most of the world’s population have yet to enter it.

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For almost twenty years after the end of the Soviet system its ideologists believed that they had achieved ‘the end of history’, ‘an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’ (Fukuyama), 2 growth in a definitive and permanent, self-stabilising social and political world order of capitalism, unchallenged and unchallengeable both in theory and practice. None of this is tenable any longer. The twentieth-century attempts to treat world history as an economic zero-sum game between private and public, pure individualism and pure collectivism, have not survived the manifest bankruptcy of the Soviet economy and of the economy of ‘market fundamentalism’ between 1980 and 2008. Nor is a return to the one more possible than a return to the other. Since the 1980s it has been evident that the socialists, Marxist or otherwise, were left without their traditional alternative to capitalism, at least unless or until they rethought what they meant by ‘socialism’ and abandoned the presumption that the (manual) working class would necessarily be the chief agent of social transformation.

Market Sense and Nonsense
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 5 Oct 2012

Schwager Hedge Fund Market Wizards: How Winning Traders Win Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America’s Top Stock Traders Schwager on Futures: Technical Analysis Schwager on Futures: Fundamental Analysis Schwager on Futures: Managed Trading: Myths & Truths Getting Started in Technical Analysis A Complete Guide to the Futures Markets: Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Trading, Spreads, and Options Study Guide to Accompany Fundamental Analysis (with Steven C. Turner) Study Guide to Accompany Technical Analysis (with Thomas A. Bierovic and Steven C. Turner) Cover design: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2013 by Jack D.

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Clarity Portfolio Viewer Closet benchmarker Closet index fund CNBC Coincident negative return (CNR) matrix Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) vs. commercial paper Commercial paper, vs. collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commodity prices Commodity trading advisors (CTAs) Comparison pitfalls markets strategy style time period Conservative investment Contango Contrarian indicator Convergence strategies Convertible arbitrage Convertible bond prices Correlation among managers and beta beyond coefficient of determination definition down months focus linear relationships to managers misconceptions about plus beta within portfolios spurious Correlation assumptions Correlation coefficient Correlation matrix Correlations going to one event Costs Countertrend strategies Countrywide Cramer, Jim Credit arbitrage Credit default swaps Credit hedge funds Credit quality Credit rating agencies Credit risk Credit spreads Critical financial applications CTA approaches The Daily Show Data relevance Default risk Deficient market hypothesis. See also Efficient market hypothesis (EMH) about beating the market fundamentals vs. price moves hedgers and governments human emotions investment insights luck vs. skill market collapse information negative value assets the price in not always right Delta hedging Direct investments in hedge funds Directional biases Distress investments Diversification amount of benefits of in funds of funds portfolio effects qualification regarding top down approach in traditional funds Diversification benefits in hedge funds Diversified hedge funds investment Diversified portfolio of hedge funds Dollar flow Dot-com mania Double fee structure Dow Theory Downside deviation Drawdowns Druckenmiller, Stanley Efficient market hypothesis (EMH) and empirical evidence flaws future world view Emerging market funds Emotional price distortion Emotion-driven bubble Emotions and fundamentals and reason Engelberg, Joseph Equity hedge funds Equity investors Equity market neutral funds Equity prices Equity trader ESW (Joseph Engelberg, Caroline Sasseville, and Jared Williams) Event driven funds Event risk Exchange rate mechanism Expert advice Comedy Central vs.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

They must develop their vision of a new global economy, beyond complaints about the asymmetric power structure. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear whether they have the inclination to rise above their immediate interests to address the globe’s common challenges. Their own development experience makes countries like China, India, and Brazil resistant to market fundamentalism and natural advocates for institutional diversity and pragmatic experimentalism in the world economy. They can build on this experience to articulate a new global narrative that emphasizes the real economy over finance, policy diversity over harmonization, national policy space over external constraints, and social inclusion over technocratic elitism.

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From Greece’s Syriza to Brazil’s Workers’ Party, the left has failed to come up with ideas that are economically sound and politically popular, beyond ameliorative policies such as income transfers. Economists and technocrats on the left bear a large part of the blame. Instead of contributing to such a program, they abdicated too easily to market fundamentalism and bought in to its central tenets. Worse still, they led the hyperglobalization movement at crucial junctures. The enthroning of free capital mobility—especially of the short-term kind—as a policy norm by the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the IMF was arguably the most fateful decision for the global economy in recent decades.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)
by Michael R. Strain
Published 25 Feb 2020

Olsen concludes by saying that “conservative populism in the real world is nothing more than an argument that new times require new measures.” This is not the case. It is much more than that. Of course new times require new measures. Of course government needs to do more to advance economic opportunity to those who need it most. My disagreement with Olsen is not about political philosophy or the wisdom of “market fundamentalism” as a guide to public policy. My disagreement is not theoretical. It is about the harmful way that populism on the political right has manifested itself—in the real world—during the past several years. Olsen writes: “Strain’s book effectively refutes the ‘left populist’ argument of general capitalist failure.”

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 10 Jun 2012

It seemed curious that the ECB was apparently willing to delegate authority to a private institution, operating in secret, on what was or was not an acceptable restructuring. So much for democratic accountability. 39. The term “Chicago school” has come to refer to Milton Friedman and his disciples who believed in market fundamentalism, the idea that unfettered markets are always efficient even in the absence of government regulation. Milton Friedman taught for many years at the University of Chicago. But, of course, many economists who teach there do not subscribe to market fundamentalism—and many economists at other schools do. See chapter 3 for a longer discussion. 40. See the website of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve for the most up-to-date balance sheet figures, http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm. 41.

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If the leaders of the Fed hadn’t been so wedded to the notion that there were no bubbles, it would have been obvious to them (as it was to economists like Robert Shiller, of Yale, one of the country’s leading experts on housing),54 that the unprecedented rise in housing prices relative to incomes almost surely represented a bubble. In addition, the Fed didn’t have to rely on interest rate changes to dampen the bubble—it could have increased down payment requirements or tightened lending standards. Congress had given the Fed authority to do so in 1994. The Fed in its allegiance to market fundamentalism had tied its own hands. Economists have, similarly, provided the Fed with reasons not to attempt to address unemployment. People in a dynamic economy have to move from job to job, and that takes time, which creates a natural rate of unemployment. To push the economy beyond that natural rate pushes the economy to ever-accelerating inflation (in this view).

New Market Wizards: Conversations With America's Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 28 Jan 1994

However, there was one exception. [He laughs at the recollection.] I was probably one of the only candidates who knew virtually nothing about Richard Dennis. Although I didn’t know it, Richard Dennis was famous for being one of the world’s great technical traders. During the interview I asked, “Do you trade the markets fundamentally or technically?” That got a good chuckle. He answered, “We trade technically.” I responded by asking, “Is fundamental analysis dead?” Dennis answered, with a smile, “We certainly hope not.” Obviously your lack of experience didn’t hurt you. As it turned out, of the thirteen people selected, one-third had no experience, one-third had significant experience, and the remaining one-third had a little bit of experience.

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In other words, chart traders are artists until they mathematically define their patterns—say, as part of a system structure—at which time they become scientists. Why have you chosen a purely technical approach in favor of one that also employs fundamentals? Many economists have tried to trade the commodity markets fundamentally and have usually ended up losing. The problem is that the markets operate more on psychology than on fundamentals. For example, you may determine that silver should be priced at, say, $8, and that may well be an accurate evaluation. However, under certain conditions—for example, a major inflationary environment—the price could temporarily go much higher.

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These two ratios—0.618 and 0.382—are commonly used to project retracements of prior price swings. Floor trader. A member of the exchange who trades on the floor for personal profit. Frontrunning. The unethical—and in some cases illegal—practice of a broker placing his own order in front of a customer order that he anticipates will move the market. Fundamental analysis. The use of economic data to forecast prices. For example, fundamental analysis of a currency might focus on such items as relative inflation rates, relative interest rates, relative economic growth rates, and political factors. Futures. See “Futures—Understanding the Basics.” Gann analysis.

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives
by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez
Published 5 Jan 2010

Frank and his ilk aside, many people see solving car-related problems as an engineering issue alone, not a cultural or political challenge, requiring behavioral changes or social innovations. They are the many, many “irrational futurists,” in the words of one iconoclastic GM executive, people who assume that science will solve, and the market will commercialize, technical solutions to the problems of pollution, congestion, or highway fatalities.25 After years of market fundamentalism—or the belief that the market is the mechanism that, if left alone, will produce the best outcome for the most people—as the credo of government 36 Carjacked and media, people generally assume the market will make happen the things that need to happen. Many, especially the young, are convinced that global warming, in part caused by auto emissions, will be reversed by the invention of a nonpolluting fuel or superlight materials for car manufacture.

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Byrider, 108 Jaguar, 74 James, Leon, 157–8 Jeep Wrangler, 16, 65 Johnson, Stephen L., 175 Joyner, Tom, 151 Katz, Jack, 153–5 Kia, 2 Klare, Michael T., 89–90 Klein, Naomi, 10 Krugman, Paul, 126 Land Rover, 16, 27 Lexus, 54, 74, 125, 165 Limbaugh, Rush, 149–50 Lincoln, 16, 75, 143 Live Free or Die Hard (film), 7 London, 134, 225 252 Carjacked Ludwig, Art, 99 luxury, 74–8 market fundamentalism, 35–6 marketing strategies: auto shows and, 48–9 car regulation and, 18 of Chevrolet, 178 children and, 50–2 credit and, 84–7 emotions and, 40–6 of Ford, 42 of Honda, 44, 48, 55 interactive, 40 luxury and, 74–8 niche, 32 of Nissan, 43–5 progress and, 34 safety and, 203 self-expression and, 56–7 Sloan’s GM, 64 status and, 57–60 SUVs and, 73, 89, 199 teenagers and, 2, 51–4, 59 of Volkswagen, 27–8 mass transit.

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 23 Dec 2010

Much of economic research is in fact devoted to understanding the types of government intervention that can improve economic performance. Non-economic motives and socially cooperative behavior are increasingly part of what economists study. The problem is not that economists are high priests of free market fundamentalism, but that they suffer from the same heuristic biases as regular people. They tend to exhibit groupthink and overconfidence, relying excessively on those pieces of evidence that support their preferred narrative of the moment, while dismissing others that don’t fit as neatly. They follow fads and fashion, promoting different sets of ideas at different times.

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Developing nations sought to become export platforms and became increasingly willing to submit themselves to such rules in their drive to attract foreign investment. Entangled with these changes was an important ideological transformation. The 1980s were the decade of the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions. Free market economics was in the ascendancy, producing what has been variously called the Washington Consensus, market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism. Whatever the appellation, this belief system combined excessive optimism about what markets could achieve on their own with a very bleak view of the capacity of governments to act in socially desirable ways. Governments stood in the way of markets instead of being indispensable to their functioning, and accordingly had to be cut down to size.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Yet we perceive a fatal flaw in the Right: it has been timid and unimaginative in its vision of the social changes necessary to make markets flourish. Many on the Right support Market Fundamentalism, an ideology they assume to have been proven in economic theory and historical experience. In reality, it is little more than a nostalgic commitment to an idealized version of markets as they existed in the Anglo-Saxon world in the nineteenth century. (We will use the term capitalism to refer to this idealized historical version of markets, in which governments focus on protecting private property and enforcing contracts.) We contrast Market Fundamentalism with Market Radicalism, which is our own commitment to understand, restructure, and improve markets at their very roots.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

Further Reading H.-J. CHANG Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World (London: Random House, 2007). P. HIRST, G. THOMPSON AND S. BROMLEY Globalization in Question, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). R. KOZUL-WRIGHT AND P. RAYMENT The Resistible Rise of Market Fundamentalism: Rethinking Development Policy in an Unbalanced World (London: Zed Books and Third World Network, 2007). W. MILBERG AND D. WINKLER Outsourcing Economics: Global Value Chains in Capitalist Development (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). D. RODRIK The Globalization Paradox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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The figures were 63 per cent for Liberia, 50 per cent for Haiti and 42 per cent for Kosovo. 13. All the FDI flow figures cited below are inflow figures. In theory, inflows and outflows of FDI on the world scale should be the same, but the actual data always show discrepancies. 14. Calculation based on World Bank data. 15. See R. Kozul-Wright and P. Rayment, The Resistible Rise of Market Fundamentalism: Rethinking Development Policy in an Unbalanced World (London: Zed Books and Third World Network, 2007), Chapter 4, for an excellent review of the evidence. 16. On tax havens, see N. Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London: Vintage, 2012), and the website of Tax Justice Network, www.taxjustice.net.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has drawn parallels between the democratic reformers in the Middle East and the economic reformers in Latin America, arguing that they are both making a stand against different kinds of fundamentalism, both of which deny the importance of their humanity, and that they recognise the parallels between them. It may be religious fundamentalism which clings to a bizarre belief in the literal truth of every sentence of holy scripture. Or it may be market fundamentalism, which clings to a bizarre belief in the objective reality of market values and the bottom line. It is at heart the same thing, and accepting that is no criticism of either religion or the market. I find this idea compelling. It points to a similar crisis in economics and theology, and demands a humanistic response to both kinds of spiritual impoverishment.

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It means rejecting inhumane simplifications, single bottom lines, one-dimensional measures, and all the other nostrums that have been allowed to drive out complex and humanising middle-class values. Perhaps it also sheds some light on one of the things that has been confusing me. Where is the spark of revolt against the market fundamentalism which is impoverishing the UK, where the middle classes are cowed, the working classes are powerless, and where political debate is so staggeringly narrow and constrained? Watching the new Pope Francis developing his pro-poor mission in Latin America, I have been wondering whether the spark of change is going to come from the Church in its tolerant form.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there’s something wrong.21 Unsurprisingly, a large share of tech tycoons professes some degree of adherence to libertarianism. In some cases, like that of PayPal founder Peter Thiel (perhaps the most vocal libertarian of his cohort) the obsession with market fundamentalism made him become a staunch supporter of Trump, and he even served as part of his transition team. He remained a Trump advisor even after many of his tech colleagues, such as Elon Musk, abandoned the administration due to its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Figure 6.7: The bigger firms keep getting bigger Notes: This chart shows the share of revenues by the top 4 firms in each industry (based on NAICS two-digit levels which are given in parenthesis) where data on industry concentration is available.

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My country and darling of globalization in Latin America, Mexico, is a fine example of this, having seen its income per capita (in PPP terms) peak at just over half of the US’s in 1981, only to see that fall to one-third by 201834 — despite the ambitious North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that Ivy League-educated Mexican technocrats thought would bring the country first-world prosperity. Economist and globalization critic Dani Rodrik explained the consequences of this free-market fundamentalism: The one thing that is generally agreed on about the consequences of these reforms is that things have not quite worked out the way they were intended. Even their most ardent supporters now concede that growth has been below expectations in Latin America (and the “transition crisis” deeper and more sustained than expected in former socialist economies).

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

The market is not the one and all; it has an outside, it has a limit.14 Just so it doesn’t appear that I am unfairly taking advantage of a certain class of people who might have been overly inclined to jump the gun, let’s sample some people closer to the orthodoxy in American economics like, say, Joseph Stiglitz: Neo-liberal market fundamentalism was always a political doctrine serving certain interests. It was never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now be clear, is it supported by historical experience. Learning this lesson may be the silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the global economy.15 In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, Stiglitz was quoted as saying, “Neoliberalism like the Washington Consensus is dead in most western countries.

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These propositions are, of necessity, a central focus of a book on the relationship of neoliberals to the crisis. It should be very important to have some familiarity with these ideas, if only to resist simple-minded characterizations of the neoliberal approach to the crisis as some evangelical “market fundamentalism.” Although it is undeniably the case that all manner of secondhand purveyors of ideas on the right would wish to crow that “market freedom” promotes their own brand of religious righteousness, or maybe even the converse, it nonetheless debases comprehension to conflate the two by disparaging both as “fundamentalism”—a sneer unfortunately becoming commonplace on the left.

…

While Stiglitz has certainly earned his Nobel, he has not effectively staunched the intellectual trend of treating markets as prodigious information processors; nor has he provided a knock-down refutation of the EMH. This has led to the distressing spectacle of Stiglitz, the great hope of the “legitimate left,” openly defending the neoclassical approach to the crisis, while not really changing it all that much. Stiglitz has admitted that his mission all along was to undermine free-market fundamentalism from within: [I]t seemed to me the most effective way of attacking the paradigm was to keep within the standard framework as much as possible . . .While there is a single way in which information is perfect, there are an infinite number of ways that information can be imperfect. One of the keys to success was formulating simple models in which the set of relevant information could be fully specified . . . the use of highly simplified models to help clarify thinking about quite complicated matters.70 The way he sought to do this is to produce little stripped-down models that maximize standard utility or production functions, with a glitch or two inserted up front in the setup.

Hopes and Prospects
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2009

Stephen Zunes, one of the leading scholarly analysts of these matters, points out that “at a critical point in the nation’s effort to become more self-sufficient [in the early 1950s], the U.S. government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its foreign debts.”1 The economic policies forced on Bolivia in those years were a precursor of the structural adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which has generally had harmful effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where financial liberalization is bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and leading to massive state intervention in a desperate effort to rescue collapsing financial institutions. We should note that this is a regular feature of contemporary state capitalism, though the scale today is unprecedented.

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See American Indians “natural growth exceptions” to policy opposing new settlements, 186 natural resources, limited access to, 167 Necessary Illusions (Chomsky), 313n15 Negbi, Moshe, 155 Negroponte, John, 264 neoliberal globalization, financialization of economy in era of, 94 neoliberal market fundamentalism, 105 neoliberal market “reforms,” 100 neoliberalism, 53, 70, 75, 79, 81–84 central doctrine of, 93 Chile and, 92 vs. democracy, 91 and development, 75–76 See also financial liberalization Neoliberalismo y Globalización, vii Netanyahu, Binyamin, 178, 180, 186, 189, 201, 234 New Deal, 38, 77 “new initiative” for Middle East peace, 182, 201, 203 New Nationalism, 25 Nicaragua, 46, 275 9/11 terrorist attacks, 26–28, 266–67 “war on drugs” and, 57 Nixon, Richard M., 37, 42, 61, 116 Noble, David, 88 Non-Aligned Movement, 135, 196 Norris, John, 287n23 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 29, 35–36, 69, 69, 91, 215–16, 270 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 65, 171, 238, 248, 278 East German territories and, 171, 173, 279–80 expansion, 65, 136, 173–74, 223, 279–80 Gorbachev and, 136, 171, 279 “NATO response force,” 223–24 “responsibility to protect” and, 185 North Korea, 137–40 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 194–97 Iran and, 135, 169, 196, 197, 199, 249, 250 Israel and, 194, 195 Obama and, 165–66, 194, 196, 197, 199, 249, 250 Pakistan and, 240 Reagan and, 240 United States and, 136 nuclear weapons, 166, 174 Diego Garcia and, 168 eliminating/ending the threat of, 136, 65–67 India and, 194–95 Iran and, 135, 169, 188, 194, 196–200, 249 Iraq and, 128, 198 Israel and, 194, 196, 197, 199, 249 Lee Butler on, 165 NATO and, 171 no-first-use policy, 166, 171 North Korea and, 137–39 Obama and, 165–66, 194–96, 249 Pakistan and, 169, 194, 196, 198, 210, 240, 249 Russia and, 168, 171 Saddam and, 127–28, 139, 197, 198 See also ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs; missile defense programs; weapons of mass destruction nuclear weapons programs, U.S. allies with extensive, 249 nuclear weapons–free zones (NWFZs), 63, 135, 167–69, 171, 173, 250.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

Already in 2007, Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds had moved to invest in Western financial companies, including Barclays, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS and the private equity firms Blackstone and Carlyle. For a time it seemed as if the sovereign wealth funds might orchestrate a global bail-out of Western finance; the ultimate role reversal in financial history. For the proponents of what George Soros has disparaged as ‘market fundamentalism’, here was a painful anomaly: among the biggest winners of the latest crisis were state-owned entities.bi And yet there are reasons why this seemingly elegant, and quintessentially Chimerican, resolution of the American crisis has failed to happen. Part of the reason is simply that the initial Chinese forays into US financial stocks have produced less than stellar results.bj There are justifiable fears in Beijing that the worst may be yet to come for Western banks, especially given the unknowable impact of a US recession on outstanding credit default swaps with a notional value of $62 trillion.

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SIVs see structured investment vehicles Skilling, Jeffrey K. 169 slavery: and home ownership 267 Rothschilds and 93 slave trading 25 Sloan, Alfred 160 Slovenia 2 Smith, Adam 53 socialists: and bond markets 89-90 and liberalization 312 and welfare state 200-202 Socialist Standard 17-18 Song Hongbing 86 Soros, George 314-19 income 2 on ‘market fundamentalism’ 337 Sourrouille, Juan 112 South America 18-26 gas pipelines 119 property law 274-6 see also Latin America Southern Rhodesia 295 South Korea 233 South Sea Bubble see bubbles sovereign wealth funds 9 Soviet-style economics 213 Soviet Union see Russia/USSR Spain 36 declining empire 26 and gold and silver 1 property price boom 10 royal funding 52 Spanish Succession, War of the 156 special-purpose entitities (SPEs) 172-3 speciation 53 speculators 122. see also futures contracts Spencer, Herbert 351 spices 127 spreads 241 squatters 276-7 squirrel skins 25 Sri Lanka 134 stagflation 211 Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 268 Standard and Poor’s 500: 124n.

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann , Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler
Published 25 Mar 2018

An increasing number of segments will arise with specific expectations placed on selfdriving cars. This will result in more and more vehicle variants with differing features and functions. The car manufacturers may start with just a few types of autonomous vehicles, which will then be quickly adapted to reflect the desires of different target groups in the various markets. Fundamentally, the types of vehicle already described can be identified, which are likely to play a role in the starting phase of autonomous driving (see Table 9.2 and Box 9.3 [113]). One category will be autonomous robocars, which will primarily be used in cities, to transport people from the railway station to their homes, for example.

…

The first telematicsbased policies were launched in the United Kingdom in the 1990s with an integrated emergency call in the case of an accident. In the United States, 10 per cent of all insurance policies are sold with pay-how-you-drive pricing. Today, numerous companies have already started transforming the motor insurance market fundamentally. Two examples to demonstrate this: (1) Short-term car insurance is not new, with policies ranging from 1 to 31 days. Meanwhile, however, Cuvva has launched an app that provides hourly insurance. All you need is the registration plate number, the required period for the insurance cover and a picture of the vehicle. (2) Metromile offers pay-as-you-drive insurance for which customers pay a monthly base rate plus a rate per mile for every mile driven.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

We have learned that the market is not all knowing, especially when it is distorted by greed and avarice and government complicity. We have learned the hard way the costs of “too big to fail.” We have learned not to trust the right-wing ideologues who peddled a devil’s brew of deregulated and free market fundamentalism. We have learned a hard lesson about free market fundamentalism. Just as we have learned a hard lesson about free trade fundamentalism. This snake oil was peddled by the big banks and the big corporations. You can see the effects by walking down the main street of almost any city or town in any state, surely in the State of Ohio.

Water: A Biography
by Giulio Boccaletti
Published 13 Sep 2021

Despite some localized floods: Barriopedro et al., “The 2009/10 Drought in China: Possible Causes and Impacts on Vegetation.” The shopping spree had consequences: Sternberg, “Chinese Drought, Wheat, and the Egyptian Uprising: How a Localized Hazard Became Globalized.” Those countries are highly vulnerable: Enghiad et al., “An Overview of Global Wheat Market Fundamentals in an Era of Climate Concerns.” Pressure grew on public finances: Abderrahim and Castel, Inflation in Tunisia, 11. Egypt was the largest wheat importer: Breisinger et al., Beyond the Arab Awakening, 12. During the eighties and nineties, Gaddafi: Adi, Pan-Africanism, 213. Those events shared basic traits: Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf.

…

Uesugi, 48–49. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2010. Emanuel, Kerry A. “The Power of a Hurricane: An Example of Reckless Driving on the Information Superhighway” Weather 54 (April 1999): 107–108. Enghiad, Aliakbar, D. Ufer, A. M. Countryman, and D. D. Thilmany. “An Overview of Global Wheat Market Fundamentals in an Era of Climate Concerns.” International Journal of Agronomy 2017 (July 2017): 1–15. Epstein, Steven A. An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Erdkamp, Paul. The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

For many on the right of politics, he is a founding figure of the modern era: the greatest of all economists, an eloquent advocate of the freedom of the individual and the staunch enemy of state intervention, in a world released from the utopian delusions of communism and socialism. For many on the left, he is something very different: the true source and origin of so-called market fundamentalism, author of ‘the textbook on contemporary capitalism’ according to the activist and writer Naomi Klein, the prime mover of a materialist ideology that is sweeping the world and corrupting real sources of human value, an apologist for wealth and inequality and human selfishness—and a misogynist to boot.

…

If it is not challenged by those who believe in it, then it will be challenged by those who wish to destroy it. The financial crash of 2007–8 not only wiped out a vast amount of economic value: it wiped out much of the public credibility of economics itself, and pushed the public understanding of economics into a general critique under the heading of ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘market fundamentalism’. This conflation has been convenient. It is easy for policy-makers to understand, it creates a simple public narrative out of a far more complex underlying reality, and it gives immediate scope for often justified criticism of banks, financial markets, regulators and indeed politicians and capitalism itself.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

This was nothing new, but the financial system that emerged in the late twentieth century was particularly opaque and impenetrable. In the process, the interest of shareholders and the interests of the bankers, traders, and managers who were the agents of those shareholders diverged. Regulators could have stepped into the breach. But like so many eras of booms gone bust, the late twentieth century was an era of free-market fundamentalism. Regulators and supervisors in the United States—not only the Federal Reserve but dozens of other federal and state authorities—were asleep at the wheel, unaware or willfully ignorant of how financial institutions were circumventing everything from capital adequacy requirements to accounting regulations.

…

Almost all crises begin the same way: modestly. Subtle developments set the stage for the real drama down the line. This scene setting can take years, even decades, as numerous forces create conditions hospitable to a boom-and-bust cycle. The crisis that exploded in 2007 was no exception. Decades of free-market fundamentalism laid the foundation for the meltdown, as so-called reformers swept aside banking regulations established in the Great Depression, and as Wall Street firms found ways to evade the rules that remained. In the process, a vast shadow banking system grew up outside regulatory oversight. Over the same period banks increasingly adopted compensation schemes like bonuses that encouraged high-risk, short-term leveraged betting, even though such bets would undercut a financial firm’s long-term stability.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
by Joel Bakan
Published 1 Jan 2003

Inevitably, people will debate the extent to which such groups and interests should be immune to corporate exploitation, the kinds of measures that should be used to protect them, and what groups and interests should be protected-children's minds and imaginations , schools, universities, cultural institutions, water and power utilities, health and welfare services, police, courts, prisons, firefighters, parks, nature reserves, genes and other biological materials, and public space are all likely candidates-but these are healthy debates to have, far healthier than the increasingly prevalent presumption that no public interest exists beyond the accumulated financial interests of individual corporations, consumers, and shareholders . Page 164 ', JOEL BAKAN CHALLENGE INTERNATIONAL NEOLIBERALISM. Nations should work together to shift the ideologies and practices of international institutions, such as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, away from market fundamentalism and its facilitation of deregulation and privatization. The current ideological biases of these institutions are not [and] develop the capacity to unite, to organize, and to recover our faith in ourselves and in others." That is what Olivera and the people of Cochabamba recently did." It all began when the Bolivian government, under pressure from the World Bank to privatize water utilities, contracted with Aguas del Tunari, the major shareholder of which is Bechtel subsidiary International Water Ltd., to run the water system of Cochabamba, a water- starved region in central Bolivia.

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
by Dean Baker
Published 1 Jan 2011

How could any believer in the virtue of free markets support the existence of large financial institutions that borrow at a lower cost than their competitors because of an implicit guarantee from the government? The fact that most of those claiming to be “free marketers” have overwhelmingly been on the side of the too-big-to-fail banks tells the world as clearly as possible that their motivations have nothing to do with a commitment to market fundamentalism and everything to do with a commitment to serving the interests of the rich and powerful. This is disguised as a commitment to the market for the obvious reason that doing things out of a commitment to free market principles sounds better than explicitly claiming to pursue policies that redistribute income from the vast majority of the population to the rich.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
by David C. Korten
Published 1 Jan 2001

The uncertainty and resentment created fertile ground for the demagogues of Empire. Renewing the Historic Alliance Historically, rejection of the democratic ideal in America has coalesced around one or both of two fundamentalisms. Plutocrats, heirs to the vision of Alexander Hamilton, embrace a market fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by persons of financial means. Theocrats, heirs to the Calvinist vision of John Winthrop, embrace a religious fundamentalism that legitimates unaccountable rule by those of a prescribed faith and celebrates wealth and power as a mark of God’s favor. Although plutocrats give priority to material values and theocrats to spiritual values, their shared drive for dominator power and aversion to democracy make them allies of convenience.

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See also legal issues/legislation law of entropy, 271 life, 271–273 religious, 162 of thermodynamics, 273–274 Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 162 leaders, New Right, 336 leadership Aristotle on choice of, 154–155 dilemma of (ancient Athenian), 148–153 390 INDE X leadership (continued) feminine, 95, 99, 107, 323–324 from below, 13, 73, 87–88, 179, 315–326 social movement, 9, 55, 82, 195, 315–316, 353 strategies for, 316–318 leaders of twentieth century, 315–316 League of Nations, 81 learning, challenges of early human, 93 Left Behind series (LaHaye and Jenkins), 260 legal issues/legislation Alien Act, 189 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 205 charters, 191 Civil Rights Act, 203 Clean Air Act, 228 Climate Protection Agreement, 320–321 Endangered Species Act, 228 labor laws, 209 Revenue Act, 175 Sedition Act, 189 share ownership by corporations, 192 Stamp Act, 175, 176 Supreme Court, 186, 207, 209, 211 Tea Act, 175 Liberator, The, 202 liberty, U.S. declaration of, 159 life as capacity to choose, 270–271 forest ecosystems, 275–278 human body, 278–280 as mutual empowerment, 274–275 as struggle, 271–273 life cycle, human, 288–289, 289–290 life satisfaction scores, 299–300 life stages, 288–289 lifestyle improvements, 297, 332 Liliuokalani, Queen, 193 limbic brain, 283–284, 285 Limits to Growth (Club of Rome), 218 living a lie, 355–356 living cultures, 349–352 living economies, 14–15, 319–320, 342–345 living indicators, 343–344 Living Planet Index (World Wildlife Fund), 59, 61 living politics, 345–349 living systems, 274 loans, 137–138, 138–139, 198 local living economies, 14–15, 343 local preference, 343 Locke, John, 153, 155 Long Emergency, The (Kunstler), 62–63 Louisiana Purchase, 190 love, tension between fear and, 34 low-income countries, 136–137, 227 Lukensmeyer, Carolyn, 346 Luoma, Jon R., 275–278 Luther, Martin, 116 Macy, Joanna, 18 Madison, James, 187 Mafia, 211 Magical Consciousness, 43, 49, 52, 56, 328 magical consequences, 49 Maguire, Daniel, 51 majoritarian political base, 317–318 Mander, Jerry, 15 manufacturing production, 208 Marcos, Ferdinand, 196 Margulis, Lynn, 270, 272–273, 291 market capitalization, 68 market economies, 15, 345 market fundamentalism, 219, 239 markets, responsive, 304, 344 Marshall, John, 189 masculine principles, 105 Maslow, Abraham, 42 Mason, George, 185 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 172 Massachusetts Supreme Court, 176 material mechanism, 14, 255, 256, 265, 280 mature citizenship, politics of, 339 mature society, creating, 48–49 May, Rollo, 43 meaning, finding, 311–312 meaning stories, 246–247, 249, 257, 308–310 Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, 207 mechanism, science of, 264 media, 82–83, 348 independent, 346–347 Memorandum E-B34, 194 men.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
by Evan Osnos
Published 12 May 2014

On paper, China remained suspicious of the individual; even after reforms were under way, the 1980 edition of the country’s authoritative dictionary, The Sea of Words, defined individualism as “the heart of the Bourgeois worldview, behavior that benefits oneself at the expense of others.” And nothing was more abhorrent to the Communist Party than the language of Thatcherist free-market fundamentalism. But China was enacting some of its most basic ideas: the retreat of public services, hostility to trade unions, national and military pride. All over China, people were embarking on journeys, joining the largest migration in human history. China’s extraordinary growth relied on a combination of abundant cheap labor and a surge of investment in factories and infrastructure—a recipe that uncorked economic energy stored up during the years of turmoil under Mao.

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Cixi, Empress Dowager class Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (Fussell) Clinton, Hillary CNN Coca-Cola Cohen, Jerome Cohen, Joan Lebold Cold War college admissions Colombia color revolution COMDEX Communist Party, Chinese; alleged virtue of; censorship by; Central Committee of; Charter 08 denounced by; class opposed by; corruption in; culture planned by; dissidents contained by; Eighteenth Party Congress of; free market fundamentalism disdained by; land reform of; membership of; as “Party in Power”; propaganda studied by; Seventeenth National Congress of; on values; and Wenzhou train crash Communist Youth League concubines Confucianism Confucius Confucius Institute Confucius Temple Congress, U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, U.S.

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
by Alan S. Blinder
Published 24 Jan 2013

If this were so, prices would ignore will-o’-the-wisps, unfounded rumors, the madness of crowds, and other extraneous factors—focusing at every moment on the fundamentals. In that case, prices would never deviate from fundamental values; that is, market prices would always be “right.” Under that exaggerated form of market efficiency, which critics sometimes deride as “free-market fundamentalism,” there would never be asset-price bubbles. Almost no one takes the strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) as the literal truth, just as no physicist accepts Newtonian mechanics as 100 percent accurate. But, to extend the analogy, Newtonian physics often provides excellent approximations of reality.

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See Regulation; Regulatory failure Financial Services Authority (FSA), 124 Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), 301, 316 First Franklin, 151 Fiscal cliff, causes of, 360 Fisher, Richard, 383–84 Fitch, 400 rating failures, 79–81 Fixed-income securities bonds, 40–41 default risk, 41–42 Fleming, Greg, 150, 152 Foreclosure mitigation, 320–42 barriers to, 322–23, 337–42 Home Affordable programs, 334–37 initial failed attempts, 327–32, 432 New Deal solutions, 324–25 Rick Santelli rant, 338–40 and TARP funds, 179, 332–33 Foreclosures ARMs, default in design of, 70–71, 321–22 bank lawsuits/settlements, 334, 432 causes of, 321–22 and subprime mortgages, 57, 70–71, 84 Fortis, decline and bailout of, 169 Frank, Barney, 140, 183, 188, 201, 225. See also Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 profile of, 304–5 Franken, Al, 286 Fraud, 354–56 Freddie Mac. See Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Free-market fundamentalism, 65 Free-riding, 285–86 Friedman, Milton, 110 Friedman, Thomas, 440 Fromer, Kevin, 184 Frum, David, 432 Fuld, Richard “Dick,” on Lehman collapse, 120 Fundamentals, defined, 29 Fundamental value bubble as deviation from, 29–31, 39 of home, 30 of stock/dividends, 29 Geanakopolos, John, 329 Geithner, Timothy and AIG bailout, 134–35, 138, 140 and bailouts, 110 housing plan of, 334, 338 and Lehman collapse, 123–24 on stress tests, 257–59 and TARP, 191–92, 200–201 as Treasury secretary, 165, 205, 214, 216–17 on Volcker Rule, 311–12 and Wachovia/Wells merger, 158–61 on Washington Mutual decision, 156–57 General Motors (GM), 212–13 General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), 259 Germany and European crisis, 169–70, 410–11 as finance leader, 417–19 Gingrich, Newt, 439 Glass-Steagall Act (1933) Dodd-Frank on, 307 repeal of, 266–67, 294 Global financial crisis.

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 7 Feb 2012

These guys have it all: a method, the conviction and the discipline to act decisively time after time, regardless of distractions and pressures. They are heroes of Wall Street, and Jack Schwager’s book brings their characters vividly to life.” —Robert R. Prechter, Jr., Editor, The Elliott Wave Theorist Other Books by Jack D. Schwager A Complete Guide to the Futures Markets: Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Trading, Spreads, and Options Getting Started in Technical Analysis The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America’s Top Stock Traders Schwager on Futures: Fundamental Analysis Schwager on Futures: Managed Trading Myths & Truths Schwager on Futures: Technical Analysis Study Guide to Accompany Fundamental Analysis (with Steven C.

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These two ratios—0.618 and 0.382—are commonly used to project retracements of prior price swings. Floor trader. A member of the exchange who trades on the floor for personal profit. Frontrunning. The unethical—and in some cases illegal—practice of a broker placing his own order in front of a customer order that he anticipates will move the market. Fundamental analysis. The use of economic data to forecast prices. For example, fundamental analysis of a currency might focus on such items as relative inflation rates, relative interest rates, relative economic growth rates, and political factors. Futures. See the “Taking the Mystery Out of Futures” section (page 3).

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

It is a state within a state, albeit one largely financed by another state, that has not seceded from its host nation but controls large swaths with last-instance sovereignty. On purely formal terms, how would organizational apparatuses such as these compare to corporations that have, at least in the United States, been granted the constitutional protections of private religious belief? (Here market fundamentalism collaborates directly in desecularization.) We can easily imagine scenarios in which theologically programmatic Cloud platforms might compose their City, Address, Interface, and User layers as something that resembles Hezbollah at least as much as a mid-twentieth-century corporation. 40.  It is clearly not the annulment of dissensus, because in the absence of real politicization of fundamental conflict and the proliferation of incompatible and often unredeemable cosmographies, the only positions of dissent end up being those of the irredentist, the humanist, and the fundamentalist.

…

Back in the city, people may assault other people wearing Google Glass on behalf of evicted renters, imagining their acts as those of popular refusal and resistance to the tyranny of calculative vision. Others draw embarrassing dichotomies between “poetry” and “finance” as the key to unlocking a new society. However, others provide durable critiques of how the algorithmic geopolitics is currently configured, and how its dangerous naturalization by market fundamentalism is not only legible in certain philosophical trends but naturalized by them. Others have accomplished a powerful politics of open, reprogrammable computational infrastructures that has had a direct and positive on how global systems are developed, though not nearly enough, and battles won may be reversed.

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See also borders; grids of communication, 205 of demarcation, international law, 32 geopolitical effects, 39–40 inside and outside of, 23–28 land versus sea, 19, 26–28, 30, 113, 150 nomos of the Cloud, 28–31 reversibility, 22, 150 subdividing Earth, 21–24, 193, 195 liquefaction and solidification, 355, 379n9 liquefaction of self, 71 live-work-sleep factory cities, 130–131 living beings-subjects-apparatuses, 272, 279 Llull, Ramon, 77 localism, 104, 143 logistical aesthetics, 178, 230–235, 243 logistics, defined, 422n28 London, US embassy in, 322 Longo, Giuseppe, 389n12 loop topology, 24, 84, 373 Los Angeles, 320 Lovelace, Ada Byron, 42, 79 Lucretius, 77, 192 Luhmann, Niklas, 385n25 machine-as-state, 7–13, 34, 40, 65, 373 machine-human distinction, 164–165 machine owners, rights of, 285 machines agency of, 348 of governance, 173–174 innate capacities of, 273 intelligence of, 78, 81, 262, 362 real versus artificial, 358 subjectification of, 272–273 machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, 137 machine-to-machine (M2M) connoisseurship, 226 machine User, 279–284 machinic prostheticization theory, 273 Madison, James, 109 Mad Max, 319 Maidan Square protests, Ukraine, 347 Malle, Louis, 429n62 malware, 202, 346 Manson, Charles, 293 manufacturing electronics, ecology of, 82–83 maps cartographic function of the state, 109, 119 Europe by energy polities, 99 geolocative Apps, 236, 243 of global address space, 208 Google Maps, 9, 120, 144, 242, 265, 431n70 modern nation-state, 24 Nicaragua-Costa Rica border conflict, 9, 120, 144 personal mapping technologies, 86, 236, 243, 431n70 as precomputational interfaces, 429n61 remapping war, 17, 242, 247–248 of sovereignty, 53–54 subdividing Earth, 195, 413n5 of territorial expansion, 120 Marcus, Gary, 283–284 Marcuse, Herbert, 328 market fundamentalism, 446n39 market governance, 310, 329–330 market sovereignty, 21, 105, 285, 329 Marramao, Giacomo, 381n24 Marx, Karl, 52, 77, 212, 328 Masdar City, Abu Dhabi (Foster), 179, 181–182, 281 Massumi, Brian, 101 material cosmopolitanism, 257 materialism, 131, 212 mathematical space, 337, 352 mathematics, universal laws of, 134 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 37, 53 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 191 May Fools (Malle), 429n62 Mayne, Thom, 323 McHale, John, 435n38 McLuhan, Marshall, 219, 251, 273 mechanical images, growth in, 225–226 Mechanical Turk (Amazon), 278–279, 308 media computational, 198 digital, 55 global, 55 Media Lab, MIT, 201, 226 mediascape, 148 medicine, hyperilluminated, 267–269 megacities, 162–163, 182, 312 megastructures accidental, 5, 8–17, 54, 61, 64, 72, 303, 367 architecture of, 154, 183–187, 296, 320 atmospheric, 195 cities infolded in, 155 Cloud platform, 183–189 computational, 336 corporate campuses, 183–187, 320 feudal, 311 geoepidermal, 90 inclusion and exclusion in, 311–312 intimate pairing of international, 189 inverting, 160 mediation of humans, 188 purpose of, 154–155 Stack as, 197 synthetic, 162–163 as utopia, 176–183 Megaupload raids, 399n34 mega-utopianism, architectural, 179 Meillassoux, Quentin, 358 membranes.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
by Amitav Ghosh
Published 16 Jan 2018

Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences. 179 acted upon: As Rachel Dyer notes, ‘all the stuff about changing the light-bulbs and driving less, although it is useful for raising consciousness and gives people some sense of control over their fate, is practically irrelevant to the outcome of this crisis.’ See Rachel Dyer, Climate Wars, loc. 118. 179 ‘at the same time!’: John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (London: Hogarth Press, 1926). 180 parts of a whole: In the words of Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, this is a ‘quasi-religious faith, hence the label market fundamentalism’ (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future [New York: Columbia University Press, 2014], 37). 181 ‘wicked problem’: In one definition ‘wicked problems are essentially unique, have no definitive formulation, and can be considered symptoms of yet other problems’ (Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 334). 182 last two centuries: This is how Tim Flannery puts it: ‘America and Australia were created on the frontier, and the citizens of both nations hold deep beliefs about the benefits of endless growth and expansion.’

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

The Labour Party, the traditional vehicle for working-class interests, is now, in the words of its own internal report, the party of ‘high-status city dwellers’.4 The political left has come to represent a credentialed and wealthy elite with what Christopher Lasch described as ‘a satisfying sense of personal righteousness’, who often see working people as reactionary barriers to progress.5 The Conservatives have started to transform their voting coalition and now command greater working-class support than Labour. They have done so by backing away from market fundamentalism, but a large portion of the right-wing element of the political class remains in thrall to the economic liberalism that caused many of the issues we face today. The political class continues to be dominated by high-status, professional graduates with the views and values generally representative of that group.

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment
by Noam Chomsky
Published 15 Mar 2010

The economic policies forced on Bolivia at that time were a precursor of the structural-adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which has generally had disastrous effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where the curse of financial liberalization has helped to bring about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The traditional modalities of imperial control—violence and economic war—are weakening. Latin America has real choices. Washington well understands that these choices threaten not only its domination of the hemisphere, but also its global dominance.

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 17 Mar 2009

And even in those countries where money flowed out on the back of crises, in just one decade investor money has returned. The reasons for the rapidly growing interest in emerging economies are threefold: For one thing, investors are always looking for the next, best opportunity. And emerging-market fundamentals make a strong case for being some of the best opportunities around. Countries that exhibit strong economic performance and are seen to be on a sound and credible footing will be rewarded. At a minimum, foreign investors will be willing to lend the country the cash. However, the beauty with bonds is that their very existence lends further credibility to the country seeking funds, thereby encouraging a broader range of high-quality private investment.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan
Published 28 Jan 2020

The financial architecture of the 1930s remains the closest analogy we have to date to an arrangement that does target sabotage. Contrary to common belief, the principal cause of and rationale for the financial regulations that Pecora proposed, including those that became the basis for the Glass–Steagall Act, were not meant to distort the markets. Fundamentally, those regulations were pro-market, but anti-business. They were meant to safeguard the financial market from attempts to control the flow of information and outcome by financial actors. It seems that this distinction – between the market and business – is the most difficult hurdle to be overcome when discussing financial regulation today.

The Great Crash 1929
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Published 15 Dec 2009

Steel opened at 181, and, by what one paper called a succession of "feverish dips," went to 165. Auburn Automobile lost 66 points; Otis Elevator lost 45. The Times industrials were off 37 points for the day, or only 6 points less than on the terrible Tuesday eight days earlier. Where would it all end? There was also disturbing news from beyond the market. Fundamentals seemed to be turning sour. The week's figures on carloadings showed a heavy drop as compared with the year before. The steel rate was significantly down from the preceding week. More serious, the slump had extended to the commodity markets. On previous days these had reacted sympathetically with the stock market.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

While the group’s title evoked the Founding Fathers, its chief executive officer was a Wisconsin investor named Eric O’Keefe who had been involved with the Kochs since his days as a young volunteer in David Koch’s Libertarian Party campaign for vice president. O’Keefe eventually became the national director of the Libertarian Party. By 1983, however, like the Kochs, he had moved on to promoting free-market fundamentalism through other means, often joining forces with the brothers through their donor seminars and other ventures. Influenced as a child by The Wall Street Journal and the Conservative Book Club, O’Keefe, as The Washington Post wrote, “had money. He grew up with some and made a lot more as an investor, allowing him to devote decades to a series of ambitious political crusades, nearly all of them failures.”

…

The think tanks, advocacy groups, and talking heads on the right sprang into action, shaping a political narrative that staved off the kind of course correction that might otherwise have been expected. A key skirmish in this battle was the reframing of the history of the 2008 economic crash. From an empirical standpoint, it was hard to see it as anything other than a wipeout for the proponents of free-market fundamentalism and an argument for stronger government regulations. Like the Great Depression, it might have been expected to produce a backlash against those seen as irresponsible profiteers, resulting in more government intervention and a fairer tax system. Joseph Stiglitz, the liberal economist, described the 2008 financial meltdown as the equivalent for free-market advocates to the fall of the Berlin Wall for Communists.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

The political influence of the business community had become so weak, Powell contended, that the business executive had become “truly the ‘forgotten man.’ ” In a tone of exasperation, he chided America’s corporate leaders for bowing to mainstream middle-of-the-road policies and for adopting a strategy of “appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem.” The time has come, he insisted, for Corporate America to adopt “a more aggressive attitude” and to change Washington’s policies through “confrontation politics.” Political mutiny had been brewing for some time. By the early 1970s, the free market fundamentalism of economist Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago, was giving new legitimacy to pro-business laissez-faire economics in academic circles. William Buckley’s National Review and Irving Kristol’s Public Interest were challenging the long-accepted governmental activism of the welfare state, as it was then called.

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Economic revisionists like Clyde Prestowitz, the Reagan administration’s chief trade negotiator for Asia, dispute the old orthodox argument, contending that it denies reality and defies common sense. “For some time now our ‘best and brightest’ have been invoking false doctrines that are systematically undermining American prosperity,” Prestowitz wrote. “Leading among these is the economic orthodoxy of market fundamentalism, simplistic pure free trade….” Former IBM vice president Ralph Gomory contended, in testimony to Congress, that Ricardo’s nearly two-hundred-year-old theory does not match modern conditions. What America has lost to China, Gomory asserted, is not just a shift in production, but a shift in productivity, which puts the United States on the defensive.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Using games to get people to take their medications or quite smoking or go to school is not all that different from paying them to do so: in both cases, the effects go far beyond considerations of efficiency. Is it so unreasonable to assume that a kid who is paid to read books will think about reading differently than a kid who comes to enjoy reading for its own sake? As philosopher Michael Sandel points out in What Money Can’t Buy, his critique of market fundamentalism, “What begins as a market mechanism becomes a market norm,” transforming our attitudes to the good in question—whether it’s education or health—and such transformations are not always for the better. Gamification is no different; a project that enlists citizens into helping science by relying on game mechanics rather than by appealing to higher values will eventually come to transform how citizens relate to science.

…

Mad Men, Faded Denims, and Real Phonies All these attempts to fix the human condition—to reduce our biases by quantifying everything, to circumvent the frailties of our memory by recording everything, to rid us of our lowly, provincial interests by getting technology companies to serve us a more nutritious information diet, to get us to do the right thing by turning everything in life into a game—are indicative of Silicon Valley’s unease with imperfection as well as its glorification of the powerful tools at its disposal. Our geek kings do not realize that inefficiency is precisely what shelters us from the inhumanity of Taylorism and market fundamentalism. When inefficiency is the result of a deliberative commitment by a democratically run community, there is no need to eliminate it, even if the latest technologies can accomplish that in no time. Silicon Valley’s greatest ambition, though, is to ensure that all our social interactions—and even ourselves—exist under the yoke of authenticity.

Statistical Arbitrage: Algorithmic Trading Insights and Techniques
by Andrew Pole
Published 14 Sep 2007

Far more dramatic than the prosaic reality, which is a complex mix of multiple causes and timings. All the familiar one liners, including decimalization, competition, and low volatility, had (and have) their moment, but none individually, nor the combination, can have delivered a blow to financial markets. Fundamentally altering the price dynamics of markets in ways that drastically diminish the economic potential in reversion schemes, mining value across the spectrum from the very high frequency hare of intra-day to the venerable tortoise of a month or more, requires a more profound explanation. Change upon change upon change cataloged in Chapter 9 is at the root of the dearth of return to statistical arbitrage in 2002–2004.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

lo Participants in the transhumanism debates have interpreted particular religious traditions or worldviews to require the banning of certain kinds of research and development, as if the connection from lab bench to moral spillover in society were knowable in advance. Any moral framework is incoherent if it seeks simply to extend existing ethical systems into more complex domains by, for example, making individual engineers or scientists personally responsible for the behavior of the larger technological systems on which they work. On the other hand, market fundamentalism, which posits (impossibly) that all economic transactions should be unencumbered by government interference, has become a Level III moral framework that acts in opposition to the above examples, as if unfettered permissiveness in the pursuit of technological innovation automatically leads to morally optimal outcomes. 182 Chapter 8 Ethical frameworks that link Level I moral behavior to Level III knowledge assume not only that future technological paths can be predicted, but that single worldviews and belief systems are adequate to frame the ethical implications of complex adaptive Earth systems.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

Culture needs to be broadly interpreted here, because this narrative has meanwhile taken over all sectors of society, from science and education to health care and the media. I shall not discuss the broader historic background of neo-liberalism.* Hans Achterhuis has described this very well, and Kapitalisme zonder remmen: opkomst en ondergang van het marktfundamentalisme (Capitalism without Brakes: the rise and fall of market fundamentalism) by the historian Maarten van Rossem makes the link with the current economic crisis crystal-clear. A number of important points emerge from their analyses. Throughout history, economies have always been embedded in religious, ethical, and social structures. This no longer applies in the case of neo-liberalism.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

First, financial firms may be able to rely more on debt because the assets they are borrowing against are much more stable in value than those of nonfinancial firms. As John Cochrane has pointed out, a diversified portfolio of loans and securities just isn’t very risky, certainly not in comparison to the expected future profit flows of a single company.20 Second, beyond the difference in market fundamentals, financial firms’ predilection for debt may also reflect a market failure. Specifically, in judging the trade-off between risk and reward when choosing how much debt to take on, financial firms may look only at their own individual situation and not take account of the destabilizing effects of aggregate leverage in the financial system.21 Given the fact that banks borrow from each other and also considering the risk of contagion during bad times, levels of leverage that might be fine for a single institution become problematic if more widespread.

Hedge Fund Market Wizards
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 24 Apr 2012

Contents Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Part One: Macro Men Chapter 1: Colm O’Shea Addendum: Ray Dalio’s Big Picture View Chapter 2: Ray Dalio Chapter 3: Larry Benedict Chapter 4: Scott Ramsey Chapter 5: Jaffray Woodriff Part Two: Multistrategy Players Chapter 6: Edward Thorp Chapter 7: Jamie Mai Chapter 8: Michael Platt Part Three: Equity Traders Chapter 9: Steve Clark Chapter 10: Martin Taylor Chapter 11: Tom Claugus Chapter 12: Joe Vidich Chapter 13: Kevin Daly Chapter 14: Jimmy Balodimas Chapter 15: Joel Greenblatt Conclusion Epilogue Appendix A Appendix B About the Author Index Other Books by Jack D. Schwager A Complete Guide to the Futures Markets: Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Trading, Spreads, and Options Getting Started in Technical Analysis Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America’s Top Stock Traders Schwager on Futures: Fundamental Analysis Schwager on Futures: Managed Trading Myths & Truths Schwager on Futures: Technical Analysis Study Guide to Accompany Fundamental Analysis (with Steven C.

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See also Subprime mortgages/bonds Financial crisis beginning in 2007 Colm O’Shea on determining start of Michael Platt on Steve Clark on First New York Securities. See also Balodimas, Jimmy Fiscal policy Five Corners Partners, LP Five-phase cycle Flexibility Forward conversions Forward pricing Free cash flow (FCF) Free markets Fundamental analysis. See also Taylor, Martin Fund asset size Fund capacity Futures traders. See Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) Gain to Pain ratio Gambling baccarat system blackjack system compared to investing roulette system Gate provision Gating Geismar, Michael Gerard, Ralph Giuliani, Rudolph Gold Goldman Sachs Goldstein, Rob Goodyear Google Gotham Capital.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises
by Timothy F. Geithner
Published 11 May 2014

I had the dubious distinction of being in charge of the New York Fed when Wall Street imploded. The crisis later inspired a lot of commentary suggesting that the Fed was a reluctant regulator—and that I was too close to Wall Street, too confident in the competence and integrity of bankers, too devoted to the free-market fundamentalism I supposedly inherited from Rubin, Summers, and Greenspan. I was routinely described as a tool of the industry, bent by the banks. Even critics who didn’t suggest I was corrupt assumed I was captured by the establishment’s finance-friendly view of the world. So before I explain what we did at the New York Fed and why, as well as what we missed and why, I want to describe my attitudes toward the financial world when I started the job.

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Larry’s view of the world fell somewhere in between, probably closer to Greenspan’s at the time. I didn’t have the strength of any of their convictions, but by disposition, my view was closer to Rubin’s. My formative exposure to finance was the emerging-market crises, which were not attractive advertisements for free-market fundamentalism. My responsibilities at Treasury in the 1990s covered international issues, so I was mostly a bystander during the Clinton administration’s debates over financial regulation, and I didn’t have strong views about them at the time. I played no role in the noble but futile efforts to rein in Fannie and Freddie.

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino
by Jim McTague
Published 1 Mar 2011

The machines didn’t care what the name of the underlying company was or what its future growth potential was. Machines did not discriminate on that basis. The machine merely tried to predict if a stock would go up or down over the next several minutes. And it wasn’t just the machines that had lost touch with market fundamentals. Those retail investors who stayed in the market were playing the momentum game, not investing. They wanted to go with the flow, to ride the trend. Thus, they were inclined to buy stock-index futures, options, and ETFs that mimicked the S&P 500 or specific sectors of the economy. As far as the small investor was concerned, the classic buy-and-hold strategy had been a big bust.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

Maximizing THE U R BAN ROOTS OF CAPITALIST CRISES 29 its yield has driven low- or even moderate-in come households out of M anhattan and central London over the last few ye ars, with catastrophic effects on class disparities and the well-b eing of underprivileged popula­ tions. This is what is putting such intense pressure on the high-value land of D haravi in Mumbai (a so- called slum that the report correctly depicts as a pro ductive human ecosystem). In short, the report advocates the kind of free-market fundamentalism that has spawned a m acroeconomic earthquake of the sort we have just passed thro ugh (together with its continuing aftershocks) alongside urban social movements of opposi­ tion to gentrification, neighborhood destruction, and the use of eminent domain (or more brutal methods) to evict residents to m ake way for higher-value land uses.

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich
by Ndongo Sylla
Published 21 Jan 2014

We should be grateful to Sushil Mohan (2010) for being one of the rare authors to have understood that Fair Trade is a logical continuation of free trade and not an alternative to it: 101 Sylla T02779 01 text 101 28/11/2013 13:04 the fair trade scandal It is wrong to consider Fair Trade as a development of a market that is different from the ‘free market’. All that is happening is that Fair Trade opens up an alternative speciality trading channel within the free market. The market fundamentals, the demand, supply and market competitiveness conditions for Fair Trade products, follow conventional trade practices. Fair Trade works not because it subsidises goods no one wants, but because some free market consumers are willing to support it. Whether they are ‘objectively’ right to do so is important but irrelevant to this particular line of argument – Fair Trade fulfils a subjective preference.

In Defense of Global Capitalism
by Johan Norberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

‘‘The goal of this revolution,’’ according to Gray, ‘‘was to insulate neo-liberal policy irreversibly from democratic accountability in political life.’’4 Some pundits—among them Robert Kuttner, editor of The American Prospect, and economist Joseph Stiglitz—even characterize free-market advocacy as a kind of quasireligious cult, which they call ‘‘market fundamentalism.’’ Deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization, however, were not invented by ultra-liberal ideologues. True, there were political leaders—Reagan and Thatcher, for instance—who had been inspired by economic liberalism. But the biggest reformers were communists in China and the Soviet Union, protectionists in Latin America, and nationalists in Asia.

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed
by John Peet , Anton La Guardia and The Economist
Published 15 Feb 2014

As one observer of EU summits noted, everybody always stopped to listen to Merkel; nobody paid any attention when Hollande took the floor, instead fiddling with their BlackBerries and iPhones. The marginalisation of France is also denting public opinion in that country, which is increasingly turning against both the euro and the EU. The French industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, has taken to attacking the EU for its “free-market fundamentalism”. Another striking example even among the pro-European elite was a 2013 book by François Heisbourg, from the Foundation for Strategic Research, in which he argued that the euro should be scrapped in order to preserve the European Union.7 Angela alone In effect, Europe once again has what historians have called a German problem (with plenty of reason to hope that the solution will be more peaceful than in the past).

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

Bhagwati’s position was different from that of another prominent Indian economist, Amartya Sen, recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics and a contemporary of Bhagwati’s at Cambridge back in the 1950s. (Manmohan Singh, the architect of India’s reforms, also studied economics at Cambridge at the same time.) Sen has railed against “market fundamentalism” and stressed instead what he calls social capabilities, a term that boils down to an individual’s freedom and capacity to achieve things: from the basics, such as accessing food, education and health, to the more ambitious, such as expressing a political opinion, participating in the democratic process, or choosing how to live one’s life free from racial or gender prejudice.

The Knowledge Economy
by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Published 19 Mar 2019

Each property regime—which is to say, each way of organizing decentralized access to productive resources and opportunities—will tend to favor a different cast of agents and interests. The best guarantee of openness is not to sanctify one version of the market as the natural and necessary one, in the manner of market fundamentalism. It is to allow many versions—many regimes of property and contract—to coexist experimentally in the same market economy and in the same body of law. The consequence of entrenching one version of the market, usually to the benefit of a few, will be to cast justified suspicion on the cultivation of common purpose—in the firm or in the economy and the nation as a whole—that is vital to strengthening the will and the ability to cooperate.

The Behavioral Investor
by Daniel Crosby
Published 15 Feb 2018

Freed from sexual desire, we begin to evaluate our decisions on a more rational plane and may regret choices made the night before or question our choice of partner. Similarly, investors have a moment of kenjataimu when the stories that have propped up the self-reinforcing effects of a bubble give way to the dispassionate return to market fundamentals. In love and money, stories only last so long, and eventually give way to harsher realities. To torture this metaphor just a little more, a behavioral investor must learn to enjoy the benefits of flirtation while being sure not to marry someone regrettable. Trust but verify In a very real sense, it is a scary proposition to entrust your hard-earned wealth to a market insane enough to drive a laxative company into the stratosphere simply for having “tech” in its name.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

ASSUMING THE EARTH WAS FLAT WAS A SIMPLIFICATION we employed for centuries because it worked—until we needed to progress further. We replaced it with something more complex—a globe rather than a flat plain—but the complexity helped us advance. We are doing the same as we transition from money-based to data-rich markets. Fundamentally, this shift is part of a larger, broader movement that began hundreds of years ago. It drove Francis Bacon to emphasize the need for empirical evidence and René Descartes to look for reasons. It prompted Immanuel Kant to suggest that reason links to morality and Adam Smith to examine the power of market coordination.

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

Working via initiatives like Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that aims to curb the design of addictive technology, former Facebook president Sean Parker and ex-Google employees Tristan Harris and James Williams have become fervent opponents of the attention economy. But Tanner is unimpressed: They fail to attack the attention economy at its roots or challenge the basic building blocks of late capitalism: market fundamentalism, deregulation, and privatization. They reinforce neoliberal ideals, privileging the on-the-move individual whose time needs to be well spent—a neatly consumerist metaphor.62 For my part, I, too, will remain unimpressed until the social media technology we use is noncommercial. But while commercial social networks reign supreme, let’s remember that a real refusal, like Bartleby’s answer, refuses the terms of the question itself

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose
by Nik Halik and Garrett B. Gunderson
Published 5 Mar 2018

Groupon is still not profitable, and its share price is down considerably since its IPO in November 2011. For investors wanting to get into IPO investing, it may be prudent to wait for the initial IPO hype to fade before acquiring the stock. This may mean buying the stock three months after it starts trading. After a few months the price of the stock moves more according to market fundamentals than the speculative hysteria preceding it. Some investors assume an IPO is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. In reality, prior to its IPO, a company may have secured multiple rounds of investments. By the time you acquire shares of a company during the IPO, early private institutional investors are existing shareholders.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

Why not simply say that the market price is the moral price? As soon as this point is accepted, often as a near-religious tenet, most of morality can happily be left to the market. In the words of George Soros:3 ‘This idea was called laissez faire in the nineteenth century… I have found a better name for it: market fundamentalism.’ Is Mark Lore, the CEO of Walmart, really worth US$236 million per annum?4 Let the market decide. Should there be more low-cost housing? Let the market decide. How much should a nurse be paid? Let the market decide! This line of thinking produces results that most people find bizarre. In the US, an oncology nurse can expect to earn between US$74,000 and US$118,000.5 But each of the key executives of the tobacco company Philip Morris is paid more than US$5 million.6 If we accept that the market price truly reflects their moral value, we must conclude that each one of these executives does more good for society by producing, marketing and selling (carcinogenic) cigarettes than fifty oncology nurses do in tending those with cancer.

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne
Published 20 Jan 2014

Chapter 2 introduces the analytical tools and frameworks that are essential for creating and capturing blue oceans. Although supplementary tools are introduced in other chapters as needed, these basic analytics are used throughout the book. Companies can make proactive changes in industry or market fundamentals through the purposeful application of these blue ocean tools and frameworks, which are grounded in the issues of both opportunity and risk. Subsequent chapters introduce the principles that drive the successful formulation and implementation of blue ocean strategy and explain how they, along with the analytics, are applied in action.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

Many economists might take issue with the claim that they have so much influence, arguing that too few politicians pay them sufficient heed. It is tempting, in the era of Trump and Brexit, to go along with this view, since the rhetoric of both of these so-called ‘populist revolts’ might cut against economists’ prescriptions of free trade. However, lurking behind both is a strain of pro-business market fundamentalism that draws its intellectual credibility almost entirely from a particular view of economics, one that bears striking resemblance to the picture of the subject offered by the standard curriculum: everything will work out just fine, so long as the government keeps its nose out. Many professional economists have substantially more nuanced views about the role of government in economies, and argued forcefully against the election of Donald Trump, and in particular against Britain’s proposed exit from the European Union.

Birth of the Euro
by Otmar Issing
Published 20 Oct 2008

Only with a flexible (floating) exchange rate is the central bank able to achieve a domestic objective (generally speaking, the objective of price stability).32 The choice of exchange rate regime is of central importance for monetary policy and also for the place of the central bank in the macroeconomic policy framework. If a fixed exchange rate system is chosen, this ultimately means no less than that, even if it may continue to exist de jure, the independence of the central bank exists de facto only on paper, in that its obligation to intervene in the foreign exchange market fundamentally robs the central bank of its sovereignty over monetary policy-making.33 The same considerations as for an individual country also apply to the currency and the central bank of a monetary union. Hence, as regards the position of the ECB and its monetary policy, a pivotal role is played by the arrangements governing exchange rate policy responsibility, and in particular by the exchange rate regime.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

Futures trading in the Amsterdam markets had its origin in the sixteenth century and futures were traded on the Amsterdam exchange just like any other commodity. Derivatives fed the tulip mania and the subsequent crash, although the reasons for the crisis and crash are not as clear as you might think. Some observers see the tulip market’s collapse as a response to financial regulation, not market fundamentals (see ‘Was tulipmania irrational?’, The Economist, 4 October 2013). Government officials, who were themselves speculating on the markets, were planning a rule change to convert futures contracts into options, which would mean that people who had undertaken to buy tulip bulbs in the future could pay a small amount to cancel the contracts if the price was not in their favour.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

As we showed in Chapter 2, the assumption of abundance, and consequent revulsion against technology and psychological distancing from the world of work, was the imaginative backdrop of the American utopian movements of the 1960s. The question is: why did the perception of imminent Bliss of the 1960s lead to the restoration of Darwinian capitalism in the 1980s? What brought Reagan and Thatcher to power and led to the renewal of free-market fundamentalism? It is easy to see that, in the form in which the followers of Marcuse imagined it, Bliss was an illusion. For reasons analyzed in Chapter 1, richer societies are likely to become more, rather than less, acquisitive, as the power of relative wants grows. But this secular trend does not explain the sudden collapse of the system of political economy that had brought the rich part of the world to the dawn of universal abundance.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

First, while companies are proclaiming the virtues of their ethicality on a scale never before seen (no large firm will omit a ‘social accounting report’ on its website), the ‘business as usual’ mentality now feels completely entrenched and immovable. The financial crisis might have opened up new ways of approaching the nature of economic activity, especially in terms of more progressive and imaginative alternative organizational forms. However, market fundamentalism has emerged from the 2008 meltdown in an almost unassailable hegemonic position, despite the growth of ‘green’ think tanks, sustainable economic practice reports, and the like. The second dimension of this contradiction at the heart of CSR pertains to the abiding legitimacy crisis of big business in much of the Western world.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

THING 7 1 On Lincoln’s protectionist views, see my earlier book Kicking Away the Ladder (Anthem Press, London, 2002), pp. 27–8 and the references thereof. 2 This story is told in greater detail in my earlier books: Kicking Away the Ladder is a heavily referenced and annotated academic – but by no means difficult-to-read – monograph, focused particularly on trade policy; Bad Samaritans (Random House, London, 2007, and Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2008) covers a broader range of policy areas and is written in a more user-friendly way. THING 8 1 For further evidence, see my recent book Bad Samaritans (Random House, London, 2007, and Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2008), ch. 4, ‘The Finn and the Elephant’, and R. Kozul-Wright and P. Rayment, The Resistible Rise of Market Fundamentalism (Zed Books, London, 2007), ch. 4. THING 9 1 K. Coutts, A. Glyn and B. Rowthorn, ‘Structural change under New Labour’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2007, vol. 31, no. 5. 2 The term is borrowed from the 2008 report by the British government’s Department for BERR (Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform), Globalisation and the Changing UK Economy (2008). 3 B.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Even as the tech industry became a powerful force in the US economy and spread its influence around the world while people became dependent on hardware and software produced by American companies, the titans of the industry continued to see themselves as scrappy upstarts; the Davids fighting some increasingly abstract Goliath. University of California researchers Martin Kenney and John Zysman argued that the dynamic these venture capitalists created had social and economic consequences, and they were not positive. Rather, they funded “a drive toward disruption without social benefit” that not only distorted market fundamentals by pursuing a predatory growth strategy, but actively attacked regulatory structures designed to protect workers and the public.2 In his article about this phenomenon, Levitz used the example of WeWork because it was a high-profile case where the model failed. WeWork offered co-working spaces around the world, but instead of positioning itself as a company that rented office space, it claimed it was a tech company, which came with a different set of expectations.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
by Michael A. Cusumano , Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
Published 6 May 2019

Think about how difficult and expensive it would have been if Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, or WeChat had tried to hire all the engineers that built the millions of applications now available for their innovation platforms. Think about how expensive it would have been if Airbnb had tried to buy all the homes and apartment buildings its users accessed, or if Uber, Lyft, or Didi had tried to buy all the vehicles its drivers use. In short, we learn from looking at market fundamentals that a platform business must compete in multiple dimensions. Some of these dimensions (like reducing the ability of other firms to exploit differentiation or niches and erecting entry barriers) are the same as competition in conventional markets. Other dimensions (like generating network effects or limiting multi-homing) are distinctive to platform businesses.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Young professionals understand that they’re playing a game, competing against one another in the marketplace of jobs as well as that of retirement strategies. As the United States’ manufacturing base declines, fewer young workers expect old-fashioned, long-term guarantees such as pensions, anyway.12 The rise of the 401(k) and concurrent decline in pensions emerged at a propitious moment in American history, when a strain of “free market” fundamentalism had seeped from the Goldwater and Friedman fringes of the Republican Party into the technolibertarian mainstream. The long boom of the 1990s, and its accompanying corporate focus on lean management and cost cutting, only amplified that trend.13 This confluence of circumstances—the invention of individual, tax-deferred savings instruments, the decline in American manufacturing, the rise of ultrafree-market ideology, the growing power of finance as a PR and lobbying force, and the availability of online trading tools—created a feedback loop in which each element further exaggerates and entrenches the others.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

There is, in fact, something curiously Manichean about the way the capitalist political economy works, as the chapters that follow will show. Things that are in themselves a benefit to society – banking, debt, speculation, animal spirits – become damaging when taken to excess. And excess seems to be a recurring feature of economic cycles and of capitalism itself. After the long period of market fundamentalism introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and after the worst recession since the 1930s, people are understandably resentful of huge boardroom pay awards, fat bank bonuses and rising inequality. How far society’s waning tolerance of these excesses will lead to a much more heavily regulated, lower growth form of capitalism turns heavily on these difficult issues about the moral character of money.

Learn Algorithmic Trading
by Sebastien Donadio
Published 7 Nov 2019

Other Books You May Enjoy If you enjoyed this book, you may be interested in these other books by Packt: Mastering Python for Finance - Second Edition James Ma Weiming ISBN: 9781789346466 Solve linear and nonlinear models representing various financial problems Perform principal component analysis on the DOW index and its components Analyze, predict, and forecast stationary and non-stationary time series processes Create an event-driven backtesting tool and measure your strategies Build a high-frequency algorithmic trading platform with Python Replicate the CBOT VIX index with SPX options for studying VIX-based strategies Perform regression-based and classification-based machine learning tasks for prediction Use TensorFlow and Keras in deep learning neural network architecture Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading Stefan Jansen ISBN: 9781789346411 Implement machine learning techniques to solve investment and trading problems Leverage market, fundamental, and alternative data to research alpha factors Design and fine-tune supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning models Optimize portfolio risk and performance using pandas, NumPy, and scikit-learn Integrate machine learning models into a live trading strategy on Quantopian Evaluate strategies using reliable backtesting methodologies for time series Design and evaluate deep neural networks using Keras, PyTorch, and TensorFlow Work with reinforcement learning for trading strategies in the OpenAI Gym Leave a review - let other readers know what you think Please share your thoughts on this book with others by leaving a review on the site that you bought it from.

The Great Depression: A Diary
by Benjamin Roth , James Ledbetter and Daniel B. Roth
Published 21 Jul 2009

In this depression at least the stock upturn came several weeks before business indexes showed any improvement. For the past two weeks these indexes have been turning slowly up. At the time of the stock market upsurge the indexes were very slowly moving down and some were stationary. Same with stocks. Volume was low and there were many indications of a sold-out market. Fundamentally the whole business situation is weakened by the monetary policies of the New Deal and I do not see how we can have enduring recovery until this is rectified. This may not be until Roosevelt’s term of office is over. In the meanwhile the national debt approaches $40 billion. People seem to have forgotten about the danger of inflation but it is still there just the same.

High-Frequency Trading
by David Easley , Marcos López de Prado and Maureen O'Hara
Published 28 Sep 2013

Proponents argue that such taxes can produce positive effects on financial markets by increasing the cost and reducing the volume of shortterm trading. Crucially, this argument is based on a view of shortterm trading as being mostly speculative (often supported by or based on trading systems) and unrelated to market fundamentals. This form of trading is thus viewed as having a negative impact on financial markets by contributing to excessive liquidity, excessive price volatility and asset bubbles. Furthermore, it is argued that the increasing ratio of financial transactions to GDP suggests considerable socially unproductive financial activity and hence a waste of resources.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

Indeed, “no amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing.” Any such efforts at secrecy, classification, or the containment of information would fail, Wiener argued, just as surely as hucksters’ schemes for perpetual-motion machines faltered in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. Wiener criticized the American “orthodoxy” of free-market fundamentalism in much the same way. For most Americans, “questions of information will be evaluated according to a standard American criterion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it will bring in the open market.” Indeed, “[T]he fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold”; most people, he observed, “cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.”

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

The best way to halt this inevitable stride towards communist subjection was to replace social democratic capitalism with a free-market version, thus cutting the ambitions of the state down to size.10 Whatever the weaknesses of Friedman’s argument, his linking the ‘big state’ with Soviet communism and the ‘small state’ with Western freedom chimed with the deeply pervasive anti-communist sentiments of the day. And this was the key to endowing small-state market fundamentalism with the moral vision it had previously lacked. All that now remained was to persuasively communicate this new-fangled vision far and wide. What new capitalism therefore required was a group of highly charismatic politicians who could take the message to the people. Margaret Thatcher rose to political prominence in the mid 1970s, a period during which only a small handful of parliamentarians championed the central ideas of new capitalism.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
by Paul Gilding
Published 28 Mar 2011

Our addiction to growth is a complex phenomenon, one that can’t be blamed on a single economic model or philosophy. It is not the fault of capitalism or Western democracy, and it is not a conspiracy of the global corporate sector or of the rich. It is not a bad idea that emerged in economics, and it is not the result of free market fundamentalism that emerged in the 1980s with globalization. While each of those factors is involved, it is too simple and convenient to blame any of them as the main driver. Growth goes to the core of the society we have built because it is the result of who we are and what we have decided to value. So the fact that it is finished, at least in its current material form and indeed in any form for some decades to come, is going to strike at the heart of modern society.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 Dec 2007

If a TNC that has bought up, rather than newly created, a company is practising transfer pricing, the firm that has now become a TNC subsidiary could be paying less tax than it used to when it was a domestic firm. 27 The data are from UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). 28 Especially when it comes to FDI by collective investment funds (see notes 5 and 22), this may be the sensible strategy, as they do not have the industry-specific knowhow to improve the productive capabilities of the firms they buy up. 29 R. Kozul-Wright & P. Rayment (2007), The Resistible Rise of Market Fundamentalism: Rethinking Development Policy in an Unbalanced World (Zed Books, London), chapter 4. Also, see Kose et al. (2006), pp. 27–30. 30 The measures include: requirements for joint ventures, which increases the chance of technology transfer to the local partner; explicit conditions concerning technology transfer; local contents requirements, which forces the TNC to transfer some technology to the supplier; and export requirements, which force the TNC to use up-to-date technology in order to be competitive in the world market. 31 Sanjaya Lall, the late Oxford economist and one of the leading scholars on TNCs, once put this point well: ‘while having more FDI, on the margin, may usually (if not always) bring net benefits to the host country, there still is a question of choosing between different strategies regarding the role of FDI in long-term development’.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2003

It is therefore rational to destroy the possibility for decent survival for our grandchildren, if by so doing we can maximize our own “wealth”—which means a particular perception of self-interest constructed by vast industries devoted to implanting and reinforcing it. The threats to survival are currently being enhanced by dedicated efforts not only to weaken the institutional structures that have been developed to mitigate the harsh consequences of market fundamentalism, but also to undermine the culture of sympathy and solidarity that sustains these institutions. All of this is another prescription for disaster, perhaps in the not very distant future. But again, it has a certain rationality within prevailing structures of doctrine and institutions. It would be a great error to conclude that the prospects are uniformly bleak.

Economists and the Powerful
by Norbert Haring , Norbert H. Ring and Niall Douglas
Published 30 Sep 2012

In the next chapter, we will examine how a particularly powerful set of economic agents, those controlling the financial industry, have always used and still use their power to extract high profits to the detriment of ordinary citizens and of industries further down the hierarchy, while a biased economic mainstream pretended it was free competitive forces at work. Chapter 2 MONEY IS POWER An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention. —Hank Paulson, 2007 Market fundamentalism has served well the interests of the owners and the managers of financial capital… Deregulation of financial transactions also served the interests of the managers of financial capital. The financial industry grew to a point there it represented 25 percent of the stock market capitalization of the United States.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

Our condition, he said, was “a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”3 Unlike George W. Bush, Obama seemed to understand the basic economic imperative. In March 2008, as Wall Street was beginning to feel the tremors of the coming financial earthquake, his speech to the Economic Club of New York competently analyzed the flaws in the free-market fundamentalism of the past decades. He reminded his audience that at the beginning of the republic, the Founding Fathers had recognized the need for government to set the rules of the marketplace. He was specific; he condemned the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and said it was aimed more at “facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.”

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Jul 2007

If a TNC that has bought up, rather than newly created, a company is practising transfer pricing, the firm that has now become a TNC subsidiary could be paying less tax than it used to when it was a domestic firm. 27 The data are from UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). 28 Especially when it comes to FDI by collective investment funds (see notes 5 and 22), this may be the sensible strategy, as they do not have the industry-specific knowhow to improve the productive capabilities of the firms they buy up. 29 R. Kozul-Wright & P. Rayment (2007), The Resistible Rise of Market Fundamentalism: Rethinking Development Policy in an Unbalanced World (Zed Books, London), chapter 4. Also, see Kose et al. (2006), pp. 27–30. 30 The measures include: requirements for joint ventures, which increases the chance of technology transfer to the local partner; explicit conditions concerning technology transfer; local contents requirements, which forces the TNC to transfer some technology to the supplier; and export requirements, which force the TNC to use up-to-date technology in order to be competitive in the world market. 31 Sanjaya Lall, the late Oxford economist and one of the leading scholars on TNCs, once put this point well: ‘while having more FDI, on the margin, may usually (if not always) bring net benefits to the host country, there still is a question of choosing between different strategies regarding the role of FDI in long-term development’.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

Early in his bestselling book Globalization and Its Discontents, he acknowledges that “because of globalization many people in the world now live longer than before and their standard of living is far better.”7 His anger and condemnation are focused on specific aspects of the process, in particular that policies advocated by the International Monetary Fund in response to the crises in Asia and Russia were, in his view, wrongheaded, biased toward the interests of Western banks, and caused unnecessary misery. Stiglitz’s work was an attack on what he regarded as “market fundamentalism” leading to premature liberalization of trade and foreign exchange regimes. Yet while the globalization consensus wobbled after the Asian, Russian, and Latin American crises, it fundamentally stayed in place. Open economies in a globalized world were clearly vulnerable to sudden financial crises, but turning your back on the world was not an attractive or practical remedy.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Reversing the slide into a neo-feudal order will require the development of a new political paradigm. The current “progressive” approach to “social justice,” with its attachment to a powerful central government, will only strengthen the clerisy by vesting more authority in the “expert” class. On the other hand, the devotees of market fundamentalism, refusing to acknowledge the dangers of oligarchic power and the harm being done to the middle and working classes, might further a political trajectory that threatens the viability of capitalism itself. Some prominent business executives now recognize the problem and seek ways to remedy it, but there is much less awareness or concern among market ideologues on the right.39 A new perspective is needed, but it can emerge only when the reality of an emergent neo-feudalism is widely acknowledged and its dangers understood.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

He saw that locals—renegade independent traders like Spitznagel—scanned the floor for information, looking for the weak hand. Then, in a pack, they’d abruptly switch the price action, in a flash bidding much higher or lower to squeeze other traders to sell or buy. Action went from squeeze to squeeze and had virtually nothing to do with market fundamentals. Taleb learned more about market dynamics in those first six months than in all his years sitting at a desk. He left the floor in 1993 and over the next few years grew restless, bouncing from CIBC Wood Gundy to BNP Paribas. But something was nagging him. Trading at the Merc required a lot of shouting—as well as occasionally wrestling with an enraged pit trader clamping his meaty fists around his neck.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

By tying our fates together, we ensure that we act in the collective interest as often as possible. There’s a truly pragmatic argument for universal access to basic rights like healthcare, housing, and good jobs. Such a system would have handled the pandemic better. A nationalized healthcare industry, freed from the vexing inequities of free market fundamentalism, would be less likely to create the shortages that just-in-time production forced on us. Worker-owned restaurants and bars would be more likely to institute better safety measures for their worker-owners and, by extension, for their customers. We should heed the advice of New York assemblyman Ron Kim, one of the bigger thorns in Cuomo’s side after it was discovered he’d hidden nursing home deaths in his state.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

One reason those at or from HBS did not comprehend the increasing fragility of the financial system was that they had been enthusiastic supporters of many of the factors that had made it so: efficient markets theory, shareholder capitalism, the perverse incentives of Michael Jensen–inspired compensation packages, “innovation spirals” at the likes of Enron, and HBS-endorsed “risk management” systems at giant financial organizations that were nothing of the sort. “A kind of market fundamentalism took hold in business education,” HBS professor Rakesh Khurana told the New York Times in 2009. “The new logic of shareholder primacy absolved management of any responsibility for anything other than financial results.”9 And the tools they used in service of that logic had only cemented it in its place.

…

See also capitalism; corporations; entrepreneurs; management Business Adrift (Donham), 102 business education, 11–13; American model, 228–36; business administration as a teachable skill, 61; campus appearance and, 74; case method and, 46–53, 279 (see also case method); Chandler on, 247; CIA, capitalist propaganda, and, 187; creating team players, 185–87; critics of, 210, 313; David, Ford, and, 219–23; education as a commodity, 217–18; as employed by business itself, 197; in entrepreneurship, 319–33; ethics and, 260, 428–41; in Europe, 12–13, 21; executive education, 107–10, 147–59; failure of, 576; financial crisis of 2007–10 and, 551; Flexner and, 97–100; Ford and Carnegie foundations critical of, 221, 223–24; generalist approach, 180–81, 197, 247, 448; Germany and Japan, 198, 232; HBS dominating international, 228–36; HBS educating a technocratic elite, 60; HBS influence on other institutions, 234–36; HBS vs. other schools, 392–99; income inequality and, 542; Johnson on, 447; leadership education and, 308–18, 396; Livingston article on, 290–92; Locke on, 447–48; managerial ideology of, 214–15, 286; market fundamentalism in, 550; MBAs awarded (1958 to 1981), 217; number of colleges, 12; Porter model for, 424; postwar surge in, 144; quantitative orientation of, 215–18, 220, 221, 224, 445; rankings, 254, 280, 493; risk management and, 551–52; shift to shareholder value/theory of the firm, 369; social responsibility and, 59, 369, 391; specialist curricula, 448; theory of business and, 57–58; tuition increases, 542; U.S. economy decline and, 347–48; U.S. institutions offering MBAs, 193; weakness of, 194–95; women admitted to schools, 137, 240.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004

We can only hope that George W. Bush's presidency—a presidency made possible by money from corporations and the superwealthy, and largely geared toward serving these constituencies—will also go down in the history books as the last stand of a deeply corrupt social order. Banishing the latest plague of market fundamentalism from U.S. society, forging a new social contract, reforming business and professions, teaching integrity to the young—these are the changes needed to dismantle the cheating culture. Some of us are positioned to be actively involved in such reform efforts;all of us can work as individuals, in our daily lives, to strengthen the moral fabric of U.S. society.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
by Simon Johnson and James Kwak
Published 29 Mar 2010

The Dodd-Frank Act, though imperfect, marked the end of over three decades of deregulation and nonregulation of the financial sector. As with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, legislation can play a significant role in changing the mainstream consensus. Wall Street’s apologists still sing the praises of free market fundamentalism and unfettered financial innovation, but their accustomed air of inevitability and triumphalism is gone. The American public has become deeply skeptical of financial machinations they cannot understand, and many of them have invested untold hours in learning how the financial system works and whom it benefits.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
by William Poundstone
Published 18 Sep 2006

Public information includes not only past stock prices but also every press release, balance sheet, Bloomberg wire story, analyst’s report, and pundit comment. No matter how intently you follow the news, and no matter how good you are at drawing conclusions from news, by gut instinct or fancy software, you can’t beat the market. Fundamental analysis (the study of company finances and other business and economic factors) is worthless, too. Finally, the “strong form” adds private information to the mix. It says that you can’t beat the market even if you have access to company news that has not yet been made public. “Insider trading” is worthless!

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile
by Alexander Davidson
Published 1 Apr 2008

One indication of a shortage of supply is decreasing LME stocks in some metals. In April 2007, copper, lead and nickel were particularly low, although they had been lower in the past. ‘But LME warehouse stocks constantly change as material comes on and off warrant, and stock levels and trends will differ according to the metal and its particular market fundamentals,’ a spokesman said. Cycle theory suggests that commodities have outperformed stocks in a regular 18-year cycle, and in mid-2007, there was much talk that commodities were in a super-cycle, which perhaps the market had discounted. But if there have been cycles in the past, it does not in itself mean they recur in the same form.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

Libraries are, after all, as another think tank clown opined a few weeks ago, “a valuable retail outlet”.’ Philip Pullman has weighed in regularly since the purge on public libraries began. In the Guardian, he saw the war on libraries as part of a wider, nastier assault on what were once our core values. Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days … I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about … things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight … Leave the libraries alone.

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles
by William Quinn and John D. Turner
Published 5 Aug 2020

On the rare occasion that a prestigious economics or finance journal published an article about a bubble, it was often to argue that the supposed bubble was illusory and that prices during it were mostly ‘rational’.71 After the dot-com crash, the academic tradition of attributing bubbles to market fundamentals continued. The Journal of Financial Economics, one of the leading finance journals, published an article arguing that there was no Dot-Com Bubble, and that the dramatic price changes actually resulted from changes in the expected return associated with technology shares.72 The basis of this article was that internet shares justified their peak values because their best-case scenarios were so spectacularly profitable: in the words of the authors, ‘a firm with some probability of failing and some probability of becoming the next Microsoft is very valuable’.73 However, even if this were true, it would not account for internet share prices being 90 per cent lower a few months later, when many companies still had considerable potential.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

During the immediate post-war years, it was believed that increased economic prosperity was something that everyone had contributed to, and so it had to be shared by all. It was an industrial model of progress built on partnership between company owners and their workforces. By contrast, the growth phase of the 1980s was based more on market fundamentalism and individualism and less on state intervention or the building of a social contract. I think this was a mistake. The stakeholder model requires businesses to think beyond their direct, primary interests and to include the concerns of employees and their communities in their decision-making.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

During the immediate post-war years, it was believed that increased economic prosperity was something that everyone had contributed to, and so it had to be shared by all. It was an industrial model of progress built on partnership between company owners and their workforces. By contrast, the growth phase of the 1980s was based more on market fundamentalism and individualism and less on state intervention or the building of a social contract. I think this was a mistake. The stakeholder model requires businesses to think beyond their direct, primary interests and to include the concerns of employees and their communities in their decision-making.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

Mindful of the communist enemy that needed to be kept at bay, both left and right broadly agreed on high taxes, heavy regulation and a generous welfare state that, on some level, demonstrated its respect for social cohesion and solidarity. The breakdown of this post-war consensus began in the mid-1970s, and was exacerbated by the end of the Cold War. Since the fall of the Eastern Bloc, the drive to revert to a more ruthless market fundamentalism and a minimal state has been increasingly strong, promoted, of course, by the numerous libertarian think tanks documented in this book. Taxes should be lowered. State assets should be privatised. In the process, the assumptions about democracy, ethics and human rights absorbed by the West’s educated middle class can much more easily be undermined, and the institutions that underpin those attitudes weakened.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
by Russell Gold
Published 7 Apr 2014

The list of who held the natural gas contracts was a who’s who of global capitalism and energy. In descending order, they were BP, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Shell. The sixth largest was the reclusive Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser, who owns a private gas exploration company, and who lent money to McClendon and often talked to him about market fundamentals. The eighth largest was John Arnold’s Centaurus Advisors, a major Houston hedge fund in which McClendon had invested. Chesapeake Energy held gas contracts to make it the seventeenth-largest participant in the futures markets, by far the largest position for an energy company of its size. Only a few individuals made the list.

The Global Money Markets
by Frank J. Fabozzi , Steven V. Mann and Moorad Choudhry
Published 14 Jul 2002

The contract consists of a series of notional cash flows representing the cash flows of a bond, with a fixed-rate cash flow and a principal repayment. The fixed-rate cash flow is set at 6%, and the price quotation is per 100 euro just like a bond future. When the contract expires its price reflects the market price at the time, reflecting supply and demand, and other economic and market fundamentals. The settlement price is calculated using the standard exchange delivery settlement price methodology (EDSP). For Swapnote the EDSP is given by m EDSP = 100 d m + C ∑ Ai di (1) i=1 where C = the notional coupon for the contract, which is fixed at 6% m = he maturity of the contract in years, either 2, 5 or 10 Ai = the notional accrued interest between coupon dates, given as the number of days between the i-1 and i notional cash flows and divided by 360.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

.: changes in the environment) will create and how the ripples of these environmental changes will affect smaller agents in the economy. Monetary and Fiscal policy will no longer have to be reactive in nature, but could be made perspective instead. Of course, moving to such kind of a framework will not be an overnight process as it forces us to rethink market fundamentals and economic policy making from the ground up. But as we have seen in this chapter, this has already begun and there is a whole new field of scientific enquiry that is reformulating the way we think of the fundamentals of economic theory. The way this process can be enacted and the challenges it will create at the micro, meso and macro levels is a subject that will need to be addressed in detail in the years to come.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

There has been a long tradition of cultural and social opposition to these effects of capitalism, as described in chapter 1. The shape the opposition takes will change with the times. Certainly, the absence of communism and socialism as credible alternative systems makes current distaste for “market fundamentalism” very different in flavor compared with previous periods such as the 1930s and 1960s when the pendulum of opinion has swung that same way. Be that as it may, the crisis of recent years has certainly reinforced the view that markets have—in some way—gone too far. But is the antimarket backlash any more than an emotional outburst before the bankers return to business as usual?

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
by Vincent Bevins
Published 18 May 2020

CEPAL was the epicenter of development economics and dependency theory; Chile’s new dictator, on the other hand, had elevated a group of well-connected Chilean economists who had studied at the University of Chicago, and favored a radical turn toward free-market economics. This group, which came to be known as the “Chicago Boys,” were far more zealous than even Benny’s old acquaintances in the “Berkeley Mafia” back in Indonesia. Their ascendance was not planned—the Pinochet government’s raison d’être was anticommunism, not market fundamentalism—but under these economists, Chile became the world’s first test case for “neoliberal” economics, and Benny’s CEPAL offered advice that was no longer welcome.67 But still, Benny was soon invited to fancy events in barrio alto, the eastern neighborhoods up toward the hills, where the elite lived.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

Also, sooner or later the barbarians were going to go after the monasteries too; and as the current furor over quantitative easing shows, the invading hordes have arrived. FINANCIAL INSTABILITY Last but not least, the very success of central-bank-led stabilization, combined with financial deregulation—itself a by-product of the revival of free-market fundamentalism—set the stage for a crisis too big for the central bankers to handle. This is Minskyism: the long period of relative stability led to greater risk-taking, greater leverage, and, finally, a huge deleveraging shock. And Milton Friedman was wrong: in the face of a really big shock, which pushes the economy into a liquidity trap, the central bank can’t prevent a depression.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
by Philip A. Fisher
Published 13 Apr 2015

For example, Warren Buffett has long credited my father andCommon Stocks andUncommon Profits as being fundamental to the development of his investment philosophy. The first of my father's “Don'ts” in Chapter Nine—“Don't overstress diversification”—gets you quickly to a key cornerstone of Buffettism. And you can find it in the very same place Buffett first did. Not much of great importance to market fundamentalism changed between the writing of my father's first book and that of his third and last book, Conservative Investors Sleep Well. But a lot of water went under the investment bridge: a huge bull market, a huge bear market, 1958 to 1974—lots of fads and fancies. By then my father was sixty-seven.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

All it takes is a bit of creativity, plenty of bandwidth and the will to innovate. 1 These difficulties were compounded by the fact that the United States set up operational headquarters in Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, which had been turned into electronically shielded bunkers by the paranoid dictator. 2 We take these duties from a list of the ten functions of the state in the book Fixing Failed States, by Clare Lockhart and Ashraf Ghani, the founders of the Institute for State Effectiveness. 3 The journalist Naomi Klein famously called these actors “disaster capitalists” in her provocative book The Shock Doctrine. Klein argues that neo-liberal economics advocates seek to exploit a postcrisis environment to impose free-market ideals, usually to the detriment of the existing economic order. Like psychological shock therapy, this free-market fundamentalism uses the appearance of a “blank slate” to violently reshape the economic environment. 4 Estimates on the death toll of the Haitian earthquake vary widely. The Haitian government believes 316,000 people were killed, while a leaked memo from the U.S. government put the figure somewhere between 46,190 and 84,961.

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment
by David F. Swensen
Published 8 Aug 2005

Even though the primary motivation for rebalancing concerns fidelity to the risk-and-return profile of long-term policy asset-allocation targets, in markets characterized by excess volatility rebalancing holds the potential to boost returns. When security prices fluctuate more than necessary to reflect changes in market fundamentals, investors enjoy the opportunity to buy low and sell high, enhancing overall portfolio results. As part of a quarterly, semiannual, or annual portfolio review, sensible investors consider rebalancing requirements and opportunities. The requirements stem from market-induced changes in allocations.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Published 1 Sep 2015

After all, many UK local councils are now wholly privatized, operated by companies with no knowledge about the regional area.11 It is a cold process that has unfolded without public consent. The challenges remain profound. While former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a key architect of today’s neoliberal destruction of the public sector, died in April 2013, mass privatization, market fundamentalism, and support for dictatorships friendly to the West, which were championed by her and like-minded capitalists, continue to thrive. Both main parties in British politics still subscribe to private contracting as a responsible way to manage the state. But opinion polling consistently shows that the British public much prefer services run by the public sector.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

According to the Office of Rail Regulation in 2013, when it came to taxpayers’ money the publicly owned East Coast mainline was the most efficient rail company, receiving far less public money than any of the UK’s fifteen privately run rail franchises. Just 1 per cent of East Coast’s income was a government subsidy, compared to up to 36 per cent for privately owned companies. But the Establishment’s free-market fundamentalism does not work pragmatically on the basis of ‘what works’, and the government planned to sell off the franchise to private owners by 2015. Labour’s Tom Watson tells me of a former transport minister who said to him: ‘These train operating companies are the nearest thing we’ve got to rogues and vagabonds in commerce and regulatory arrangements are completely inadequate.’

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

Walmart argues that its low prices make up for the low wages, raising the standard of living of working-class people by offering them cheap goods. It also argues that its workers like their work. Regardless, the company’s impact has been such that, as Bethany Moreton argued, “the economic vision we call neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, or free-market fundamentalism could also claim the title of Wal-Martism.” 23 In the wake of Walmart, retail businesses had few options. Walmart’s entry into a community often triggered a wave of closures among shops that couldn’t compete with the chain’s massive advantages. One study found that in the ten years after Walmart’s arrival in Iowa, “the state lost 555 groceries, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 158 women’s apparel shops, 116 drugstores, and 153 shoe stores.”

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

The crisis confronting the United States and the world in 2008 was, as noted earlier, a man-made disaster. I had seen this movie before: how a combination of powerful (if wrong) ideas and powerful interests can combine to produce calamitous results. As chief economist of the World Bank, I had observed how, after the end of colonialism, the West managed to push ideas of free-market fundamentalism—many of which reflected the perspectives and interests of Wall Street—on developing countries. Of course, the developing countries didn’t have much choice: colonial powers had ravaged these countries, exploiting them ruthlessly, extracting their resources, but doing little to develop their economies.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

If the campaign had been all about ‘who is better at steering us through Brexit’, says Andrew Fisher, ‘she’d have won her landslide. We had to close down Brexit as an issue. Moving the debate on to different, domestic terrain was our only hope.’ Here, though, lay opportunity. Although for decades people had been widely resigned to the ideals of market fundamentalism, these ideals – even in the heady days of Tony Blair – had never really enjoyed enthusiastic support. The problem for the proponents of ‘There Is No Alternative’ was that, well, people thought there was. In polling, for instance, Britons often plumped in a healthy majority for the renationalization of major utilities: water, gas, electricity and railways.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

And indeed the very word souq, now sometimes also applied to the open spaces that European Polanyists are in search of, derives from Akkadian “street, a narrow place.” And Polanyi lives on, I have noted, in the writings of enthusiasts from the political left, his natural home. A recent example is Fred Block and Margaret Somers’s resuscitation of his political program in The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (2014), whose publisher’s description claims boldly that markets “cannot be self-regulating because they require ongoing state action. Furthermore, they cannot by themselves provide such necessities of social existence as education, health care, social and personal security, and the right to earn a livelihood.”24 Yet the requisite “ongoing state action” does not so obviously require the 40 percent of national income spent by states on average in the OECD.

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Blackstone, William. 1765–1769. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Facsimile edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Blainey, Geoffrey. 2009. A Shorter History of Australia. North Sydney, NSW: Random House Australia. Block, Fred, and Margaret R. Somers. 2014. The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boccaccio, Giovanni. 1349–1351 (2000). Decameron. Ed. and trans. Stanley Appelbaum. Italian and English text. Mineola, New York: Dover. Boehm, Christopher. 2001. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street
by Aaron Brown and Eric Kim
Published 10 Oct 2011

Fundamentals were pulling the prices down and, as often happens in markets, there was a sudden adjustment triggered by minor news. The inexpensive bulbs and futures contracts on bulbs are a different story. I’ve claimed that these had monetized, and their increase in value from 1635 to 1637 was based on their value as money, not on tulip market fundamentals. In the initial phase, when physical bulbs were traded, they were like precious metal money—total supply was limited. The introduction of futures contracts removed that limitation. However, no bank or clearinghouse existed to make the contracts into true paper money. I do not believe people used futures on inexpensive tulip bulbs to speculate on tulips.

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
by Steven Drobny
Published 18 Mar 2010

See Maximum Sharpe Ratio Multiyear horizons NASDAQ (1995-2003) index (1994-2003) mispricing Negative carry Negative skew risk New Deal New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) Nikkei (1980-1998) Nominal GDP Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) Nonconstant volatility, presence Nonequity assets, inclusion Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), data Normal backwardation North Sea crude Notre Dame (university endowment) Ohio, pension fund loss Oil (1986-2009) Oil (1998-2009) Oil fields, Commodity Investor purchase 1% effect One time stimulus programs Optimal portfolio construction, real money funds failure Optionality, usage Options markets, day-to-day liquidity Options, usage Orange County pension fund, problem Outcomes, positive asymmetry (achievement) Overnight index, geometric average Overnight indexed swap (OIS) spreads (2006-2008) Overvaluation zones, examination Overvalued assets (portfolio ownership), diversification (absence) Oxford Endowment, asset management Passive asset mix, importance Passive commodity indices, avoidance Paulson, Henry Peak oil, belief Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), corporation pension fund guarantees Pensioner, The CalPERS control, example dollar notional thinking illiquid asset avoidance illiquidity premium measurement process illiquidity risk, hedge process interview investment scenario lessons leverage, usage performance, compounding cost post-crash investment, peer performance returns, targeting risk management risk premiums, specification risk/return approach 60-40 policy, standardization Pension funds allocation base currency commodity investment reasons constraint increase investment implementation, changes talent, quality long-term investment horizon real risk swaps/futures, usage Pensions assets, conservative management cash level change contributions, delay funding levels plans, constraints profits structure, impact systems, demographic challenges (impact) underfunding, shortfall Perfection, paradox Personal budgets, problems Philippines, peso (1993-1994) Philosopher, The Physical commodities, front contract advantage Pioneering Portfolio Management (Swensen) Plan assets, value (estimate) Plasticine™ Plasticine Macro Trader, The China perspective commodities, ownership complacency context, creation contrarian perspective diversification interpretation equities, delusion Favorite Trade format disapproval,–370368 hedge funds usage ideas, generation (global macro perspective) information, filtration interview investment safety investment storm investor letter, impact Japan bullishness liquidity, importance long-only community, adaptation long-only investment market behavior entry, awareness irrationality, relationship mentor lessons pension fund portfolio management performance portfolio construction, rethinking creation operation predictability, degree risk management evolution importance lessons success, consideration trade development ideas, importance problem theses, development trading decisions trend, anticipation P&L trading Popper, Karl Portable alpha allocation Portfolio Commodity Hedger construction construction guidelines rethinking diversification risk diversity Equity Trader construction illiquid assets, leverage illiquidity level, risk management levering, risk collars (usage) liquidity management, difficulty management investor approach recipe marginal trade optimization P&L volatility, limits policy activity, increase (impact) real money manager construction replication/modeling risks concentration, increase management size, reduction stress tests, conducting structure Portfolio-level expected alpha Positioning, understanding Positions notional value oversizing running scaling Positive asymmetry, achievement Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (2008) Precommitments, method Predator, The bearishness, development CalPERS operation inflection points, awareness information collection examination process interview lessons liquidity, valuation macro overlay, profitability markets fundamentals/psychology, impact psychology, understanding mental flexibility optimist, perspective risk management stock market increase, nervousness stocks long position picking, profitability style, evolution tactical approach time horizon trade problem quality trading ideas, origination uniqueness Premium.

Commodity Trading Advisors: Risk, Performance Analysis, and Selection
by Greg N. Gregoriou , Vassilios Karavas , François-Serge Lhabitant and Fabrice Douglas Rouah
Published 23 Sep 2004

Previous empirical studies related to the market behavior and impact of hedge funds and CTAs can be divided into three groups. The first set of studies focuses on the issue of “herding,” which can be defined as a group of traders taking similar positions simultaneously or following one another (Kodres 1994). This type of trading behavior can be destabilizing if it is not based on information about market fundamentals, but instead is based on a common “noise factor” (De Long, Schleifer, Summers, and Waldman 1990). Kodres and Pritsker (1996) and Kodres (1994) investigate herding behavior on a daily basis for large futures market traders, including hedge funds and CTAs, in 11 financial futures markets. Weiner (2002) analyzes 1See Eichengreen and Mathieson (1998) for a thorough overview of the hedge fund industry.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

Its corrosive impact on democratic governance and our inability to put to real democratic use international financial institutions that are nominally already at the service of democracy is augmented by a cognate ideology of privatization that is prevalent both on the international scene and within the countries whose economies are being globalized. McWorld is accompanied by this ideology of privatization—what Europeans often call neoliberalism and George Soros has labeled market fundamentalism (an appropriate implicit comparison to Jihadic fundamentalism)—that saps democracy by attacking government and its culture of public power. By arguing that markets can do everything government once did, and better, with more freedom for citizens, privatization within nation-states opens the way for a deregulation of markets that in turn facilitates the globalization and hence privatization of the economy.

Ayn Rand Cult
by Jeff Walker
Published 30 Dec 1998

Rand had hoped the Objectivist movement would play that role at a more philosophic level, but Objectivists were neither knowledgeable enough nor civilized enough to make the kind of headway that Mont Pèlerin made. Post-war American business leaders were willing to embrace an increased role for government and abandoned free-market fundamentalism, thereby also ceding intellectual territory to Rand. Lewis H. Brown made some concessions to government but was also the man behind the American Enterprise Institute, eventually a highly effective think-tank for promoting smaller government. It was William F. Buckley, who, prior to Atlas Shrugged, united the diverse strand’s of conservatism.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

Error prone, he even managed to open his ministerial car door on a cyclist in 2016 and then failed to give his details after causing this crash.35 His Minister of State for Transport was Jo Johnson, who resigned on 9 November 2018 over Brexit. Sajid Javid [11], formerly a banker, became an MP in 2009 and Home Secretary in April 2018, having been Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government since 2016. He admits to an obsession with Ayn Rand, the poster girl of a particularly hardcore brand of free-market fundamentalism – the advocate of a philosophy she called ‘the virtue of selfishness’.36 It is widely reported that Javid earnt up to £3 million a year as a banker, owning property in London worth in excess of £6 million, though he has never confirmed these claims.37 He regularly attends secretive neocon conferences in the USA.38 Natalie Evans [10], life peer and currently Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords, became the director of the charity New Schools Network in 2013.39 The organisation encouraged the establishment of free schools outside the normal local authority provision, using state funds.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

Despite concerns about financing, Hayek and the founders remained optimistic. The fund-raising efforts of Hunold and Luhnow ensured continued viability by providing the cash to make all-expenses-paid meetings possible.9 In recent years, the MPS has become associated with a neoliberalism that advocates “market fundamentalism” predicated on neoclassical economics, limited government, international trade liberalization, and globalization. In its formative years, it looked less single-minded and dogmatic. Within the society, there were staunch antistatists like Mises. There were also German ordoliberals like Röpke and Rüstow, who saw the state serving a central role in the creation of markets and the maintenance of law, order, and prosperity.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

Both Democrat and Republican, neoliberals believe in the unfettered free market, deregulation, privatization, reduction in government, and trickle-down economics. They often deny that this powerful system even exists. As Naomi Klein points out in The Shock Doctrine, “the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities.” Call it free-market fundamentalism, globalization, free trade, laissez-faire, it’s all neoliberalism. Its followers will tell you that its effects are natural and inevitable. Gentrification? Natural and inevitable. Global warming? Natural and inevitable. They will echo Margaret Thatcher’s mantra: “There is no alternative.” But these are lies that have burrowed into our minds, altering the way we think and feel.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
by Bethany Moreton
Published 15 May 2009

In this logic, there is no such thing as society or community, only individuals; the commons are a crime against efÂ�fiÂ� ciency; and government action intrudes illegitimately on the sovereign territory of economics, to the detriment of all. Since in practice neoliberal restructuring redistributed wealth upward, the rise of this “free-market fundamentalism” after the early 1970s left some observers demanding to know what was the matter with Kansas; why did those who lost out under the model’s prescriptions continue to enable them politically? In much of the world, the free-market vision spent those decades as a contested ideology, subjected to debate and often found wanting.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

The political drum has started to beat again for more aggressive and vigilant regulation and for an end to obscene pay packages that reward private sector leaders, even if they end up screwing their shareholders, their customers, their employees, and the public at large. This in turn has led some to wonder whether we are at a turning point for the superclass, whether we might see the beginning of the end of a golden era of greed and excess. And while changes are likely afoot and twenty-five years of a default impulse to “leave it to the markets” (market fundamentalism) are coming to an end, any study of the history of elites shows that while overreach regularly dogs those in power, efforts to rein them in usually amount to invitations to a new group to assume, and often later abuse, that power. The events of the first year in the life of this book have done a great deal to underscore the relevance of its themes.

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility
by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness
Published 28 Mar 2010

Tourism is another option, though it similarly requires the importation of tourists as well as the creation of an industry in which workers must cater to tourists’ fluctuating travel budgets, their fickle desires for Third World authenticity, or their collective nostalgia for an exoticized past in which the “other” comes to life in a diorama of his or her natural habitat.100 The remedy for poverty prescribed by the newest wave of Western doctors (of economics) necessitates micro-lending schemes aimed at providing small loans to so-called barefoot bankers and others who lack access to credit, as well as the revitalization of the social mobility narrative—most commonly framed in terms of entrepreneurialism. pedals for progress, for example, aims to provide the people of less economically developed countries with bicycles in order to “unleash their entrepreneurial spirit,” just as World Bicycle relief positions the bicycle as a technological catalyst capable of fueling an individual’s “entrepreneurial drive.”101 One of the main reasons why an “entrepreneurial spirit,” as well as “cleverness,” “creativity,” “ingenuity,” and “innovation,” are so highly valued within this framework is because these characteristics are seen as the tools with which individuals can purportedly pursue individual solutions to a set of historically shaped, economically rooted, culturally entrenched, and otherwise social problems; it is the classic Horatio alger story modified for the postindustrial, buzz-word-chirping “creative class” in the United States.102 in conjunction with the Great Man interpretation of history, this mythos of bootstrap capitalism enables someone like Schweidenbach to seriously and uncritically proclaim: “The elimination of poverty is never a governmental affair; the elimination of poverty is a personal issue.”103 The overarching theme promulgated by most, but certainly not all, microenterprise advocates differs little from the core philosophy of market fundamentalism, save their emphasis on the inherent goodness of social entrepreneurialism and the value of helping people in poverty. Conveniently, the latter position shields such antidemocratic impulses from judgment inasmuch as a critique of their free market ideology is easily and mistakenly construed as a critique of aid itself.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

Democracy needs to be reined in because the ballot box can’t match markets in governing complex economies; people can express themselves better through what they buy and sell. Unsurprisingly, neoliberals keep their anti-democracy agenda under wraps. 2. The rise of neoliberalism also involves a political and cultural shift compatible with its market fundamentalism. Through a host of small changes in everyday life, we are increasingly nudged towards thinking and acting in ways that fit with a market rationality. More and more, the media address us as self-seeking consumers, savvy investors, ever pursuing new ways of supplementing our incomes through ‘smart investments’.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

The term had been in use in various ideological settings for decades, and its most recent meaning is equally rooted in a particular historical moment. It captures what distinguishes contemporary mainstream politics from the mid-century marriage of big business and big government—the arrangement underlying the technocracy challenged by Roszak. The “neo” in the neoliberal outlook involves the merger of technocratic expertise and market fundamentalism. The results are all around us: the privatization of areas previously protected from market discipline, mainly health care and education; the reliance on economic utility as the sole criterion of worth; the reverence for quantitative data as a guarantor of certainty and source of social value; the indifference to the fate of the millions of people ignored or left behind in the wake of the “creative destruction” caused by capitalist development.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Nevertheless, their efforts to make consumers sovereign over both industrialists and government regulators allowed them to make common cause with Republicans celebrating the virtues of markets that were genuinely free.41 A second part of the reorientation of the Democrats emerged more slowly out of a series of painful political calculations, as the conviction grew among them that they would not win the presidency again unless they accepted at least a portion of Republican Party market fundamentalism. McGovern’s devastating defeat in 1972 at the hands of Richard Nixon had sent the first shudder down Democratic spines. The next moment of truth came in 1984, when Reagan triumphed in a landslide over the Democratic nominee Walter Mondale. And then the 1988 Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, lost to George H.

All the Devils Are Here
by Bethany McLean
Published 19 Oct 2010

It is also clear from internal e-mails that by 2006 there were Goldman traders—not all of them, but some—who viewed some of their subprime holdings as junk. One trader described a Goldman mortgage-backed security this way: “It stinks.... I don’t want it in our book.” Swenson later wrote in a self-review that “during the early summer of 2006, it was clear that the market fundamentals in subprime and the highly levered nature of CDOs was going to have a very unhappy ending.” The year 2006 was when Dan Sparks became the head of the mortgage desk. Sparks, an intense Texan who had joined Goldman as an analyst in 1989 after graduating from Texas A&M, spent his early years at the firm helping the Resolution Trust Corporation dispose of assets from the S&L crisis.

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America)
by Louis Hyman
Published 3 Jan 2011

Through the attempts to stabilize a faltering economy, New Deal housing programs radically changed existing consumer and business practices of debt. Borrowers enthusiastically took longer mortgages as large institutional lenders enjoyed insured investments. These radical interventions in mortgage markets fundamentally altered the ways in which Americans borrowed. The short-term loan that was barely tolerated socially became, by government policy, an encouraged long-term debt, partially because the government language reframed mortgages not as a heavy debt, but as responsible long-term investments for the borrower.

Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom
by van K. Tharp
Published 1 Jan 1998

A huge market in foreign currencies made by large banks worldwide. Today there are also much smaller companies that allow you to trade forex, but they take the side of the bid-ask spread opposite from you. fundamental analysis Analysis of the market to determine its supply-and-demand characteristics. In equities markets, fundamental analysis determines the value, the earnings, the management, and the relative data of a particular stock. futures A contract obligating its holder to buy a specified asset at a particular time and price. When commodity exchanges added stock index contracts and currency contracts, the term futures was developed to be more inclusive of these assets.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

Another employee explained her boss to Jobs’s biographer in terms of the Bay Area religious entrepreneur Jim Jones, who became famous when Apple was also a Bay Area start-up: “It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” Entrepreneurialism that produces useful, innovative new products and processes is one thing. Bravo to Jobs and these entrepreneurs. But the free-market fundamentalism that became our governing paradigm starting in the 1980s had unfortunate consequences when it extended into wholesale wishfulness and denial of reality. Near the end of a speech he delivered at a conservative think tank around Christmastime in 1996, during the long boom, our libertarian chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, wondered, “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?”

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Schwartz, “Carrier Workers See Costs, Not Benefits, of Global Trade,” New York Times, March 19, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/business/economy/carrier-workers-see-costs-not-benefits-of-global-trade.html. 256 $12 billion to buy back their stock: Tedd Mann and Ezekiel Minaya, “United Technologies Unveils $12 Billion Buyback,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/uni ted-technologies-unveils-12-billion-buyback-1445343580. 258 “economism”: James Kwak, Economism (New York: Random House, 2016). This is often referred to as “market fundamentalism.” 260 scheduled by calling a dispatcher: Stone, The Upstarts, 43. 261 “extract all of his surplus”: Hal Varian, “Economic Mechanism Design for Computerized Agents,” Proceedings of the First USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce (New York: Usenix, 1995), retrieved April 2, 2015, http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/mechanism-design.pdf. 262 “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher”: Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life (New York: Penguin, 2014), 21. 262 who would set the rules of the game: There is a growing nostalgia for unions, very different from the disdain that they were held in twenty years ago.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

The establishment had been coasting for a long time and was out of answers. Its failure pointed to new directions, maybe Marxist, maybe libertarian, along a volatile trajectory that it could no longer control. Thiel’s argument ran into resistance across the political spectrum. On the right, market fundamentalism took the place of serious thinking about innovation (that was why Romney hadn’t understood Thiel’s point at their breakfast meeting). On the left, there was an official smugness about innovation—just spend more money—while deep down lurked an unspoken pessimism. President Obama probably believed that there wasn’t much to be done about decline except manage it, but he couldn’t give another “malaise” speech (after what happened to Jimmy Carter, no one ever would again), so his picture of the future remained strangely empty.

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems
by Didier Sornette
Published 18 Nov 2002

It is therefore difficult to avoid a subjective bias, especially since the very existence of bubbles is still hotly debated [459, 411, 229, 144, 120, 342, 108, 187, 109, 359, 453, 185, 320]. A major problem with arguments in favor of bubbles is also that apparent evidence for bubbles can be reinterpreted in terms of market fundamentals that are unobserved by the researcher [120, 135, 185]. We have thus taken a pragmatic and very straightforward approach consisting in selecting “bubbles” based on the following three criteria:  the existence of a sharp peak in the spirit of [348],  the existence of a preceding period of increasing price that extends over at least six months and that should preferably be comparable with those of the larger crashes discussed in chapter 7, 286  chapter 8 the existence of a fast price decrease following the peak over a time interval much shorter than the accelerating period.

The Enemy Within
by Seumas Milne
Published 1 Dec 1994

But it was also a challenge to the destructive profit- and market-driven transformation of economic life already then in full flow. And it raised the alternative of a different kind of Britain, rooted in solidarity and collective action, against the individualism and private greed of the Thatcher years – symbolized by the wads of overtime cash her riot squads waved at the miners’ picket lines. A generation on, the market fundamentalism unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the wake of the pit strike has had the ground cut from beneath it by the crisis of deregulated capitalism she championed – and not just in Britain, of course. For two decades after the country’s miners ended their outright resistance to what became an untrammelled state assault, the legacy of Thatcher’s shock therapy remained largely unchallenged at home, while the neoliberal order she trail-blazed reigned supreme across most of the world.

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
by Leah McGrath Goodman
Published 15 Feb 2011

Some of them even believed that the market switched course in direct correlation with phases of the moon. “One guy I knew always went long or short, I can’t remember which, whenever the moon was full,” Lapayover says. “He swore by it.” Collins first learned technical analysis from Michel Marks, who also traded on what were called market fundamentals, such as supply, demand, seasonal trends, and more concrete economic factors not involving things like the moon or astrology. On September 22, 1980, Guttman had been in the pits for almost three years. He didn’t bet on heating oil, because platinum had become the busier market. But once in a while, he’d shuffle over to the heating-oil pit at the behest of Marks with the other traders to buy or sell a few lots.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

The pervasive sentiment on regulation among the liberalizing governments was “less is more.” FULL SPEED AHEAD ON INTEGRATION IN EUROPE Unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, continental Europe did not react to the slowdown in the 1970s with a wholesale move toward deregulation and liberalization. While market “fundamentalism” along with individualism were seen as Anglo-American fetishes that were not conducive to civilized conduct or social harmony, European politicians were also reluctant to confront the electorate after thirty glorious years of growth with the reality that they had promised too much. The kinds of protections that Europe had built for incumbent workers were also not conducive to social harmony.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 12 Oct 2020

In this light the twenty-first-century revival of the term “survival of the fittest,” which we noticed in Figure 5.1, is unsurprising, since it was the slogan of choice for the libertarians of the first Gilded Age. Gradually, individual “choice” became the touchstone for all conservatives. As Paul Ryan put it, “In every fight we are involved here on Capitol Hill… it is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict: individualism versus collectivism.”59 To be sure, free market fundamentalism, undergirded by libertarianism, was not the only route followed by post-1960s conservatives; others explored themes of law and order, racism, and evangelical Christianity. In today’s Trump world what counts as conservatism is much in turmoil, but for the half century between 1960 and 2016 conservatism shifted starkly away from the solidarity and compassion of the 1950s Republicans (later dismissed as “Republicans in Name Only”) to libertarian individualism.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

Another employee explained her boss to Jobs’s biographer in terms of the Bay Area religious entrepreneur Jim Jones, who became famous when Apple was also a Bay Area start-up: “It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” Entrepreneurialism that produces useful, innovative new products and processes is one thing. Bravo to Jobs and these entrepreneurs. But the free-market fundamentalism that became our governing paradigm starting in the 1980s had unfortunate consequences when it extended into wholesale wishfulness and denial of reality. Near the end of a speech he delivered at a conservative think tank around Christmastime in 1996, during the long boom, our libertarian chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, wondered, “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?”

Stigum's Money Market, 4E
by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi
Published 9 Feb 2007

An important difference between the TUT and the NOB is that the cheapest to deliver can change often, largely because of its short maturity and because new 2-year notes are auctioned every month. USING FUTURES TO GATHER MARKET INTELLIGENCE One of the most important elements in investing is having an accurate assessment of market expectations. If an investor’s assumptions regarding market expectations are wrong, an accurate forecast of market fundamentals won’t necessarily translate into successful investment strategies. Successful strategies are those that capture investments that do not yet fully capture, or discount, events in the future. It’s therefore imperative for investors to estimate as accurately as possible the market assumptions embedded in market prices.

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Noncommercials are considered speculators. This is the group to watch. Market tops and bottoms frequently have been foreshadowed by extreme positions taken by noncommercial traders. This is the case largely because speculative traders have relatively less information in hand than do commercial traders with respect to market fundamentals and the true level of underlying demand for fixed-income securities. In addition, speculators frequently have a herd mentality and are therefore more likely to alter their positions when commercial players ignite a change in the market’s direction. Moreover, speculators have a tendency to accumulate relatively large positions toward the end of a market trend, when they allow human nature to get the best of them by letting the profit motive dictate their actions.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 9 Jun 2010

Amaranth had allowed him to ramp up his positions in a niche market: By the end of February, Hunter held an astonishing 70 percent of the natural-gas futures contracts for November 2006 delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange and about 60 percent of the contracts for January 2007. By means of this enormous position, Hunter was betting that November gas would fall in value and that January would rise; and so long as he added aggressively to his wager, his view was likely to be self-fulfilling. After all, it was not clear that his strategy was making money because market fundamentals were on his side. By early 2006, gas output had recovered from the devastation of the hurricanes, and mild winter weather was reducing gas demand, so that by April the quantity of gas held in storage was nearly 40 percent above the previous five-year average. Under these circumstances, the success of Hunter’s bet on summer/winter spreads seemed hard to explain—except when you looked at the astonishing growth in his positions.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

From Elliot’s example, and others like him, Damasio came to the profound conclusion that the role of emotion in human cognition is central to rationality.3 In other words, to be fully rational, we need emotion. Even though Damasio’s original studies are over thirty years old, his conclusion still surprises many people, especially economists. After all, isn’t it fear and greed, or Keynes’s animal spirits, that cause prices to deviate irrationally from market fundamentals? In the absence of fear and greed, wouldn’t our rational brains simply come to the correct conclusion, without any of the behavioral biases we’ve seen in chapter 2? To answer this question, we need a more sophisticated view of what emotions are and the role they play in decision making. Here, the neuroscientists and the psychologists have converged onto a simple, compelling explanation.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

He believed that any attempt to improve public policy was doomed to failure: The probability of the people in power being individuals who dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.24 New Old Deal Politicians and governments, irrespective of ideology, accepted market fundamentalism. Free markets were considered better at regulating competing forces, allocating resources, and meeting consumer demand. The role of government was to remove impediments to and ensure the proper institutional framework for free and competitive markets. Harvard economist and U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers “tried to leave [his] students with...the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand.

Big Debt Crises
by Ray Dalio
Published 9 Sep 2018

It opened with a speech that railed against securities firms’ abuses and called for federal control of the stock and commodities exchanges.157 There were indications that he favored a devaluation of the dollar, which increased the pressure on the currency. To allay those fears, Roosevelt said he would not take the country off the gold standard, but investors were not convinced.158 By the way, politicians and policy makers frequently make disingenuous promises that are expedient and inconsistent with economic and market fundamentals, and such promises should never be believed. Bank failures were ticking upward, open market operations had ended, the RFC had been neutered, government spending had been reined in, and the threat of devaluation loomed large. Gold outflows resumed and prices, which had recently begun to stabilize, started to fall.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

Rather than identifying low interest rates and the accompanying credit boom as the main cause of the asset price bubble and other imbalances in the US economy (e.g. the record low savings rate and soaring trade deficit), Governor Bernanke suggested that ‘some of the observed correlation [between credit and asset prices] may reflect simply the tendency of both credit and asset prices to rise during economic booms’ (Bernanke, ‘Asset Price “Bubbles” and Monetary Policy’). 27. Bernanke was repeating the findings of a December 2004 paper by researchers at the New York Fed that claimed that ‘a close analysis of the US housing market in recent years … finds little basis for such concerns. The marked upturn in home prices is largely attributable to strong market fundamentals … much of the volatility at the state level is the result of changing fundamentals rather than regional bubbles.’ (Jonathan McCarthy and Richard W. Peach, ‘Are Home Prices the Next “Bubble”?’ Federal Reserve Bank of New York, December 2004.) 28. Cited by Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London, 2013), p. 88. 29.

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

The World Bank tentatively began to rearticulate structural adjustment in these terms as early as 1989, partly in response to anti-IMF riots (such as the one that erupted in Caracas that year); but it was only with its 1997 report The State in a Changing World that the Bank came out clearly as bidding to displace the “free market fundamentalism” of the Washington Consensus, which the report suggested had led many countries to “overshoot the mark.”76 Echoing the kind of “third way” arguments that had been current in social-democratic intellectual circles for the better part of a decade, the Bank now explicitly advocated a large role for the state in protecting and correcting markets.

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal
by Ludwig B. Chincarini
Published 29 Jul 2012

Both funds lowered their risk and used more rigorous stress tests. But JWMP and PGAM had levered positions in fixed-income markets, including mortgages, that deteriorated enormously and caused massive losses. Market insanity ruled the day in 2008. As the real estate market collapsed, financial instruments’ prices changed not according to market fundamentals, but according to the crowd’s movements. The fixed-income markets took much larger shocks than in previous crises, including that of 1998. Market movements were approximately 2.5 times as large as in 1998, though this varied by sector. Lehman’s failure created a huge market imbalance. The prices of many financial securities moved in opposite directions from how they might normally react.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
by Steve Coll
Published 30 Apr 2012

If such prices persisted, Democrats were almost certain to seek relief for disadvantaged households trapped by long commutes to work and stagnant incomes. Tillerson and his corporate planning group could not figure out what was causing the 2008 price spike. The detailed internal analysis of global supply and demand produced by ExxonMobil economists during early 2008 suggested that global prices were moving much higher than market fundamentals would predict. Was hot speculative money pouring into commodity funds a factor? Were traders assessing political risk in West Africa or the Middle East as a more profound forward-looking bottleneck on supply than ExxonMobil did? Tillerson felt genuinely befuddled. On the one hand, the corporation’s typical “one right answer” analysis suggested that some sort of bubble had inflated and that oil prices would eventually fall, relieving some of the reputational pressure faced by Big Oil that summer.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert
Published 2 Dec 2014

The Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1859 (Manchester: Cave & Sever, 1860), 18, 19, 22, 23, 33, 34, 38, 39, 45. 2. “Liverpool. By Order of the Liverpool Cotton Association Ltd., Catalogue of the Valuable Club Furnishings etc. to be Sold by Auction by Marsh Lyons & Co., Tuesday, 17th December 1963,” Greater Manchester County Record Office, Manchester, UK. 3. “Monthly Economic Letter: U.S. and Global Market Fundamentals,” Cotton Incorporated, accessed January 23, 2013, http://www.cottoninc.com/corporate/Market-Data/MonthlyEconomicLetter/; “The Fabric of Our Lives,” accessed July 1, 2012, http://www.thefabricofourlives.com/. 4. The average weight of a sheep fleece in the United States is 7.3 pounds according to “Fast Facts…About American Wool,” American Sheep Industry Association, accessed March 10, 2013, www.sheepusa.org.