Zombie, Plan 9 From Outer Space/Wikimedia
There is now a cottage industry of academic research dedicated to the question of ‘how neoliberalism survived the financial crisis’, a phrase echoed in the subtitle of Philip Mirowski’s book on the topic.
Many of the answers are now well-established. The emergency introduction of low or negative interest rates, followed up by the policy of ‘quantitative easing’, meant that failed institutions and bad debts were allowed to survive when they would otherwise have been written off. The reliance on advice from the same coterie of technocrats in Washington DC, Brussels and London meant that policy remained in the same tramlines as the pre-2008 world.
