The Myths of Neoliberal Deregulation
If a single root cause has predominated in explanations of the current global financial crisis, it is “deregulation”. Lack of state oversight of financial markets is widely cited as having permitted the perilous over-leveraging of financial institutions, based on weakly securitized debt, that has brought about the present debacle.This diagnosis of the cause of the crisis also steers towards a particular solution: if deregulation allowed markets to get out of control, then we must look to re-regulation as the way out. The authors’s argument seeks to underscore the limitations of the “deregulation thesis”. The authors propose a new approach to the financial crisis in the context of the contradictions of the contemporary neoliberal American State.