Bailing led to debt. Debt led to crisis. Crisis led to austerity. Perhaps we could have avoided this sequence—as this book has shown, there were moments of choice. There was nothing inevitable about austerity—even if its root cause is a too big to bail banking system stuck inside a modern gold standard/monetary doomsday device that seems to have limited the options to “add central bank liquidity, squeeze the budget, and pray.”

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 621