I hope to add to these accounts one simple thing: the idea that this crisis is first and foremost a private-sector crisis. In each episode we examine in this book, in the United States, the European Union, and Eastern Europe, we shall see that the crisis was generated by the private sector but is being paid for by the pubic sector, that is, by you and me. We can establish this by thinking counterfactually. One might ask the question, could we have had the crisis if the income distribution had been less skewed, if regulators had been more independent, and if finance had been less powerful? I believe we could. These were important factors—they turbocharged the problem—but they were not essential to it in and of themselves.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 75