First ignored and then defeated in Europe, Austrian ideas survived in America, where their popularity has ebbed and flowed for nearly a century. Although battered and beaten-down by the Keynesian revolution after World War II, Austrian ideas never quite disappeared from the American scene. They staged something of a comeback in the 1970s when Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics and served as a popular justification for Reagan's supply-side policies, but they disappeared again until the current crisis brought them back to the fore. Why this reappearance? The answer lies in what they said about banks.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 385