Since economists were caught off-guard during the onset of the crisis, both journalists and the general public had initially to fall back on vernacular understandings of the disaster, as well as cultural conceptions of the economy then prevalent. Hence the prior decades of “everyday neoliberalism” that had taken root in the culture provided a bulwark until the active mobilization of the Neoliberal Thought Collective could mount further responses.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 976