It is important to perceive that this middle-term response was the locus of the Schmittian moment of the neoliberal program. In normal times, none of these governmental entities would ever have had the authority or sovereignty to farm out massive government subsidies and waivers to other third-party private firms at the stroke of a pen: in a sense, the “privatization” of a financial rescue was more or less unthinkable. Indeed, Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke had been known to repeatedly deny that they had the statutory authority to do any number of things during the crisis. Yet, precisely here, in the midst of the collapse, these neoliberal leaders took upon themselves the right to arrogate the power of defining the “exception,” to anoint themselves as the true political sovereigns in time of emergency; and right at that juncture, they imposed the neoliberal prescription that creating more and different “markets” would serve to rescue the economy. Here lay the deep neoliberal provenance of the seeming potpourri of bailouts, rule suspensions, windfalls, forced mergers, and all the rest.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 945