The other dominant metaphor was the biblical “Day of Reckoning.” Americans love a good apocalypse, and journalists found some figures who were willing to deliver it, from Naseem Taleb and his “Black Swan” to Nouriel Roubini as Dr. Doom. The evil will be punished, the last shall be made first, the moneychangers will be ejected from the temple, and the righteous shall triumph. I hope I need not expound upon the fact that there is nowhere to be found such Old Testament reckoning in orthodox economic theory: the market correctly evaluates everything in real time, and no one is really punished, but rather experiences depreciation of their human capital (or something like that). This metaphor lacked staying power, however, once it started to become clear that the putative sinners, the investment bankers, never had to face the music at all. Instead, they were bailed out by the taxpayers, and went on to enjoy their most profitable year in history in 2009. Notoriously, bankers raked in record bonuses. Indeed, profits per employee in all privately held U.S. companies more than recovered by 2011, as revealed in Table 4.1 and Figure 4.1, while employment itself languished. Apparently all boats were not raised by the profit gusher. Socialism for the rich seems blatantly antithetical to the Great Reckoning, so we just stopped hearing about that by roughly mid-2009.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 468