Once that happened, things turned ugly: the market designers for hire themselves became some of the most fierce critics of the TARP, denouncing Cash for Trash. In an interview for NPR, Ausubel complained, “Instead of conducting transparent auctions, the Treasury is going to instead distribute suitcases of cash”; for Cramton, “It really is moving down the path to crony capitalism, in my mind, where the government is picking winners and losers in a nontransparent way.” This turnabout, however turncoat, was easy to pull off because both the market designers and the anti-TARP petitioners now claimed to have shared very similar assumptions about the economic role of government.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 862