This mechanism of “market-maker of last resort” as a neoliberal analogue of the carbon-trading schemes has had a felicitous political effect from the perspective of the neoliberals, of shifting attention away from the original insolvency of the banks and firms who securitized the impossible and proliferated the debt in the first place, and displacing it onto the sovereign federal governments, who found their public debt growing perilously out of control. One might regard this innovation as co-opting the very idea of nationalization of business firms from the history of the left, but turning it on its head, lumbering the state with only the failed assets off the crippled private balance sheets, while leaving the remainder of the firm in private hands, to enjoy revived profitability. As the Manchester CRESC group observed, “Leverage was the driving force behind the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses.”

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 947