Yet I shall argue in chapter 6 there was something new and sinister about the way the “rescue” was prosecuted, so as to prevent any return to older structures. The “level-headed” response turned out to be a shell game, with much of the mechanics of the rescue handed over to private interests, and where so much sovereign debt was being piled on over time that the backstop character of state fiscal authority was undermined; private sector insolvency had infected state solvency. In other words, recurrent banking crises revealed the basic incapacity of the Keynesian state to immobilize and rectify endemic macroeconomic crises, rendering “regulation” a hazy memory. Indeed, by 2012, people were actually forgetting that this was at base a crisis of capitalism, and only derivatively a fiscal crisis of the state. Sovereign debt looked as wobbly as private bank debt. This dynamic was avoidable because it was entirely predictable.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 49