Actually, I need to credit Rajan with a bit more ingenuity than he claims for himself in these interviews. His book Fault Lines has managed to amalgamate what had by then become the neoliberals’ favorite stories about the crisis into one neat and tidy package. In caricature, it combines: fingering the Asian economies for seeking to accumulate dollar reserves after the Asian crisis of 1997, and therefore creating a world “savings glut”; luxuriant financial innovation (a phenomenon that was “natural”), which lulled bankers and others into taking on “excessive risk”; and technological innovation, which lowered wages and worsened income distribution in the United States, which in turn lured the government to ineptly try to counter it by screwing around with the household mortgage market. The financial sector got frisky, investors bought it, and the government foolishly sought to lean against the wind. The beauty of this narrative is that it mentions some of the major bugaboos of the left, but deftly subordinates them to the time-honored litany that the markets worked as they should, and it was all, in the final analysis, the fault of the government. This ingenious commingling of complaints about worsening income distribution and rapacious bankers with what is at bottom a unilateral denial that economists got anything wrong has been so effective that it often has inserted Rajan into critical leftish campaigns where the audience was oblivious to the true character of the analysis.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 496