This blasé line emanating from Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research committed the ultimate historical solecism by lumping together two centuries of credit crises as somehow "the same," attempting to reduce them all to a few implausible quantitative indicators of sovereign debt to GNP and a "capital mobility index." Thus was this particular journalists' trope tamed and recaptured by the economics profession, indirectly revealing neoclassical economists' contempt for history. Conveniently, this recapture of crisis discourse turned out also to be the opening salvo of the neoliberal offensive that all attention concerning crisis debilities should be refocused away from the private sector and toward the debt obligations of the state. … But economists could not bring themselves to begin to discuss the major structural difference between 1929 and 2008: this time around, professional economists had played a much larger role in producing the conditions leading to systemic breakdown, from theorizing the financial innovations and staffing the financial institutions to justifying the deconstruction of regulatory structures held over from the last Great Depression.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 475