Upon reflection, it was perhaps not unexpected that the concepts which came to dominate “explanation” in the generalist press were a mélange of biological and religious metaphors: Nature and God usually trump the market in America. Although the actual array of metaphors bandied about back then pose all sorts of interesting questions from a rhetorical point of view (and someday should attract its very own Derrida), the main lesson we shall draw here from our superficial survey is that none of them had anything whatsoever to do with economic theory. They were the flimsiest of jerry-built constructs, improvised on the fly to make someone disoriented by panic believe we could make some instant sense of the crisis.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 465