Something about the “celebration” did not smell quite right; but the ever-entrepreneurial Åsbrink once more revealed his disdain for rules and protocol, in a manner almost as despotic and high-handed as in the previous cases of the interest rate coup and the Jubilee Fund. In short, the Riksbank bureaucracy resorted to deception and worse in order to steamroller the prize. Almost all the stakeholders were opposed in 1968: the Foundation to some extent, the Nobel family, the existing Nobel infrastructure, and the Parliament. The first trick was to usher the interests arrayed against the prize into an abrupt ambush. While still negotiating in secret, the bank announced the prize’s existence in the press as a fait accompli—two weeks before the agreement was signed with the Nobel Foundation on May 14, 1968! Some of the principals were thus shamed into compliance by not allowing the dispute over an illicit conspiracy to go public. Also, Åsbrink used his regulatory leverage over the Foundation to get them to agree; existing tax rules prevented the Foundation from investing in certain securities, which was causing the endowment to be hemmed in; the bank got the rules applying to the Foundation’s capital management changed in their favor.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 466