In the wake of the Great Depression, it took more than a decade of experimentation to construct a new architecture. Among its tenets was the recognition that successful markets depended on tough policing, and the importance of the prosperity of the middle class, which in turn meant workers should reap their fair share of productivity gains. But the amorphous and often contradictory “free markets” ideology has conditioned policymakers and the public to view unregulated commerce as virtuous, when unconstrained markets are, in fact, a brawl. In the Anglo-Saxon world where this model has been taken the furthest, we’ve seen shallow expansions, stagnant average worker wages and rising income disparity, with very big gains at the very top. That’s a particularly difficult model to dislodge. As former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson has pointed out, reform programmes usually fail unless some members of the oligarchy break ranks. Unfortunately, it may take an unmanageable crisis to convince them.
Death Of An Economic Paradigm
It's from an op-ed Yves wrote yesterday in Mint, which Yves describes as India's second largest business paper. Mint appears to be associated with The Wall Street Journal somehow.
As with so much that Yves has written these days, this strikes me as both true and sad. The truly sad part about this is that at least part of the oligarchy, that part that makes its money in manufacturing or other industries, should welcome better regulation of the financial industries. Yet, it appears that they either don't, or that even their interest is not enough.
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