Reshaping markets : economic governance, the global financial crisis and liberal utopia

"It is a matter of grave concern that the explanation of the 2007-8 financial markets crash which continues to exert the largest political influence upon the attempts being made to reform the financial system is based on the concept of deregulation. The crash was a disaster the groundwork for which was laid by the highly aggressive and utterly incompetent government restructuring of the financial sector called in the UK the 'Big Bang'. It took place whilst that sector was under the supervision of multiple regulatory agencies, against a background of legal and economic policies which gave every inducement to reckless (and much inducement to fraudulent) trade. It is by no means to exonerate private actors from their responsibility for the disaster to say that to regard the appalling government failure as an episode of deregulation is a major obstacle to the explanation of the crash and the formulation of an adequate policy for relief of the ensuing depression. I have argued this elsewhere on numerous occasions (most recently in criticism of Richard Posner's version of the concept of deregulation (Campbell 2010a; 2012)), and do not propose to do so again"--