ABSTRACT
Carlo De Benedetti The neo-liberal experiment in Belgium lasted only seven years, but nevertheless fundamentally changed the way the economy was managed. Politically, the neo-liberal experiment reached an end with a crisis in autumn 1987, but the resulting coalition of socialists and Christian-democrats in fact built a broader mass base for austerity policies and supply-side economics. The obsessive idea was that salvation could only come from sound economic and financial policies and from a new consensus between capital and labour needed to make Belgian export less vulnerable to foreign competition. The end of the Keynesian road to full employment was a fact and this provided the basis for an enormous expansion of stock market speculation and other financial transactions.
