ABSTRACT

By the early 1990s, in a process given huge impetus by the fall of Communism, the doctrines of light-touch regulation, competitive tax environments, and market flexibility had become the ideology without a name of Western governments, of right and left alike. All of this bore an unclear relationship with something called the real economy, and the world where most people live, except that it was becoming increasingly clear that the market collapse in the USA had its roots in the overvaluation of the housing market and the giving of irresponsible loans. The echoes of Rosenfeld's 'narcissistic organisation' (1971) and of the psychoanalytic theories of perverse indifference to, and twisting of, reality, are inescapable. The reaction to the credit crunch and the bail-out betrayed the contradictions that had always underpinned free-market ideology, and the wider emotional investments of economic individualism.