ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism and Thatcherism broadly aligned in a desire to prioritize stable monetary conditions at the expense of Keynesian counter-cyclical deficit spending. It has been widely assumed that the Thatcher government was 'pro-market', implementing liberalization and deregulation. Financial deregulation during the 1980s was a seemingly clear application of liberal economic ideas. Into the latter part of the 1980s and then 1990s financial liberalization and deregulation, which Big Bang encapsulated, accelerated globalization. The economic liberal viewpoint, however, was that the regulatory framework itself sowed the seeds for later crises because policies were not sufficiently pro-market. Hayekian thinking again viewed neoliberal deregulation as overbearing state involvement that distorted markets. With respect to Big Bang in 1986 the Thatcher government managed to end the restrictive practices of the old City system, only to replace it with a more powerful vested interest.
