ABSTRACT
The intervention of the US federal government to contain the 2008 financial crisis was commonly interpreted as a departure from the free market neoliberal paradigm that had dominated federal economic policy since the Reagan era of the 1980s. Reagan (1981) had set the tone for the following three decades in his first inaugural speech, by claiming in relation to the “stagflation” 1 of the 1970s: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In the crisis of 2008, however, Republicans and Democrats alike seemed to agree – perhaps grudgingly – that government intervention was the only workable solution to prevent a complete collapse of the international financial system.
