Introduction

This chapter addresses the importance of the sources and of their collective remembrances of and narratives constructed around the crisis response. Governmental acts or refusal to act were underpinned by ideological and economic beliefs, a worldview that championed unregulated markets ahead of state prerogatives. There was a weakening of state power and a gradual retreat of the state’s desire and authority to regulate a rapidly growing global financial system and bank and nonbank actors as a corollary to this deregulatory neoliberal paradigm. A deregulatory, laissez-faire, neoliberal Anglo-Saxon worldview and narrative championing economic markets over regulatory vigour underlay these developments. Excessive risk, speculation, manias and dangerous booms and busts were a thing of the past, or so many policy makers believed, blind to the lessons of economic history. Historical memory of the drivers of individuals and investors, of the commonalities in past boom and bust cycles, was forgotten.