Beyond the Global Financial Crisis: Structural Continuities as Impediments to a Sustainable Recovery

Year 2012, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 10 - 27, 02.01.2012

Ziya Öniş Mustafa Kutlay

Abstract

Beyond the Global Financial Crisis: Structural Continuities as Impediments to a Sustainable Recovery

Abstract

There has scarcely been
a day in the last three years when we have not read depressing headlines in the
newspapers about the global economic crisis. The current turmoil, which many
experts concur in seeing as the worst jolt to the world economy since the Great
Depression, is pushing the parameters of the established system to its limits.
One could say that we see, in the short-term measures taken against the crisis
at the time, an effective anti-crisis strategy. But ironically, the promptness
with which these short-term measures were enacted prevented adequate
questioning of the dominant paradigm which had caused the crisis. As a result,
the structural problems leading to the crisis were not abated. Despite the
occurrence of the deepest economic crisis to be experienced since the Great
Depression, the present economic emergency did not shake the neoclassical
economic paradigm as strongly as was needed. A puzzle that this study aims to
solve arises here: Why and how has the conventional wisdom survived and
reproduced its intellectual hegemony even after the “most devastating economic
crisis” since the Great Depression?

Keywords

global financial crisis, regulatory capture, structural continuity, Wall Street lobby, neoclassical economic paradigm

References

• Wolf, Martin. “Why It is so Hard to Keep the Financial Sector Caged.” Financial Times, February 5, 2008.