The End of Things: The Great Financial Crisis

Abstract

We now come to the current crisis that threatens to undermine many of the assumptions and policy predispositions of what both critics and admirers often refer to as the ‘Anglo-American’ model of liberal capitalism, and casts a long shadow over the global health of capitalism more generally. But even internationally, and with regards to specific questions of market regulation, the smaller partner in this unequal pairing cannot be treated as coincident with the larger, and among the questions to be addressed in this chapter is the extent to which Britain has been rendered vulnerable to the increasing scale of the world crisis as a result of its own policy failings. After a short review of salient features of the crisis, with reference both to its impact on the UK economy and the drama of its unfolding, we go on to explore the extent to which British policy mindsets and the policies pursued underlie and explain a manifest lack of preparedness for the current situation. Against this, we consider attempts to reference the crisis in the United Kingdom as a distinctly ‘global’ or US phenomenon. We then pose some questions regarding pragmatic and intellectual responses to the crisis. But a principal concern at this point — a prelude to the close of this book — is with unresolved weaknesses in, and political dilemmas for, the British economy on the one hand, and state denial of the portents of crisis and avoidance of responsibilities on the other.