Goodnight, Chicago!

We're watching the death throes of thirty-odd years of Chicago School neo-liberal economics. The death of the ideology that the market can be allowed to decide how, or indeed whether, certain types of social provision will be made. The death of unbridled capitalism and the Thatcher and Reagan Darwinian philosophies of self. Perhaps we're even witnessing the death of growth as a means of providing some kind of illusory trickle-down economic effect. (In fact, the effect is more trickle-up than trickle-down.)

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Dinosaur banking

A fascinating story is unfolding in the US. The bill to bail out financial markets has failed and must now be renegotiated, and the reasons for the failure appears to be, in large part, disaffected Republicans whose constituency seems to be small business. The reasoning is that small business pays for its mistakes, therefore big business should too, and that anything else would be "socialism." Well, there it is: the "s" word.

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