Low growth, in turn, reinforces inequality by intensifying distributional conflict, making concessions to the poor more costly for the rich, and making the rich insist more than before on strict observance of the ‘Matthew principle’ governing free markets

Markets, however, have an inherent tendency to expand beyond their original domain, the trading of material goods, to all other spheres of life, regardless of their suitability for commodification – or, in Marxian terms, for subsumption under the logic of capital accumulation

As of the 1980s, deregulation of U.S. financial markets had abolished the restrictions on the private production and marketization of money devised after the Great Depression. ‘Financialization’, as the process came to be known, seemed the last remaining way to restore growth and profitability to the economy of the overextended hegemon of global capitalism.

This was anticipated in the infamous ‘plutonomy’ memorandums distributed by Citibank in 2005 and 2006 to a select circle of its richest clients, to assure them that their prosperity no longer depended on that of wage earners

mainstream economics’ account of dysfunctions in the economy as being the result of a cleavage between traditionalist principles of moral economy and rational-modern principles amounts to a tendentious misrepresentation, for it hides the fact that the ‘economic’ economy is also a moral economy, for those with commanding powers in the market

As the two sides act on mutually incompatible ideas of what is theirs by right, one emphasizing the entitlements of citizenship and the other those of property and market power, inflation may also be considered an expression of anomie in a society which, for structural reasons, cannot agree on common criteria of social justice

The felicitous term, ‘privatized Keynesianism’, was coined to describe what was, in effect, the replacement of public with private debt

O'Connor mounting pressure on state finances by public-sector trade unions claiming the same wages and benefits as workers in private industry and thereby exposing the state to the ‘cost disease’ of the service sector

The competitive advantage of ordoliberalism after 1945 was that it could be sold as a lesson learned the hard way from the statist-dictatorial Nazi regime and its war economy: from the failure, political, moral and economic, of the Behemoth

Today’s post-democratic, or better perhaps: a-democratic, Hayekian capitalism, after the victory, or almost-victory, of neoliberalism, may be regarded as a historically updated version of ordoliberalism