Hayek believed Strong’s policy was sowing the seeds of an eventual bust. ibid.
Hayek said it was all down to interest rates being too low in the free years. ibid.
The grand dispute between Keynes and Hayek in the 1930s seems so relevant to us today, it’s become an internet sensation. ibid.
It was one of the most important intellectual battles of the twentieth century. ibid.
The Road to Serfdom was published in Britain in 1944 with little fanfare. ibid.
Britain was moving Hayek’s way. ibid.
That tension between Hayek’s ideal and a controlling instinct of even free market politicians never really went away. ibid.
The financial institutions that triggered the recent crash were free to do anything it seems except fail. ibid.
Central banks are the cause of many of capitalism’s problems, not the solution. ibid.
We were never going to master the complexities of human nature. ibid.
Hayek helped change the course of world history. ibid.
We will have continuing danger from these markets, and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis ... until we learn from experience. Brooksley Born
It’s the fact that we had these deregulated wild-west financial markets that allowed us to get into the crisis we’re in. Professor Paul Krugman
While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government. Robert Kennedy
The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient. Noam Chomsky
Economic success has invariably relied on activist policies that deliberately alter market incentives. Noam Chomsky, lecture London 1993, ‘500 Years of Western Imperialism’
The principle of really existing free market theory is free markets are fine for you but not for me. Noam Chomsky, lecture Harvard University 13th April 1996, ‘Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World’
I’ll be able to rant and rave about the marvels of the free market while I’m getting properly subsidised and defended by everyone else through the nanny state, and also this has to be risk-free so I’m perfectly willing to make profits but I don’t want to take risks. ibid.
The nanny state has to be very powerful in order to bail out the rich. ibid.
A source of cheap labour – so prison labour is going way up … In fact the scale of prison construction, which is a kind of Keynsian stimulus to the economy, but its scale has become so enormous that even high-tech industry – you know the guys are usually just ripping off the Pentagon system – they’re beginning to look at it. ibid.
Business despises and fears the markets of orthodox economic doctrine: take an economic course you learn that in a market informed consumers make rational choices. In the United States business spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year to prevent that horrible outcome projecting imagery to delude consumers. Noam Chomsky, lecture Washington State University 2005, ‘Imminent Crises’
‘Too big to fail’ is of course an insurance policy. It exacerbates built-in inefficiency of markets. Noam Chomsky, lecture Portland Oregon October 2009, ‘When Elites Fail’, Youtube
An elected government making huge changes with the consent of its people, is being undermined by concentrated powers in unregulated markets – powers which go beyond those of any individual government. George Papandreou, Greek prime minister
I’ve always been sceptical about the notion that the market is a person you can engage in an argument with, and that that person is an intelligent, rational, well-intentioned person: it is fantasy. We know that … the market is subject to irrational optimism and pessimism, and is vindictive … You’re dealing with a crazy man … Having got what he wants he will still kill you. Joseph Stiglitz, US economist
The free market has nothing to do with freedom. John Pilger, ‘Obama and Empire’, Socialism 2009 Chicago
Nobody knows what causes these panics. The causes are psychological and no-one understands them. I don’t know what caused the Great Tulip Bubble, nor last week’s panic. Milton Friedman
Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. Milton Friedman
We became convinced that markets would always find a solution, and if we let markets operate they would be self-correcting, and that turned out to be the wrong judgment. Sir Philip Hampton, chairman Royal Bank of Scotland
One of the worst fallacies in the field of economics – propagated by Karl Marx and accepted by almost everyone today, including many businessmen – is the notion that the development of monopolies is an inescapable and intrinsic result of the operation of a free, unregulated economy. In fact, the exact opposite is true. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible. Nathaniel Branden, Common Fallacies Against Capitalism
To market, to market,
To buy a plum bun. John Florio, Worlde of Wordes, 1611
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it. Harry Browne
Markets are the only true voting machines. If they are left untouched by politicians and regulation they will truly come to act out the people’s will for the first time in modern history. Walter B Wriston, Citicorp big cheese, ‘The Twilight of Sovereignty’, 1992
The very foundation of the market – the numbers that represented the sanctity of the market, the reliability of the market – were becoming unreliable because the accountants had violated the trust government had placed in them. Arthur Levitt, Securities & Exchange Commission chairman 1993-2001
Rich and powerful people are always explaining how they wish to expand their wealth and power not for themselves but for everyone else. Their basic claim for the ‘free-market’ system which has made them rich is that it is the only known system which fits what is produced to what people want and need.
Yet the plainest fact of all about a world dominated by the free market system demonstrates exactly the opposite. From every corner of the world comes the suffocated howl of millions of people whose desperate needs and wants are being systematically ignored. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch4
There would be no wealth at all if no one worked. Labour is essential to everything that is produced. The rich have got rich because they have swiped a proportion of the value of the workers’ labour, and because they use that surplus for one purpose only: to increase their own wealth, power and privilege.
This exploitation of labour, by a class of people who have grown rich because of it, is as central a characteristic of society today as it ever was. The ‘market’ is the economic mechanism by which this system works. It claims to be able to identify what is wanted or needed, and then to produce it. It claims an ‘economic discipline’ which only produces where a profit can be made. If something makes a profit, it is selling and therefore it is needed. If it doesn’t make a profit, it isn’t needed or wanted and therefore shouldn’t be made. ibid.
The market is driven not by reason or need, but by irrationality and greed. In each new burst of investment workers are taken on, and there is a short boom. When the investment is over, workers are laid off and more goods come on the market at prices they can’t afford. So there is a slump.
This switchback ride from boom to slump has been going on ever since the beginning of capitalism. For thirty years after the Second World War, capitalists started slapping each other on the backs and telling themselves they had overcome the tendency of their system to crisis. But since the mid-1970s the crises have returned with a vengeance. ibid.
The poor of the world are not found only in the non-developing countries, the poorer countries. There are large numbers of them in the richer countries too. They too are increasing as the market system – the one which claims it matches production to people – gets more successful. By 1988, in the United States of America, the land of the free market, there were 32 million people (including one-fifth of all American children) living below what the government itself said was the poverty line. In the great free market boom of 1980 to 1984, the real incomes of the poorest 40 per cent of the population fell by 3 per cent. ibid.