Austerity was willingly embraced while experts, not markets, lost legitimacy.

Evidence

According to this view, ordinary people did not so much involuntarily adopt the ascetic logic of austerity as willingly embrace it. Neoliberal reason thus bolstered (rather than undermined) a renewal of the Protestant ethic of “asceticism,” with paradoxically reverse effects on the legitimacy of experts (who were rejected for their duplicitous espousal of marketization policies) and that of markets (which were respected for their upfront, if unapologetic, pursuits of capital accumulation). Thus, even as experts, political elites, and publics entered into new conflicts around neoliberalism’s broken promises, markets and publics did not part ways. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 75

Categorization

• XREF: This inversion — publics rejecting experts for duplicity while respecting markets for candor — directly supports the reader’s financialized-populism point about voters making speculative bets under trained uncertainty. — connects to: Austerity politics endured because publics willingly embraced ascetic sacrifice — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 113; Austerity compelled sacrifice without criticism, making it repressive as well as antidemocratic. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1024
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: why did publics route distrust toward experts rather than markets? The passage offers an answer (upfront pursuit of capital read as honesty) but the psychological mechanism invites further inquiry.