Federal crisis bailouts enacted Milton Friedman’s Depression remedy of shielding the wealthy

Evidence

But few have acknowledged that this was precisely the Depression remedy promoted by Milton Friedman: keep the rich from suffering writedowns or defaulting on their debts so the so-called money supply does not contract inordinately, and everything else will just work itself out fine. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 508

Categorization

• XREF: Directly gratifies the reader’s goal of tracing how the neoliberal thought collective’s doctrines were operationalized in 2008; connects to Friedman and Schwartz’s monetarist history used by Bernanke. — connects to: Monetarism blamed the Depression on Fed policy, not underconsumption — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 408; Even Friedman rejected Hayek’s do-nothing policy as harmful in the Depression — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 82; Government bailouts prevent capitalist crises from restoring profitability — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 801 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense inversion: the monetarist ‘lesson’ of the Depression is presented not as sound policy but as literal transfer of downside risk to the public — a paradigm-level reframing of 2008 as Friedmanite policy actually working as designed.

Broader Connections

• The 2009 bailout rescued bankers while imposing austerity on workers #exemplifies (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 391
• Welfare cuts paired with corporate bailouts transfer resources from workers to capital owners #complicates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 144