Nationalization was inverted to socialize losses while privatizing remaining gains

Evidence

This mechanism of “market-maker of last resort” as a neoliberal analogue of the carbon-trading schemes has had a felicitous political effect from the perspective of the neoliberals, of shifting attention away from the original insolvency of the banks and firms who securitized the impossible and proliferated the debt in the first place, and displacing it onto the sovereign federal governments, who found their public debt growing perilously out of control. One might regard this innovation as co-opting the very idea of nationalization of business firms from the history of the left, but turning it on its head, lumbering the state with only the failed assets off the crippled private balance sheets, while leaving the remainder of the firm in private hands, to enjoy revived profitability. As the Manchester CRESC group observed, “Leverage was the driving force behind the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 947

Categorization

• XREF: Co-opting nationalization from the left and inverting it is a strong parallel to how austerity co-opts crisis rhetoric — consistent with the reader’s larger thesis. — connects to: Crises are met by primitive accumulation that privatizes public assets — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 106; Lost profits privatize while losses nationalize in statist capitalism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1153; Privatisation increased costs and destroyed the public-service ethos it claimed to improve — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2272
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of nationalization — public ownership of failure, private ownership of success — is a dense structural insight about how crisis discourse was captured.

Broader Connections

• Lost profits privatize while losses nationalize in statist capitalism. #corroborates (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1153