Rogoff’s ‘all crises are alike’ discourse shifted blame from private sector to sovereign debt

Evidence

This blasé line emanating from Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research committed the ultimate historical solecism by lumping together two centuries of credit crises as somehow “the same,” attempting to reduce them all to a few implausible quantitative indicators of sovereign debt to GNP and a “capital mobility index.” Thus was this particular journalists’ trope tamed and recaptured by the economics profession, indirectly revealing neoclassical economists’ contempt for history. Conveniently, this recapture of crisis discourse turned out also to be the opening salvo of the neoliberal offensive that all attention concerning crisis debilities should be refocused away from the private sector and toward the debt obligations of the state. … But economists could not bring themselves to begin to discuss the major structural difference between 1929 and 2008: this time around, professional economists had played a much larger role in producing the conditions leading to systemic breakdown, from theorizing the financial innovations and staffing the financial institutions to justifying the deconstruction of regulatory structures held over from the last Great Depression. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 475

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a superficially neutral historical claim (all financial crises are alike) covertly functioned as the opening gambit of austerity — a history-as-weapon essay.
• XREF: Connects to ‘This Time Is Different’ Reinhart-Rogoff literature and to the thought-collective theme of economists recapturing crisis discourse. — connects to: Neoliberalism’s crisis strategy redirected blame from banks onto state debt — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 475; The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950; The Eurozone crisis was wrongly blamed on sovereign fiscal profligacy — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 152 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism’s crisis strategy redirected blame from banks onto state debt #corroborates (0.92) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 475
• The Eurozone crisis was wrongly blamed on sovereign fiscal profligacy #exemplifies (0.85) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 152
• The sovereign debt crisis is a transmuted and camouflaged banking crisis #exemplifies (0.82) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 35
• The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950
• The crisis narrative blaming government interference absorbed leftwing grievances to defend market orthodoxy #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 496
• Crises recurring across eras implies neoliberalism may not cause them #complicates (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1787