The crisis seemed confusing because elites deliberately obscured the truth

Evidence

Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com immediately responded to this attack on the movie with a riposte that will be expanded upon in this book: “This is worse than useless, since Klein incorrectly throws up his hands and effectively says no one can understand what happened and therefore there’s no answer. One of the reasons the crisis has been so ‘difficult to understand’ is that the government and banking elites have been taking extraordinary efforts to obscure the truth. The AIG bailout, the GSE bailouts, the alphabet soup of Fed facilities, the con game of the ‘stress tests,’ the refusal to release information, the ridiculous government programs to ‘restart’ the market, the efforts to deny the mortgage crisis, HAMP, the ongoing efforts to prop up the banks even though they are insolvent, they are all massive efforts at obscuring what really happened and what is still going on. This is not a coincidence; it is a deliberate effort orchestrated by the banks, the Fed, and the Treasury.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1769

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the book’s core thesis about the ‘thought collective’ deliberately obscuring post-2008 truth — a central thread of this volume. — connects to: Leading orthodox economists could not agree on the crisis’s actual causes — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 809; Austerity was installed by deliberately confusing cause and correlation — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 204; Mainstream journalists now openly suspect economic crisis analysis was deliberately manipulated — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 826 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: This reframes the ‘confusion’ around 2008 not as genuine epistemic complexity but as an engineered information asymmetry — a paradigm-shifting way to read the crisis literature.

Broader Connections

• Leading orthodox economists could not agree on the crisis’s actual causes #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 809
• Austerity was installed by deliberately confusing cause and correlation #expands (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 204
• Mainstream journalists now openly suspect economic crisis analysis was deliberately manipulated #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 826
• Totalitarianism eluded systematic study until war’s end because of its secrecy and deliberate fact-torsion #exemplifies (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1128
• Economists lost control of crisis discourse to journalists—a sign of being caught unawares #qualifies (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 464