The Crisis: an Opportunity for the neo-liberal Model of Capitalism

The dominant discourse before the onset of what is now commonly called the Great Recession, i.e. the economic crisis that followed the financial crisis of 2008, was that the developed economies needed to adjust their institutions in order to a-dapt to the requirements of modern capitalism. One may sum up the doxa in the following way (Amable 2004). The developed economies, particularly in Europe, were suffering from an excess of regulation because the institutions inherited from the post-war fordist growth period were not suited to the new forms of capitalism. These new forms of capitalism, sometimes called ‘knowledge-based ’ economy al-legedly imposed neo-liberal reforms in the key areas of the economy (Amable 2009). In product markets, the era of stable oligopolies was supposed to be over and the key to tomorrow’s growth and employment was assumed to be in the hands of new innovative market entrants. Consequently, a more intense competition was to be promoted because barriers to competition would be a hindrance to innovation and hence to economic development, and this implied a deregulation of produc