[...]... physics-based concepts of economics to biology-based concepts with a new, epidemiological and ecological understanding The financial crisis represents the behaviour under stress of ‘a complex, adaptive system’ on the model of the spread of SARS and HIV, or the collapse of fish stocks There is an isomorphism about ‘seizures in the electrical grid, degradation of eco-systems, the spread of epidemics and the. .. elites and catastrophic consequences for the public at large It then explains how we need a new and different politico-cultural approach to present-day capitalism if we are to understand the origins of the debacle in the operations of unregulated finance and the subsequent frustration of reform, analysed separately in the front and back half of this book The opening section focuses on the informal pre-2007... earlier UK crises, like the Barings collapse of the mid-1990s or the secondary banking crisis of the mid-1970s, complacent practitioners had dared to 3 After the Great Complacence try the ‘accidents will happen’ excuse (see Moran 1986, 2001) The ‘disaster’ metaphor has been much used in US media reporting of the crisis, which of course does suggest the crisis is, like a hurricane, an act of God for which... to analysing and understanding the operations of the finance sector and the difficulties of political reform Bernanke’s story, illustrated in the opening quote, about the benefits of financial innovation was comprehensively discredited by events after 2007 and that provides us with our point of departure in the succeeding chapters of the book If most of what was interesting about the economic and social... But there are many other ways to begin a report or a book on the financial crisis and most of them can be illustrated through the various British responses to crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 The most serious of cial response was the Turner Review, produced in 2009 by the chair of the UK’s soon to be defunct Financial Services Authority (FSA) at the request of Treasury... an ideology, in the Marxist sense of the word? Today all these justifications seem out of date to me Every narration thinks of itself as a kind of merchandise In The Thousand and One Nights, a narrative is traded for one more day of life – in Sarrasine, for a night of love (Roland Barthes, L’Express interview, 31 May 1970) How and why was the crisis an elite debacle? The chapter makes the case for this... to agree on the nature and form of effective re-regulation which is strongly resisted by the lobbyists from finance That is addressed in the second part of the book 14 After the Great Complacence 1.1 The Great Complacence: Bernanke’s story If we use the framing of the debacle, informal pre -crisis stories told by policy elites are an obvious starting point We therefore begin by analysing the pre2007... power of financial elites, the social value of finance, and the possibility of democratic control If the first aim of this chapter is to explain how and why the elite political debacle frame is relevant, the second aim is to explain the approach and apparatus used in later chapters of this book to explore the operations of finance – operations which create both the underlying problem and the difficulties of. .. a new, biological understanding of the financial crisis as ecological or epidemiological network accidents In the media, the anthropologically trained business journalist Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, in her latest work on the crisis, produces another new account of the accident emphasizing the problem of fragmentation of understanding which is the consequence of technocratic elites acting in... story about the benefits of financial innovation, which was told in the period of what we call the Great Complacence when central bankers, regulators, and senior economists in international agencies repeated the same reassuring but ill-founded stories about the benefits of financial innovation and the Great Moderation’ These stories mattered because they framed the purpose, intent, and tone of policies . class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" After the Great Complacence This page intentionally left blank After the Great Complacence Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform Ewald Engelen, Ismail Ertürk, Julie. historian of finance, Donald MacKenzie. Following a classic pre -crisis study of the perfor- mativity (and counter-performativity) of mainstream finance, after the crisis, MacKenzie focuses on the role of. Tett of the Financial Times, in her latest work on the crisis, produces another new account of the accident emphasizing the problem of fragmentation of understanding which is the consequence of