The institutional dimensions of financial crisis management

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to the political economy literature on the US subprime financial crisis by concentrating on the string of major financial bailouts that occurred between September 2007 and December 2008. Part of what is missing from the extant scholarship on the financial crisis is a strong analysis of the financial bailout that contemplates the changing nature of the government's response to the crisis and anchors the intervention in the key organizing rules of the post-Bretton Woods financial order. The central underlying claim is that the understanding of the crisis' impact on the US state may be enhanced if more attention is paid to the institutional-level learning processes and capacity building experiences that occurred during the worst period of turmoil as the financial system lay on the brink of complete collapse.

Keywords:

• US Federal Reserve
• US Treasury Department
• financial crisis
• bailout
• institutional learning
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, Martijn Konings, David Wolfe and Louis Pauly as well as two anonymous reviewers for their support and guidance on this article.

Notes

1. These innovations have been widely explained and examined in the literature (see, for example, Lloyd 2011; Aquanno, forthcoming).