Market failures often have devastating societal effects, and the more
dramatic and widespread they are, the more ideologies and policies
underlying them require critical scrutiny (Polanyi, 1944). Similar to the
1929 stock market crash and Great Depression, events in the early 21st
century have created heightened uncertainty and ambiguity, as well as
efforts to reevaluate received wisdom. Over the past three decades,
neoclassical models of the Chicago and Austrian Schools of free market
economics infused and guided U.S. government policy and enforcement,
leading to severe cut backs in regulation of the banking and investment
industries. Although these ideas and practices also spread around the wor1d,
the United States provided the beacon. Wall Street became the wild west
with repeated market bubbles and collapses, culminating in the so-called
Great Recession, ushered in by the subprime meltdown in 2008 and
concomitant global tìnancial collapse. During the aftermath of the most
recent debacle, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted,
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to
protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked
disbelief" (New York Times, October 24, 2008).