Introduction
In the years prior to the 2007–2008 economic and financial crisis leaders and their governments allowed and facilitated a progressive erosion and diffusion of state power to other actors, through a series of deliberate decisions and nondecisions (Bachrach and Baratz, 1963). Governmental acts or refusal to act were underpinned by ideological and economic beliefs, a worldview that championed unregulated markets ahead of state prerogatives (Akerlof and Shiller, 2009; Padoa-Schioppa, 2010; Stiglitz, 2010). There was a weakening of state power and a gradual retreat of the state’s desire and authority to regulate a rapidly growing global financial system and bank and nonbank actors as a corollary to this deregulatory neoliberal paradigm ...
