Major economic crises are perceived as cataclysmic events that bring about significant changes. It is not surprising, then, that in the current COVID-19 crisis important scholars, pundits and politicians have expressed the view that the ensuing “aftermath” shall be different from the "past". Everything – or a lot – is going to change.[i]
This prevalent perception of economic crises (the crisis as a trigger of significant change) was spawned from the Great Depression. The Great Crash did, indeed, bring about radical changes: it had a strong impact on the relations between the state, markets and politics, and deeply influenced economic and political ideologies, leading to transformations whose effects can be traced in western societies until at least the 1970s. The transformative character of the post-1929 period made it the archetype of modern economic crises.
However, this was hardly the case in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis (and its extension as a debt crisis in the European Union). Despite great expectations that the rampant capitalism model would be rectified, the economic and political consequences of the crisis were “surprisingly conservative”.[ii] The post-crisis reforms were primarily "sectoral", largely focused on the financial sector and aimed at shaping an improved, safer and less toxic version of the financial architecture of the pre-2007 period. The Great Recession has turned out to be “much more of a status quo event […] than a transformative one”.[iii] The 2008 crisis – the most important since the interwar years and the first major crisis of a new generation of crises – has demonstrated that huge crises might not turn out to be such determining game changers, as was the 1929 crisis.
