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| Former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. |
Introduction:
The return of John Maynard Keynes in the wake of the most damaging financial downturn since the Great Depression has sparked a debate that challenges the legacy of the Great Moderation and the 20 years of calmness that prevailed over the vast plains of global financial markets. Indeed voices have risen from the fallout of the financial crisis that continually clammer that Friedrich Hayek, neoliberalism and free markets, that which has defined the last three decades of Western economics, is not the End of History.
The debate has entered mainstream media as epitomised by the financial lyricism of ‘Fightof the Century’ as seen above, an ideological sparring match that stages a rap battle between the two political and economic ideologues of the 20thand 21st Century. One, Friedrich Hayek the exemplar of libertarian economics, the other, John Maynard Keynes the man of the big state, government spending and interventionary economics.
Indeed prompted by the ‘Fight of the Century’ the purpose of this monograph is to consider financial markets and the changes that are necessary in order to bring decorum to a world of finance sailing over choppy ideological waters, battered by a raging gale of populist anger.
