Extract

Crises are multi-faceted phenomena that invite multiple approaches from different entry-points and standpoints. This chapter deploys a CPE approach to explore how the recent crisis in the North Atlantic economies, still continuing at the time of writing in mid-2013, has been construed through different economic imaginaries. Of interest is the shock that crises gave to the prevailing economic wisdom and dominant policy paradigms, leading to the recovery of other economic perspectives as well as a search to imagine alternative economic and political paths to economic recovery. Key aspects of the retrospective interpretation and prospective envisioning of economic performance are actors’ differential capacities for lesson-drawing and asymmetrical abilities to refuse to learn from their mistakes. Accordingly the following analysis considers the multi-faceted nature of the North Atlantic financial crisis and its global repercussions, the selection of some construals rather than others as the basis for economic responses and crisis management, and the transformation of a crisis that originated in private credit relations and securitization into a crisis of sovereign debt and public finances. Of special interest are two issues.