Whatever It Takes: How Neoliberalism Hijacked the Public Purse

The 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are widely understood as moments that discredited neoliberal orthodoxy and some have even declared it dead. This paper argues that, to the contrary, the massive public interventions during both episodes revived and consolidated it by the method of stabilization and use of public finance. Drawing on the theoretical tradition that treats money as a public institution, the paper traces how public finance was captured by private interests across three episodes—2008 bailouts, pandemic-era fiscal transfers, and the subsequent turn to industrial policy. The paper traces how and why this “whatever it takes” commitment to capital became possible, and argues that the same logic must be extended to financing democratic priorities if neoliberalism is to be meaningfully displaced.