The trouble with dogma is that it generates true believers – in this case, extremely rich and powerful believers. Even while the bulk of the mainstream press and media were displaying an inkling that the assumptions which had guided policy for the last 3 decades had been wrong, Neoliberals were already stammering out their denials: The most famous one being Allan Greenspan’s outrage that speculators and financiers had not behaved as the theory predicted. In other words, reality had got it wrong, not the theory. That was followed by Niall Ferguson’s slightly less hysterical but equally ridiculous claim that the crash had happened because the markets were over-regulated.

But the main reason that the narrative of Neoliberal failure quickly faded was that the the long term project of the Scaifes Mellons and Kochs to reshape the US’s economist and legal community was now maturing. Congress, the courts, the press and financial community were now well seeded with the output of Virginia Tech, GMU and other such ideologically based institutions. Incoherent mediocrities like Arthur Laffer, Phil Gramm and Dick Armey had become the go-to “economists” of the day and were backed up by prominent lawyers, bankers and journalists from the same stud farm. At the same time, Koch’s astro-turf Tea Party movement was acting to prevent any wavering by progressive (ie less reactionary) Republicans towards Keynesian or post Keynesian responses to the crisis. With all these pressures, it didn’t take long for the very cause of the problems – the translation of an incoherent economic dogma into policy – to be hailed as the solution.

There’s no mystery about it.