There are growing doubts in the west about the trinity of ideas around which the post cold-war world has been constructed: markets, democracy and American power. The faith in free markets was severely shaken by the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession — and has never really recovered. Although the global depression that many feared was avoided, the exuberant belief in the ability of free markets to raise living standards all over the world has not returned. The belief that there is a market-based formula out there that all sensible policy makers can adopt — a “Washington consensus” — has faded, to be replaced by a global … Continue reading Gideon Rachman