"We're living with the economic fallout of the financial crisis and we're struggling to make sense of it. One way of understanding what's happened is to see that we're at the end of an era, an era of market triumphalism. The last three decades were a heady, reckless time of market mania and deregulation. We had the free market fundamentalism of the Reagan–Thatcher years and then we had the market friendly Neo–Liberalism of the Clinton and Blair years, which moderated but also consolidated the faith that markets are the primary mechanism for achieving the public good. Today that faith is in doubt. Market triumphalism has given way to a new market scepticism. Almost everybody agrees that we need to improve regulation, but this moment is about more than devising new regulations. It's also a time, or so it seems to me, to rethink the role of markets in achieving the public good."
(Professor Michael Sandel, 2009 Reith Lecture Series)
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/reith/reith_20090630-0930a.mp3
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specialreports/2009/06/090612_reith_lectures_2009.shtml