Description
The American Central Bank played a fundamental role in overcoming the 2008 financial crisis. This contrasts with the context of the Great Depression, during which omission was the institution's main hallmark. However, in both contexts, the bank operated from a "liberal" theoretical framework. How can these differences be explained? This work seeks to identify a basic difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism based on the analysis of the theoretical precepts that guided the Federal Reserve's actions in the face of the two crises. I argue that what allowed the Fed to conduct the so-called "unconventional monetary policies" was the characteristic of neoliberalism as a "flexible creed" regarding state intervention in the economy. The liberal creed, in turn, although it underwent changes over the decades, remained linked to the laissez-faire horizon – of which the gold standard was the main representative. In this sense, the abandonment of laissez-faire and the impossibility of assigning a clear limit to the extent to which state interventions can be beneficial gave neoliberalism greater plasticity and the ability to reinvent itself in the face of crises.
