Isn't it strange how an abstract entity (the market) is personalised (the market feels) and that this person is driven by a desire for confidence -or ephemeral intensities. If there is no confidence there is chaos. What is supposed to be stable and self-regulating becomes chaotic. "The market" we are reliably informed doesn't like chaos, even though the stock market is chaotic.

Governments must intervene to prevent the descent into chaos, yet we are also told that "the market" has a deep antipathy to government intervention, since it represents the road to serfdom. "The market" expects that further fiscal belt-tightening to address the structural deficit is needed in order to better enable the economy to meet any future economic challenges, whatever they may be.

Media commentators just repeat the lines without bothering to think about what they are saying, and that is a good illustration of t the hegemony of neoliberalism and its axioms of self-regulated and efficient markets. Neoclassical economics then plays the role of a meta-ideology as it legitimized, mathematically and "scientifically," neoliberal ideology and deregulation.

Behind this sits the political coalition of capitalist rentiers and financists who mostly benefited from the neoliberal hegemony and from the process of financialization in which the financial system finances speculation not productive investments.