'Old ideas crawling out of the woodwork' watch

From a new book on my favorite economist John Maynard Keynes by Robert Skidelsy. From the looks of it, it seems to be fashionable to now say that one is a Keynesian now. If only they did not listen to Mr. Greenspan and his Ayn Rand inspired drivel about the BS surrounding 'self correcting markets'.

“The root cause of the present crisis lies in the intellectual failure of economics, It was the wrong ideas of economists which legitimized the deregulation of finance, and it was the deregulation of finance which led to the credit explosion which collapsed into the credit crunch. It is hard to convey the harm done by the recent dominant school of New Classical economics. Rarely in history can such powerful minds have devoted themselves to such strange ideas.”

This is what a NYTimes review about the book said (the book must be made required reading for Wall Street aspirants)...

Mr. Skidelsky surveys the vast body of Keynes’s work. But he boils the thinking down to a few essential points. Central among them is that market economies are fundamentally uncertain; large shocks like the recent meltdown are not anomalies but normal if unpredictable events. Government should intervene in a crisis — as the Obama administration has since the fall of Lehman Brothers last year — supplying a judicious but firm hand on the tiller. Mr. Skidelsky is righteous in his thunder about how Keynes’s ideas have been spurned in recent decades. He scolds the free-market ethos of the Reagan and Thatcher eras as well as the thinking of anti-Keynesian New Classical economists. He does not entirely blame the usual suspects (banks, hedge funds, credit-rating agencies, the Fed) for the current crisis. He indicts laissez-faire philosophy.