Introduction Framing the Crisis: Accident, Fiasco, or Debacle?

Abstract

The introductory chapter sets the book up as an intervention in the debate about the financial crisis by engaging in some of the possible conceptualizations of accident. The concepts of accident and fiasco are explored, drawing on the original usage by Perrow and Scott, and also incorporating analysis of the current financial crisis by Donald MacKenzie, Andrew Haldane, and Gillian Tett. Accident and fiasco are rejected in favour of debacle, a significant, non-reversible collection of outcomes that shift the balance of power, caused in part by hubris involving banking, regulatory, and political elites. The chapter and book argue that the crisis is the result of accumulating small decisions by individual banks and bankers. At the same time the regulators and political elites bought into a high modernist project of supporting a light-touch regime that largely trusted financial markets to deal with their own problems.