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Directions (Q. 191–200): In the following questions, read the following passage carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
It once looked as though the financial crisis of 2008 might even bring about the end of laissez-faire economics. “The idea of an all-powerful market which is always right is finished,” declared Nicolas Sarkozy, the then president of France. Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s finance minister at that time predicted that “the U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system.”
Even Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, once known as the “maestro” of capitalism, declared himself “in a state of shocked disbelief” at the collapse wrought by the unfettered markets he had championed throughout his life. “I’ve found a flaw,” he said. “I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
But I suspect few would have guessed that the economic order built on Reagan’s and Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalised economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago.
Britons’ vote last week to exit the European Union was not simply about their idiosyncratic distaste for all things European — an aversion shared by Thatcher, who saw Brussels as the kind of meddlesome big government she loathed. Brussels was merely a stand-in for something deeper: the very globalisation that Thatcher as Britain’s prime minister so enthusiastically promoted.
The so-called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones.
It is the same frustration that has buoyed proto-fascist politicalparties across Europe. It is the same anger fuelling thecandidacy of Mr. Trump in the United States.
It once looked as though the financial crisis of 2008 might even bring about the end of laissez-faire economics. “The idea of an all-powerful market which is always right is finished,” declared Nicolas Sarkozy, the then president of France. Peer Steinbrück, Germany’s finance minister at that time predicted that “the U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system.”
Even Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, once known as the “maestro” of capitalism, declared himself “in a state of shocked disbelief” at the collapse wrought by the unfettered markets he had championed throughout his life. “I’ve found a flaw,” he said. “I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”
But I suspect few would have guessed that the economic order built on Reagan’s and Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalised economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago.
Britons’ vote last week to exit the European Union was not simply about their idiosyncratic distaste for all things European — an aversion shared by Thatcher, who saw Brussels as the kind of meddlesome big government she loathed. Brussels was merely a stand-in for something deeper: the very globalisation that Thatcher as Britain’s prime minister so enthusiastically promoted.
The so-called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones.
It is the same frustration that has buoyed proto-fascist politicalparties across Europe. It is the same anger fuelling thecandidacy of Mr. Trump in the United States.
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