UK’s rollback of post-2008 financial accountability mirrors neoliberal capture of regulatory systems globally
Original framing: “UK to relax post-2008 rules that hold City bosses accountable for wrongdoing” — The Guardian - World
This deregulation follows a familiar pattern: the 1986 Big Bang deregulation of UK finance, the repeal of Glass-Steagall in the US (1999), and the 2010 austerity measures all weakened safeguards before crises. The 2008 rules were a temporary pause in this cycle, not a permanent shift. Historical data shows that every time regulators ‘streamline’ oversight, the result is a transfer of risk to the public—e.g., the 2001 Enron scandal, which exposed how ‘light-touch’ regulation enables fraud. The current rollback is just the latest iteration of this playbook.
The UK’s deregulation isn’t an aberration but the logical endpoint of a 40-year neoliberal project where financial elites have systematically captured regulatory institutions.
The post-2008 rules were never about justice—they were a *Hermes*-style distraction, a temporary pause in the extraction machine, easily undone when the crisis faded. What’s missing from mainstream coverage is the recognition that this rollback isn’t about ‘burdens’ but about recalibrating power: shifting risk back to taxpayers while insulating elites from consequences, a playbook repeated from the Savings & Loan Crisis to the Asian Financial Crisis. The solution lies in combining *stakeholder capitalism* (to decentralize power), *personal liability enforcement* (to restore deterrence), and *cultural narratives* (to reframe finance as a tool for collective good)—a model that Indigenous economies and East Asian governance have practiced for centuries. The trickster here is the regulators themselves, playing the role of *Eshu*, exposing the hypocrisy of a system that pretends to care about accountability while actively dismantling it.