ABSTRACT
It is perhaps fitting that the novel coronavirus triggered crises in neoliberal financialised capitalist economies around the Ides of March, the traditional day of reckoning of outstanding debts in Ancient Rome. This chapter examines what it was about neoliberalism that made the public health crisis, albeit a serious one, so intractable for the leading neoliberal financialised capitalisms. It contrasts China’s easy suppression of the virus to the responses of leading neoliberal financialised capitalist economies, the United States and the United Kingdom, and appreciate the true scale of these neoliberal financialised capitalisms’ failures. The chapter provides an outline of the economic response so as to set the stage for the discussion of the nature of the capitalism that emerges from this current crisis. By contrast, in China, where socialism remains the goal, the social contract is considerably more robust. The contrast with the leading neoliberal financialised economies, the United States and the United Kingdom, could not have been greater.
