Robert Solow at the New York Review of Books is understandably taken aback by the new book from one of the US bench's devout libertarians.

He quotes the following passage from Richard Posner's A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression:

"Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure. The government's myopia, passivity, and blunders played a critical role in allowing the recession to balloon into a depression, and so have several fortuitous factors. But without any government regulation of the financial industry, the economy would still, in all likelihood, be in a depression; what we have learned from the depression has shown that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism."