Bailouts and central bank manipulation are also capitalist ideas, or at least they were developed by capitalist economists within a capitalist framework on behalf of capitalists to try and keep capitalism afloat.
Bailing out banks and hoping they will spend it on industry just after they bankrupted themselves by gambling shows an unquestioning and total belief in the institutions of capital.
Socialists would have just lent cheap money directly to industry and full on communists would have thought it a great opportunity to dismantle the monetary system.
edit - Thinking about it, it may be a weird form of cargo-cult capitalism. As in, the political business of managing capitalist economies has been replaced by a belief in preserving the current institutions of capital, irrespective of how those institutions are behaving.
> Bailing out banks and hoping they will spend it on industry just after they bankrupted themselves by gambling shows an unquestioning and total belief in the institutions of capital.
On the contrary, it betrays deep distrust in the actual institutions of capitalism: market prices and bankruptcy.
"Institutions of capital" cannot just mean "the people who hold the capital", because by that definition every oligarch since prehistory was a capitalist. That contradicts even Marx, who saw capitalism as a distinct modern development.
I was using the phrase to specifically mean the organisations that structurally underpin modern capitalist economies and have now come to represent it. Sorry if I did not make that clear enough from context.
Now you can argue that what happened was bad economic theory, however the intent behind bailing out the banks was not to steer away from capitalism, but to prop it up, so even if you think it stinks from an economic theory perspective, it was at least intended as capitalist.
Bailing out banks and hoping they will spend it on industry just after they bankrupted themselves by gambling shows an unquestioning and total belief in the institutions of capital.
Socialists would have just lent cheap money directly to industry and full on communists would have thought it a great opportunity to dismantle the monetary system.
edit - Thinking about it, it may be a weird form of cargo-cult capitalism. As in, the political business of managing capitalist economies has been replaced by a belief in preserving the current institutions of capital, irrespective of how those institutions are behaving.