Gordon Brown's bankrupt ideology

Gordon Brown claims that free markets are a 'bankrupt ideology'. But his own brilliant ideas on the economy are far worse, says John Stepek.

The financial crisis was all the Tories' fault. So Gordon Brown reckons anyway. Apparently, "what let the world down last autumn was not just bankrupt institutions but a bankrupt ideology". What was this ideology? Ah yes, "the Conservative idea that markets always self-correct but never self-destruct".

Let's ignore the fact that even if this was correct, Mr Brown has been running the economy in one way or another since 1997, and so perhaps should already have spoken out about this 'bankrupt ideology' at some point over the past decade.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.