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Bailouts are an ideal intervention for a decaying neoliberal politics: they maintain capital flows, rising asset prices and the upwards redistribution of wealth, while supporting the minimum needs of enough of the population to prevent total social breakdown.

the model by which neoliberal capitalism has operated globally for decades. Energy producers and suppliers are extracting profits from the state by menacing the public with unaffordable bills, effectively threatening to remove the means of existence from millions of people. This process, of capital holding the public to ransom, has been going on for decades in the Global South, where countries facing financial, energy and even public health crises have been held to ransom by the IMF, World Bank and multinational corporations based in the US or Europe. Money to relieve immediate social meltdown was provided on the condition of structural reforms and repayment agreements that locked generations of citizens into decades of debt, economic restructuring and austerity to ensure the profits of corporations.

IMF/World Bank interventions undermined the growth of alternative political movements and brought post-colonial nations into a capitalist system where wealth is distributed upwards. Practices once applied by imperial nations to colonial subjects have now been turned on their domestic populations.