First of all, I would like to thank Manuela Moschella for her thoughtful and generous assessment of my book, Central Bank Capitalism. In a comparison of our two reviews, it is evident that each of us has approached the other’s work from our own complementary but different ontological assumptions. While Moschella believes that my approach tends to overemphasize structural factors, I argue that hers focuses somewhat too strongly on the level of institutional and individual actors.

My analysis does, indeed, center on the structural logic of market liberalism. According to my reasoning, it is primarily market liberal logic that guides Western central banks’ actions in general, including their focus on price stability, market neutrality, and formal independence. In most cases, this also applies to concrete monetary policy. While I agree with Moschella that safeguarding reputation is an important consideration for central banks, I believe that—especially in cases of uncertainty—upholding market liberal policies takes precedence over their institutional reputation.

Accordingly, I find that the major shifts in central bank policy are less attributable to issues of reputation than Moschella proposes. Instead, as I contend, they represent the adaptation of market liberal logic to crisis mode. This also applies to the ECB’s slight shift toward green monetary policy, as I have explored in previous work with Nicolás Aguila. In the financial crisis of 2007–09, the formerly prevailing “reason of least government as the principle organizing raison d’Etat”—as Michel Foucault (2008, p. 28) put it in his famous The Birth of Biopolitics lectures at the Collège de France—gave way to the realization that central banks had to lend massive support to shoring up the financial system. This development, however, did not make central bank capitalism, as I call it, any less market liberal. On the contrary, central banks, led by the Federal Reserve, have meanwhile come to defend market liberalism much more aggressively than before.

What is new, then, about central bank capitalism is not necessarily the monetary policy instruments, some of which had already been used in the past, as Moschella correctly points out. The novel aspect is rather the readjustment of the relation between state and market. As financial markets have become increasingly crisis-prone, I argue that central banks have had to intervene more and more radically in the market to secure market-liberal corridors in which market forces can still “freely” unfold. It is precisely this intervention that keeps the laissez-faire system functioning on an artificial basis. What this safety net in effect amounts to is what I call “laissez-faire on life support” (p. 158).

Moschella’s approach, by contrast, places greater trust in the ability of political and civil society actors to influence how monetary policy is shaped. My theoretical approach, as Moschella rightly points out, is influenced by Foucault. However, I also draw on the works of Ernesto Laclau, who emphasizes that structures only exist because they must be repeatedly reproduced by the actors in a process that is only successful to a limited extent. Dislocations within the structure occur regularly, and the structure only partially determines how these ruptures should be dealt with. This, in turn, opens up possibilities for action, including structural change. Hence, from an ontological perspective, I believe Moschella’s book and mine complement each other very nicely in that we each prioritize and clarify different moments in these processes of structural dislocation and institutional response. In addition, we both seek to provide a contemporary description of the crisis-prone nature of capitalism through our analyses of central banking and monetary policy. And by asking the kind of questions that critically probe capitalism’s modes of reproduction—and its failures—we both open up potential spaces to address some of the most pressing issues of our time.