Margaret Thatcher's economic views were influenced by the issues facing Britain at the time, from her perspective as a middle-class woman. As a daughter of a grocer, her understanding of conservatism was shaped by the struggles of her family in that era, and it was very different from the traditional, paternalistic "one nation" British Conservatism of the upper classes. Intellectually, Thatcher was influenced by economists such as Milton Friedman and Frederich Hayek. From the close of the Second World War until Thatcher's premiership, successive Labour governments had enforced more and more state control over the economy. Thatcher's principles marked a shift from that era's Keynesian supply-side incentives (driven by government programs, spending and control) to a more demand-driven set of incentives (marked by private enterprise to meet consumer needs).

It is difficult to link Thatcherism (and Reaganism) to the 2008 global financial crisis, as there was a nearly 20-year gap between policy and crisis in both cases, and economists are divided on the subject.

In favor of the argument that economic liberalism (similar to Thatcherism and Reaganism) caused the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Neo-Keynesian economists say that deregulation policies similar to those of the era (such as the repeal of provisions of the American Glass-Steagall law) allowed for the making of poor-quality loans by banks seeking short-term profit, creating the bubble in housing which eventually popped.

There are counter-arguments, saying that policies in this vein did not cause the 2008 global financial crisis. Liberal and Austrian economists argue that the ultimate cause of the crisis was the manipulation of interest rates dating back to the end of the previous 2001 Dot Com Bubble, as well as the US government itself incentivizing mortgages for less and less worthy creditors towards its policy goal of maximizing home ownership.
spam fails_task lang_mismatch pii not_appropriate hate_speech sexual_content quality toxicity humor helpfulness creativity violence