Many European countries have devoted a high proportion of their GDP to public spending and many governments cannot wait to get out of their new-found business of running banks and car companies. But the past decade has clearly produced changes which, taken cumulatively, have put the question of the state back at the centre of political debate. The obvious reason for the change is the financial crisis. As global markets collapsed, governments intervened on an unprecedented scale, injecting liquidity into their economies and taking over, or otherwise rescuing, banks and other companies that were judged "too big to fail". A few months after Lehman Brothers had collapsed, the American government was in charge of General Motors and Chrysler, the British government was running high street banks. The crisis upended conventional wisdom about the relative merits of governments and markets. Where government was once the problem, today the default villain is the market. Yet even before Lehman Brothers collapsed the state was on the march.