1According to the economic historian Žarko Lazarević, as an integral part of economic life, crises solve accumulated economic imbalances and are like a divide representing either an end or a beginning of a cycle.⁶ The crisis that erupted in 2008 is the third major crisis in the last century and a half. The first struck in 1873 and the second in 1929 with the stock market crash on Wall Street. With regards to similar events in the last century, the recession and the crisis that followed the 1973 oil crisis should also be highlighted. Since the aforementioned economic crisis in 1873, it appears that all crises had their origin in the financial, banking sector, due to financial, credit and investment speculations. What is clear when we take a closer look at the crises so far is that one of the characteristics of the capitalist economic development are the cyclical periods of crises and economic growth. A boom is usually followed by a big drop. Let us just remember the 1920s and the years before 2008. Only the sky seemed to be the limit in the economy. More than obvious, the situation was like a bubble and it was only a matter of time before it burst. If we compare the crisis in the 1930s with the 2008 crisis, we observe additional similarities. That is, by tightening the belt and taking austerity measures, which turned out to be the wrong path. The New Deal took place, clearly showing how important demand and spending are for restarting the economy. The economic theory by John Maynard Keynes later prevailed, advocating the role of regulation, among other things, which was reflected in the economic field as successful for some time. However, the measures generated by the crisis in the 1930s and the measures adopted by the Bretton Woods Agreement during the Second World War were in force for only a few decades, until the 1970s. After the Second World War, we witnessed an economic boom, in a global sense. This was a time when the state played an important role in economic policy. It was a sort of symbiosis of state interventionism and the functioning of the free market. After the outbreak of the already mentioned oil crisis in 1973, a major shift in mentality occurred, namely a belief emerged that the role of the state and interventionism were not crucial or important for the economy. Neoliberalism occurred, an economic- political paradigm advocating for the smallest possible role of the state in the economy. The economist Davorin Kračun believes that the latter gained official political support with the onset of the Reagan presidency in the United States and reached its peak in the late 1980s with the so-called Washington Consensus, which represented a recipe for transition countries.⁷ “The neoliberal economic-political paradigm was quite successful in these conditions, also because it coincided with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the expansion of the world market to the once unconquerable fortresses of Russia and China”, Kračun stated. In addition, in his belief, the information and communication revolution opened up opportunities for entirely new industries.⁸ Ivan T. Berend, a comparative historian of Central and Eastern Europe, is of a similar opinion, believing that capitalism has changed and that it is certainly no longer the same capitalism as in the 1970s. “The developed European countries have become deindustrialized, industry has lost its importance and in the most developed western countries only 18 percent of the active population work in industry. The financial sector with banks, financial institutions, insurance companies and the real estate sector is growing six times faster than the real economy and its assets are three to four times larger than the total gross domestic product of the European Union. I am referring to a deindustrialized, overly financially controlled economy that was very fragile, susceptible to the financial panic that occurred. From 1980 onwards, the entire system was deregulated: all regulation introduced in the 1930s and after the Second World War by the Bretton Woods Agreement, including the lessons of the Great Depression, was eliminated. Neoliberalism was convinced that it had solved the problems of crises, that they would no longer appear. The leading economists of the Chicago school advised the governments that we no longer need a straitjacket of regulation”, Berend believes.⁹ As emphasized by Iztok Simoniti, “neoliberalism, more appropriately called neoconservatism, is the financial feudalism of the 21^st century”. The essence of neoliberalism is that it wants to remove the state, turn it into a night watchman, leaving all power to capital, which, in Simoniti's opinion, is “a reliable recipe for a lasting bad society and is against classical democracy, as written in our constitution”.¹⁰ The fact is that many believed that the neoliberal economic-political paradigm allowed for unlimited possibilities for expansion. However, this was not the case, as the crisis finally proved, the catalyst of which, as in previous crises, was again the USA. The debt crisis occurred and numerous countries that had irresponsible banking (Iceland), high population spending (Ireland and Portugal) or irresponsible government spending (Greece) collapsed.

2The causes of the economic and financial crisis may also be different from those mentioned above, as evidenced by current events. After Slovenia recorded 3.2% real GDP growth in 2019, Covid-19 ‘struck' like a bolt from the blue. This time, the future is all the more uncertain; the consequences are and will be all the greater because the whole world is affected. The current crisis will certainly continue to affect almost all parts of society and the economy. Among other things, a number of structural reforms are urgent (health, pension ...).