When did neoliberalism end?

This paper is a contribution to the current debate whether neoliberalism has ‘ended’. It builds on a 2021 paper in the ARPE which tied the working of the neoliberal political economy to the interplay of positive real rates and options price theory (Mix 2021). For the paper at hand, I enlarge the context of said observation and define neoliberalism as a political economy based on the believe in self-regulating financial markets’ capacity to produce money out of money by itself. The paper then argues that this definition implies a criterium by which one could mark the ‘end’ of neoliberalism. This criterium would be negative real interest rates.The paper then applies this criterium to the factual political economy of the last 40 years or so to test it.