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Honig's essay emphasizes neoliberalism's destruction of a world of public things and addresses how we might respond to the catastrophe of their loss. However, to adequately confront the political dilemmas posed by neoliberalism, we must attend to the simultaneous disappearance of both common desires and collective actors. Honig's examples risk obscuring the political importance of this question.

The study of how ideas and discourse evolve within international organizations is one of the most important frontiers of global social policy theory. Setting forth an ideational approach to understanding their behavior, the article argues that international organizations are more open systems than most realists and structuralists believe. Their constantly evolving discourse and ideas can directly impact domestic policy. In order to stress this reality, drawing on the case of pension privatization, the article compares these organizations with ideologically driven domestic think tanks which, as far as pension privatization is concerned, have proved much more rigid in their policy prescriptions than the World Bank and other international organizations traditionally associated with the global pension privatization campaign.

Posing the topic: "Financial actors serving the common good" today, is directly related to the lessons we draw from the recent financial crisis. To review the case I understand two points need to be addressed briefly: on one hand, a diagnosis of the crisis, and on the other, the proposal for an efficient and resilient financial sector that follows from that view. Concerning the diagnosis, I agree with those who affirm that the crisis was originated by an excess of savings formed in financial markets for various reasons. This excessive volume of savings caused mal-investment, and evolved in accordance to the pattern of what we can call a "speculative bubble", which is not such an infrequent phenomenon in the functioning logic of capital markets. I think that the world economy during the 90s and 2000s has been characterized by an immoderate optimism regarding the potential self-regulation of capital markets. This situation was based on two elements: on one hand by the technological revolution that provided powerful new tools, and on the other, by a consensus in economic theory and policy which led to financial deregulation and gave excessive operating margins without adequate supervision.