There was no formal agreement between state and private corporations concerning the levels of investment, output or employment. The general opinion was that the aim of optimising economic performance was best served by keeping official interference to the minimum and leaving to the management of the private sector any form of self regulation.
This attitude ignored the extent to which market forces were already being systematically distorted in favour of business interests, by keeping monetary policy lax enough to allow growing indiscipline among both lenders and borrowers.
The importance of encouraging consumer demand aided by the increasing participation of women in the workplace and the relaxation of the restrictions on a number of areas of consumption, such as gambling and pornography, were readily accepted by the financial establishment anxious to exploit this lucrative market opportunity.
By the 70s and 80s it became clear that the distortion of market forces had promoted wasteful over investment and misallocation of resources.
The belief that the spread of "freemarkets" would lead to general prosperity was clearly reinforced by the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union. This bolstered the vision of a brave new liberalised world with the associated notion of globalisation, in which not only were barriers to trade and financial flows to be swept away but new markets and wealth-producing opportunities would be created.
This has not happened. The transition into the twenty-first century has shown increasing economic dysfunction and deteriorating prospects for most of its people.
There has been a deepening economic stagnation and an increasing economic insecurity within the rich countries of the industrialised West. This has condemned a substantial minority, in Britain and the United States some thirty per cent or more of the population, to the status of being a permanent underclass living in poverty. This, coupled with the spreading failure of private pension schemes, has raised the spectre of poverty or destitution in old age for many who had hithero regarded themselves as comfortably off.
In addition it has resulted in the increased marginalisation of the poor countries. The plight of 80 per cent of the world's population has gone from bad to worse. The rising numbers of economic migrants fleeing these countries, the spreading of state bankruptcy and the collapse of law and order is a reality not reflected in official statistics.
A further indication is the increasing crises in liberalised financial markets and the growing incident of fraud and corporate criminality.
The "global establishment" i.e. those vested interests that effectively dominate public opinion through political parties and the mass media, consistently deny the evidence of any long-term slowdown in economic growth.
By various processes of deception the establishment has attempted to divert attention from the reality of deepening economic crisis and systemic dysfunction by successive propaganda campaigns.
It soon became clear by the late 1990s that these supposed success stories, had owed less to liberalisation and far more to state intervention and officially sponsored market distortion.
Before the end of the last century the prophets of capitalist triumphalism had been reduced to proclaiming the United States as the new beacon of economic hope, Yet scarcely had the tumult of millennium fireworks died away in 2000 than the supposed wonders of America's new economy were shown to be a mirage - one moreover whose image of success was soon to be revealed as built on phantom output data and false accounting on an unprecedented scale.
The governments of what are supposed to be the world's most advanced countries are now so permeated with corrupt and criminal elements as seemingly to have lost any sense of responsibility for the public interest at all.
The global establishment has consistently refused to admit that the post war fiction of perpetual growth was not feasible. The refusal to accept such a possibility was well grounded in justified fears of a possible financial meltdown and, in particular, called in to question the sustainability of funded pension schemes whch had been established in the United States since the 1950s as the main source of retirement income for private sector employees. When recession struck in 1974 it was obvious that the old fashioned wholesale bankruptcy and write-off of assets was not an acceptable solution. Instead there followed official bail outs of financial institutions.
This measure provided a crucial prop to the parasitic fund management industry which had grown up to exert a massive and pernicious influence over the development of latter day global capitalism.
At the same time the establishment resorted to the idea that sustained economic growth would revive if short term sacrifices were made. Hence the decimation of British industrial capacity by the Thatcher administration.
When it became obvious that the capitalist economy could not deliver a minimum degree of durable income security to the mass of the population it was equally obvious that demands for more radical approaches might prove irresistible, and that these would be likely to entail a greater degree of public control over the private sector and greater redistribuition of income to the disadvantage of the dominant vested interests.
By giving private enterprise, particularly in the financial sector, increased licence to create and allocate credit yet maintaining an implicit guarantee that the state would underwrite any major losses, the authorities were giving a powerful incentive to irresponsible or even criminal behaviour.
In a climate of intensifying stagnation, where corporate profitability was hard to sustain at minimum acceptable levels, the temptation for corporate managers, not merely to allocate funds to excessively risky investment but to resort to outright fraud, became increasingly irresistible.
The enforced exposure of national economies to more intense and unfair competition has led to pressure on governments (especially those of the poorest countries) to cut corporate tax levels severely.
This pressure has intensifed as excess capacity has spread throughout virtually every sector of the world economy as a consequence of persistent low growth. The process of globalisation has allowed countries that do not pretend to offer minimum levels of protection or rights to workers or observe a minimum standard of environmental protection to hitch to the apparent bandwagon.
Naturally the global establishment has refused to recognise the ultimately unsustainable social consequences of the resulting progressive damage to public services and human welfare.