The biggest financial blow-up in 80 years clearly showed that the ideas that have been institutionalised in financial regulation over the last 20-30 years posed a serious danger to the real economies of Western countries. However, not much seems to be happening in terms of institutionalising new ideas. Rather, political actors try to keep old ideas alive by adjusting them to radically different circumstances. Studying the clean up after the Danish financial crisis, this paper argues that scholars should pay close attention to these processes of bricolage and pragmatism, both because their outcome significantly affect future battles about the post-crisis institutional setup, and because they entail important power-struggles. So was the case in Denmark. In this case, some banks were harder hit than others, but instances of crisis were found among banks of all sizes. However, the response by the government has clearly fallen out to the advantage of the big banks. Thus, during the course of the crisis, the government''s policy of gaining a ''consolidation'' of the Danish banking sector – i.e. getting large banks to buy up their smaller, troubled competitors – has posed as the official centrepiece argument of the government, much to the regret of the small banks. This approach dates back to the last Danish banking crisis of the late 1980s. How did Danish politicians end up identifying the solution of making the big banks even larger as the best response to the financial crisis?
