I didn't know an "erstwhile booster" is a person. Therefore, I thought "pronouncements" referred to something legal, instead of just a complicated word for "opinions". My best guess at the meaning of the sentence, therefore, was something completely different and nonsensical.
The whole article is like this. Misunderstand one flowery phrase, misunderstand the entire sentence, misunderstand the whole paragraph. It's like the author hates convincing people.
https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile
https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster
/shrug If those are familiar words to you, then I think it's a little harsh to say that they "hate convincing people" because they use them. Totally agree that a good author edits out rarer words to reach a broader audience, but I think that's a very weak vector of critique for the article as a whole.
> I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs.
Is that sentence really that hard to read? I mean, it's definitely overly flowery, but it means almost word-for-word "After many financial crises, there is a lot of economic pessimism around again, even among free-market capitalism's biggest proponents."