Much has been made of economising. Yet social scientists have paid little attention to the moment of economic failure, the moments that precede it, and the calculative infrastructures and related processes through which both failing and failure are made operable. This chapter examines the shift from the economising of the market economy, which took place across much of the nineteenth century, to the economising and marketising of the social sphere, which is still ongoing. We consider a specific case of the economising of failure, namely the repeated attempts over more than a decade to create a failure regime for NHS hospitals. These attempts commenced with the Health and Social Care Act 2003, which drew explicitly on the Insolvency Act 1986. This promised a 'failure regime' for NHS Foundation Trusts modelled on the corporate sector. Shortly after the financial crash, and in the middle of one of the biggest scandals to face NHS hospitals, these proposals were abandoned in favour of a regime based initially on the notion of 'de-authorisation'. The notion of de-authorisation was then itself abandoned, in favour of the notion of 'unsustainable provider', most recently called also the Trust Special Administrators regime.We suggest that these repeated attempts to devise a failure regime for NHS hospitals have lessons that go beyond the domain of healthcare, and that they highlight important issues concerning the role that 'exit' models and associated calculative infrastructures may play in the economising and regulating of public services and the social sphere more broadly.