Maybe this is a really sick thing for an banker's son to joke about, but ever since it started looking like we're headed toward a global recession, Erika and I check the BBC every afternoon at 1pm while we're eating soup to see if capitalism has collapsed yet. It hasn't (we'll check again tomorrow!), but while we were batting about the idea of starting a communist syndicate to roam the street getting into altercations with fascist gangs, I found this article by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian that I felt I needed to share. The depressingly accurate takeaway paragraph:
"If the market economy is looking peaky, then its accompanying free market ideology should be on life support. Behold the hypocrisy. The free marketeers have spent the past two decades preaching against the evils of state intervention, the dead hand of government, the need to roll back the frontiers, and so on. Yet what happens when these buccaneers of unfettered capitalism run into trouble? They go running to the nanny state they so deplore, sob into her lap and beg for help. The results of their own greed - 'exuberance', they call it - and incompetence have caused more than 100 substantial banking crises over the past 30 years, yet time and again it is the reviled state which answers the call for help. Four times in this period, the authorities have had to rescue crucial parts of the US financial setup. If the banks make money, they get to keep it. The moment they look like losing it, we have to cough up. In Wolf's brilliant summary: 'No industry has a comparable talent for privatising gains and socialising losses.'"
2 comments:
An interesting error in your first sentence: "a global reception". Seems as if someone has cocktail parties on his mind.
Oh, and the Guardian quotation is total crap. Seeking to even out economic cycles by managing the money supply is exactly what central banks are in business for.
Ha, whoops. Don't write blog posts when you're supposed to be writing essays.
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