It is a matter of great importance that we, the people, quit talking and thinking about the “crisis” in the worlds financial system as if it was somehow something to do with us. It only has to do with us to the extent that we believe in it. The “crisis” does not exist, unless we come to understand it as a crisis of what once was.
The new perspective I propose, here comes from someone who has followed the developments in global capital markets with interest and a great deal of schadenfreude ever since the French bank BNP Paribas first signalled there was a problem in August 2007. Since then I have spent a deal of time studying its various aspects, I am able to explain the relationship between collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps in a reasonably coherent way. However, this article will not plumb such mundane depths, since I have finally realized that that the crisis is not a general crisis. The crisis is not mine and it is not yours- it is theirs, let them keep it.
It is a crisis of confidence between pension funds, banks and other speculative investors, who faced with the imperative to deliver increasingly unrealistic levels of profit, turned away from the real world economy and created their own virtual economy on the hard-drives of their computers. This virtual economy depended on sustaining the delusion that hyper-consumers in Europe and the US could both fund and sustain their rate of consumption- a delusion that was fed by abstracting out real world factors such as the consequences of unsustainable levels of natural resource depletion. Therefore, it is fair to say that the crisis is imagined and that for its promoters it is critical that we believe them so that they don.t end up looking stupid.
This does not mean that their virtual world has not generated effects in the real world. We need only look around at the empty newbuild flats gathering dust in our citycentres and the ever lengthening dole queues. Yet, it is also the case that talk of a crisis creates opportunities, for example it gives firms an excuse to cut jobs. Bail-out funds issued to banks are also frequently used to provide large monopolistic firms credit to buy out their credit starved smaller rivals. And as Naomi Klein demonstrates in her book “The Shock Doctrine”, crises have frequently been used to justify the implementation of neoliberal economic policies- that is to say neoliberalism for us, socialism for them. So, yes, their crisis is provoking hardships but mercifully few of us are at deaths door and we still have each other, not to mention our ideas. We don´t even need to knock everything down and start from scratch as the capitalists must- we just need to retain what is useful and dump the rest. For example, it would seem that the Internet is a very useful means of communication whereas the credit ratings agencies like Standard and Poors are easily recognised as uselessly. For example, I heard yesterday that they had downgraded their rating for Russia´s credit which is not really a very nice thing to do. So for a start the recently unemployed can use their time productively by shutting them down, today.
Standard & Poors
20 Canada Sq
London, E14 5LH
This thing that the bankers have imagined and stored on their computers exists in the form of numerical symbols arranged on practically indecipherable balance sheets. The removal of regulations from the mainstream banking sector and the emergence of a shadow banking sector enabled these banks to run what were in fact gigantic Ponzi schemes. Wherever possible, profits were extracted and transferred to tax havens. For example, the $50 billion extracted via the Madoff scam is apparently safely deposited in a Luxembourg account. The expansion of this world of numbers spiralled out of control as transactions became digitised and banks desperately tried to push more credit at consumers. The poor dears even had to lend money to those areas they had redlined since the 1920s. But then BNP Paribas happened and they realized that they had created such a mountain of imaginary money that it would never be possible in a thousand years for the real economy to generate the value to repay it. For this reason alone, we need to forget about the crisis and that means forgetting about all that money we borrowed through unsecured loans.
It is only to be expected that due to the discipline that we have been subjected to all our lives that a mass default sounds a bit extreme. But it must be remembered that we have already decided to dump the credit rating agencies. Since banks have subcontracted all of their information sourcing on prospective loan candidates to these organizations, it doesn´t matter if we default provided that we dump Experian and the like at the same time. Whether or not the debt default is to be extended to secured loans such as mortgages is for others to decide. This would require genuine commitment and solidarity since if enough people throughout the UK resist the repo men and women would not have the resources to deal with it.
Again, these are fairly extreme measures. However, the government has taken steps to underwrite the British banking system that will eventually cause a sovereign currency and debt crisis. For the person in the street this would likely mean the seizure of assets held in bank accounts to repay the debts owed, as was the case in Argentina back in 2002. Hence, it is clear that the government has bought into the crisis wholesale but that does not mean we have to. Sure, the capitalists are sick and dying but that doesn´t mean we have to join them. What they´ve got is only contagious if we believe in it.
It is a crisis of confidence between pension funds, banks and other speculative investors, who faced with the imperative to deliver increasingly unrealistic levels of profit, turned away from the real world economy and created their own virtual economy on the hard-drives of their computers. This virtual economy depended on sustaining the delusion that hyper-consumers in Europe and the US could both fund and sustain their rate of consumption- a delusion that was fed by abstracting out real world factors such as the consequences of unsustainable levels of natural resource depletion. Therefore, it is fair to say that the crisis is imagined and that for its promoters it is critical that we believe them so that they don.t end up looking stupid.
This does not mean that their virtual world has not generated effects in the real world. We need only look around at the empty newbuild flats gathering dust in our citycentres and the ever lengthening dole queues. Yet, it is also the case that talk of a crisis creates opportunities, for example it gives firms an excuse to cut jobs. Bail-out funds issued to banks are also frequently used to provide large monopolistic firms credit to buy out their credit starved smaller rivals. And as Naomi Klein demonstrates in her book “The Shock Doctrine”, crises have frequently been used to justify the implementation of neoliberal economic policies- that is to say neoliberalism for us, socialism for them. So, yes, their crisis is provoking hardships but mercifully few of us are at deaths door and we still have each other, not to mention our ideas. We don´t even need to knock everything down and start from scratch as the capitalists must- we just need to retain what is useful and dump the rest. For example, it would seem that the Internet is a very useful means of communication whereas the credit ratings agencies like Standard and Poors are easily recognised as uselessly. For example, I heard yesterday that they had downgraded their rating for Russia´s credit which is not really a very nice thing to do. So for a start the recently unemployed can use their time productively by shutting them down, today.
Standard & Poors
20 Canada Sq
London, E14 5LH
This thing that the bankers have imagined and stored on their computers exists in the form of numerical symbols arranged on practically indecipherable balance sheets. The removal of regulations from the mainstream banking sector and the emergence of a shadow banking sector enabled these banks to run what were in fact gigantic Ponzi schemes. Wherever possible, profits were extracted and transferred to tax havens. For example, the $50 billion extracted via the Madoff scam is apparently safely deposited in a Luxembourg account. The expansion of this world of numbers spiralled out of control as transactions became digitised and banks desperately tried to push more credit at consumers. The poor dears even had to lend money to those areas they had redlined since the 1920s. But then BNP Paribas happened and they realized that they had created such a mountain of imaginary money that it would never be possible in a thousand years for the real economy to generate the value to repay it. For this reason alone, we need to forget about the crisis and that means forgetting about all that money we borrowed through unsecured loans.
It is only to be expected that due to the discipline that we have been subjected to all our lives that a mass default sounds a bit extreme. But it must be remembered that we have already decided to dump the credit rating agencies. Since banks have subcontracted all of their information sourcing on prospective loan candidates to these organizations, it doesn´t matter if we default provided that we dump Experian and the like at the same time. Whether or not the debt default is to be extended to secured loans such as mortgages is for others to decide. This would require genuine commitment and solidarity since if enough people throughout the UK resist the repo men and women would not have the resources to deal with it.
Again, these are fairly extreme measures. However, the government has taken steps to underwrite the British banking system that will eventually cause a sovereign currency and debt crisis. For the person in the street this would likely mean the seizure of assets held in bank accounts to repay the debts owed, as was the case in Argentina back in 2002. Hence, it is clear that the government has bought into the crisis wholesale but that does not mean we have to. Sure, the capitalists are sick and dying but that doesn´t mean we have to join them. What they´ve got is only contagious if we believe in it.
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