Ann Pettifor

Political leaders – Stand up to the bankers, you have only your chains to lose

Markets react rationally to austerity

The piece below was posted on the “Left Foot Forward” website on Monday, 8th August, 2011

“It is important that we understand the events of last week not as a new outbreak of crisis, but as a continuation of the banking crisis that first came to the public’s attention in 2007-9.

It is now just four years since the ‘debtonation’ on 9 August, 2007, when banks lost confidence in the viability of other banks, and stopped lending to each other. After a year when the fuse of huge debts endured a ‘slow burn’, the 2008 Lehman bankruptcy exploded the financial system and threatened systemic failure.

Without consulting taxpayers, central bankers and politicians rushed to the aid of bankrupt financiers. Private losses were socialised, and attempts at recovery were nursed by central bankers who pushed interest rates down to very low levels.  Thanks to the weakness of politicians and central bankers this nationalisation of private losses was offered almost unconditionally to an immensely wealthy, and unaccountable elite.

Since then politicians and central bankers, the IMF, the ECB and the EU have left the finance sector free to engage in reckless lending and speculation. Instead of disciplining financiers, they have disciplined taxpayers, and used ‘austerity’ policies to force the broader economy to bow to the will of an extremely fragile finance sector.  The purpose of ‘austerity’ we have been told, by e.g. the ECB’s Mr Trichet is to shore up the public finances, and prepare for further stages in the financial crisis, when bankers need to be bailed out again.

Only it has not quite turned out that way.

Because the result of ‘austerity’ is now clear for all to see. Far from shoring up the public finances across western economies it has weakened public finances.  As economies have faltered, tax revenues have fallen and welfare payments have rocketed. This added to the immense liabilities of the bank bail-outs, has of course strained government deficits.

And because of the policy of austerity, the global economy is weakening. Economic activity and investment has not recovered since 2009. Unemployment and insolvencies in the EU are rising and consumers are snapping their purses shut. If the US now starts cutting back further on government investment, this will lead to a further weakening of the global economy. That much is now clear for all to see.

While their disastrous impact on economic activity and employment is felt across the US and the Eurozone, austerity policies impact first and most forcefully on the poorest, weakest economies: Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

As a result, they are the first to fail the challenge of meeting foreign debt repayment obligations. These debts are the consequence of unwise, if not reckless lending and borrowing that in some cases was fraudulent. The lenders were private banks in Germany, France and the UK.  The consequence of the threat of non-payment of loans is disastrous for these private banks. Why? Because many of them are effectively insolvent already, and any further damage to their balance sheets could cause shareholders and investors to lose confidence, and lead to bankruptcy.

Hence the panic in last week’s financial markets. Bankers can’t wait for EU leaders to consult with parliaments in September on the size of taxpayer resources that must now be poured into yet another taxpayer-backed bail-out fund for the wealthy – the European Financial Stability Facility. Their banks are too fragile. They are too close to bankruptcy.

So markets repeated the blackmail they applied on 29 September, 2009, when the US Congress appeared to baulk at providing the private banking system with $750 billion of taxpayer funds (TARP).They tried hard to frighten the hell out of EU politicians on holiday.

In the process millions of investors were hurt, and billions of pounds were wiped off the value of e.g. pension funds and other investments.

That – for you and me – is the bad news.

The good news is this. Something else happened last week. It gradually began to dawn on the British and European establishment that the so-called “recovery” – based as it is on financial speculation (in e.g. food and oil) and not investment in real, socially useful economic activity – is illusory.

Second, it dawned on our estimable leaders that the financial chaos created by liberalised, de-regulated finance has not been cleared up. Far from it. Despite all the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the banking system – the private banking system is still close to insolvency.

Finally, and this is the most hopeful development: it finally dawned on at least the British establishment that “austerity” is not all it is cooked up to be. Of course we had warned of this, but ideologues in the Tea Party, the Coalition and the ECB prevailed over more rational arguments.

But now certain luminaries in our media are beginning to recognise that cuts in US government spending really will plunge the world back into recession, or even depression. Just as we at PRIME predicted. Cutting government spending at a time of financial fragility and economic weakness is unsound economics.

While recognition of this is a hopeful development, it is overshadowed by the influence of powerful bankers that persist in backing Tea Party ideologues: and who maintain their attacks on the taxpayer hand that has so sumptuously fed them.

Last week Bob Diamond, the head of Barclays, called for UK taxpayers to swallow more doses of the poisonous ‘austerity’. Stephen Hester of RBS flatly denied that banks faced “Armageddon” and instead blamed governments/taxpayers for the crisis.

It is time for our elected leaders to call the bankers’ bluff. It is possible, desirable even, to break loose from the cords that yoke the taxpayers of Britain and the rest of Europe to the interests of an immensely wealthy, greedy and stupid financial elite

So we call on our political leaders, to stand up to bankers. After all, dear leaders, you have only your chains to lose.

 

0 Shares

5 thoughts on “Political leaders – Stand up to the bankers, you have only your chains to lose”

  1. People laughed at Gordon Brown in 2008/2009 when he jetted round the world to help solve the financial crisis. They will not be laughing now, when they realise there does not seem to be any global leader with his global grasp of the situation there now.

    He was not credited with his chairmanship of the key International Financial and Monetary Committee of the IMF from 1999 to 2007. This gave him an insight not just into the problems of the developed world, with over-heated banks, but also of developing countries, with over-heated manufacturing industries.

    The problem now for the developed world is that banking is one of our key industries. We cannot expect banking to be cut back, and manufacturing to take up the slack, as our manufacturing has been off-shored to the developing world. This is why the global framework of the G20 is so important, as Gordon Brown realised. The problems are similar to the 1930’s, but because of the shape of the current world economy the solutions need to be different.

  2. What you are saying is correct but in my view the time for more of spending is finished. Yes they did socialise the loses and to such a degree that countries are now bankrupt in stead of banks. What should have happened was the banks should have been allowed to fail.

    As far as Europe goes who picks up the tab on the next bailout, Germany? I doubt it. The UK with it’s own money can print and probably will, but the EU stuck with the euro and a 2 speed economy I don’t see a fix.
    The worst part from my view is that all this mismanagement and rampant speculation has gone unpunished,in fact it’s been rewarded.
    The entire system has been poisoned since they late 70’s and has been regularly injected with low interest rates and stimulus packages just to keep this giant ponzi going. Let the lot die abolish the debt and see if we can come up with a system that’s more equitable

  3. Not only stand up to Bankers, but how about stand up to the markets? I am tired of hearing politicians justify cuts and their lack of coherent economic policy by saying that the success of their actions will be as judged by the markets. The market surely consists of people who are unelected, do not act in the best interests of the majority, have been known to engineer crises in order to bring about the volatile conditions in which they can maximise profits for the few at the expense of chaos and crises for the many. Why should our elected representatives have to satisfy such monstrous mechanisms as markets. Surely the markets should satisfy us, not the other way round. And to achieve that our elected representatives should seek to persuade governments around the globe that they should all put in place legal safeguards to limit and control the power of the markets worldwide. And to herald this new dawn how about starting by cancelling all the deficits and starting from a clean sheet around the world?

  4. I like this post a lot. The trouble with it is… do they think of it as chains? Do you really think they want to behave differently?

    Or are they doing precisely what they were hired to do?

  5. So refreshing to hear you speak tonight on the Al Jazeera programme. This is the first time I had heard a clear analysis of the real problem with the IMF and our economies.

    Thank you

Leave a Reply to Clive Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.