The sound and fury of the pigmen, signifying nothing.
Have a pleasant evening.
Here is an excerpt from a recent talk by Jamie Galbraith:
"Five years ago when the great financial crisis broke into public view, those who claimed falsely that no one could have predicted it also claimed that our economies would recover. Standard forecasts foretold rapid growth and high employment within five years. Banks in America would start lending again. Confidence would return in Europe.
Those of us who said no, that there would be no return to normal, were for the most part ignored. Yesterday we heard Professor Nouriel Roubini give a magisterial and very high speed tour of the world situation making it clear of course that the promised recovery has not occurred. But if Nouriel is Sir Isaiah Berlin’s fox, who knows many things, let me try this morning to be the hedgehog who knows one big thing, and that one big thing is that what we are experiencing is a single, unified, global crisis of the economy and of the financial system.
It is not a cluster of distinct and separated events; a subprime crisis in the United States; a public debt crisis in Greece; a bank crisis in Iceland; a real estate bust in Ireland and Spain; nor are there distinct U.S. and European crises, nor can the financial be separated from the real, nor is Germany a country to which crisis has not yet come with the suggestion that there might be some separate way out. There is one crisis, only one crisis, a deeply interconnected crisis of the world system. This crisis has, I think, three deep sources going back not twenty years but forty years to the early 1970s and the end of what we sometimes call the “golden age,” the “glorious thirty” years in the immediate aftermath of the second World War...
And the third great source of our problem is ideological. It is the neo-liberal idea that has given us deregulation and de-supervision; that has given us the notion that markets can function on their own without breaking down or blowing up. It is this notion as applied especially to finance.
This is the great illusion of the last generation, and it fostered a form of economic growth that was intrinsically unstable and unsustainable. Why? Because it was based on declining standards for loans and on lax accounting of the proceeds of those loans. Or to put it in simple terms, it was based upon financial fraud, on the most massive wave of financial fraud that the world has ever seen.
And the world has seen a lot of financial fraud. It was known to be such to the lenders at the time. This was true of housing loans in the United States made by the tens of millions that were known to the lenders as “liar’s loans,” as “ninja loans,” no income, no job, no assets; as “neutron loans” destined to explode leaving the building intact but destroying the people. This was known at the time. These were loans that had to be refinanced or they would default..."
Read the entire speech here.
