When money's being made, the denizens of the financial system are responsible. In a downturn, it's the collective 'we'
Jeremy Seabrook
guardian.co.uk
Monday September 15 2008 16:20 BST
How extraordinary it is, that representatives of the great names in global finance that have recently bitten the dust were lately paraded on television as the supreme experts on the global economy. Until today, few serious programmes on TV about the financial outlook were complete without some hireling from Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch pontificating on what governments should do, on how to ease the tax burden, on ensuring the health of the economy, on the fundamental soundness of the system, and so on ...
Attempts to assimilate the workings of capitalism to the equivalent of a natural phenomenon have been so successful that even the words used to describe the present "downturn" borrow a lustre from primeval nature: we hear of mortgage famine, credit drought, floods of bankruptcies, contagious insolvencies, epidemics of repossessions: the language evokes biblical plagues and last days. Is not nature red in tooth and claw? Or was that capitalism? ...
All this is of course, calculated to ensure that debate is securely contained within the fraying parameters of a capitalism to which no alternatives now exist. It would not do for people to become too inquisitive about the nature of a system which has been so closely identified in recent years with human nature itself. The fiction must be maintained, at all costs, that there is no other way of ordering our affairs. We are like medieval cartographers, beyond the boundaries of whose known world lay only monsters and dragons ...
Capitalism, which had coyly hidden itself beneath the voluminous drapery of prosperity and luxury, now thrusts out its face from the faded finery to look once more on a "real world" it has laid waste – on lives ruined, security trashed and hope trampled. A generation brought up to believe that affluence represents some existential truth about our lives will, inevitably, be disoriented and angry. If the coming impoverishment brings about an increase in violence, crime, racism and breakdown, who will bear those costs, who will bail out a bankrupt society? Certainly not the makers of fortunes whose activities we were until recently expected to admire as the acts of heroes and demi-gods.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/15/creditcrunch.economy
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