If you, like me, have watched the paroxysms and ‘o’er vaulting’ the leaders of the world have been going through since the ‘banking crisis’ hit, from the outside you could be forgiven for wondering what exactly maintains this crisis. As countries slide down the scale of viability you could be forgiven for asking, just how much did the bankers lose?
The answers are not clear because whilst the bankers did lose thousands of millions what we are told is that banks have money to lend but won’t lend it, in other words that this crisis is driven by the sentiment of financial advisers extraordinary. That Europe cannot dig itself out of the hole this lack of trust has created without China and America, that America has had to hock its children for the next twenty years to maintain its commercial clout, that Turkey is in better shape financially than the UK.
The bankers did not lose enough money to force countries into bankruptcy. And no mere sentiment would ever be allowed to threaten and entire continent. What seems to have happened, and what is really reprehensible, is that governments, in their entirety, promoted prosperity as the beneficiary of capitalism by spending money that did not exist.
Governments artificially inflated GDP for two decades creating artificial prosperity. Hubris we will all be paying for if we are lucky, with reduced wealth for a generation and if we are unlucky in wars over vital resources. Parliaments are vulnerable because of this and the men and women who lead us to it, along with their baking sons and daughters, should be on trial.