- 20 Sep 2018 04:40
#14947515
Ten Years After The Financial Crisis, The Contagion Has Spread To Democracy Itself
Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson dealt a catastrophic blow to public faith in American institutions.
Today, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner insist they did what they had to under conditions of extreme duress. Mistakes were made, the government’s former top financial overseers acknowledge in a recent piece for The New York Times, but they did ultimately “prevent the collapse of the financial system and avoid another Great Depression.”
Except they didn’t really rescue the banking system. They transformed it into an unaccountable criminal syndicate. In the years since the crash, the biggest Wall Street banks have been caught laundering drug money, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and Cuba, bribing foreign government officials, making illegal campaign contributions to a state regulator and manipulating the market for U.S. government debt. Citibank, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and UBS even pleaded guilty to felonies for manipulating currency markets.
Not a single human being has served a day in jail for any of it.
The financial crisis that reached its climax on that Monday morning 10 years ago was not fundamentally a problem of capital, liquidity or regulation. It was a crisis of democracy that taught middle-class families a grim lesson about who really mattered in American society ― and who didn’t count.
[...]
beginning in the 1950s, the United States increasingly came to understand finance as apolitical ― something best handled by technocratic experts insulated from the passions of a democratic electorate. This idea went by different slogans ― “the liberal consensus,” “the great moderation,” “central bank independence” ― but they all amounted to the same thing: The economy was nonideological. The decisions made by experts tending to the financial machine were were strictly tactical. Any mistakes were a matter of pulling the wrong lever or setting a dial too high.
The financial crisis exploded this myth. “The failures of the crash and the bailout were not technocratic failures,” says University of Georgia law professor Mehrsa Baradaran. “They were about power.”
[...]
Geithner hadn’t set the dials wrong. He had made a choice about who deserved the government’s full attention and how aid would be distributed. And he had done it without any meaningful input from Congress, or even a public debate.
“It led to a breakdown and a lack of trust in institutions,” says Admati. “What we witnessed here … is kind of ominous. It raised a lot of questions about who controls society ― corporations or the elected government.”
[...]
The crisis wasn’t just a breakdown of regulatory oversight. It was a failure of the democratic process, of economic management as an apolitical, technocratic field.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fi ... 32ebf92396
Ten Years After The Financial Crisis, The Contagion Has Spread To Democracy Itself
Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson dealt a catastrophic blow to public faith in American institutions.
Today, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner insist they did what they had to under conditions of extreme duress. Mistakes were made, the government’s former top financial overseers acknowledge in a recent piece for The New York Times, but they did ultimately “prevent the collapse of the financial system and avoid another Great Depression.”
Except they didn’t really rescue the banking system. They transformed it into an unaccountable criminal syndicate. In the years since the crash, the biggest Wall Street banks have been caught laundering drug money, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and Cuba, bribing foreign government officials, making illegal campaign contributions to a state regulator and manipulating the market for U.S. government debt. Citibank, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and UBS even pleaded guilty to felonies for manipulating currency markets.
Not a single human being has served a day in jail for any of it.
The financial crisis that reached its climax on that Monday morning 10 years ago was not fundamentally a problem of capital, liquidity or regulation. It was a crisis of democracy that taught middle-class families a grim lesson about who really mattered in American society ― and who didn’t count.
[...]
beginning in the 1950s, the United States increasingly came to understand finance as apolitical ― something best handled by technocratic experts insulated from the passions of a democratic electorate. This idea went by different slogans ― “the liberal consensus,” “the great moderation,” “central bank independence” ― but they all amounted to the same thing: The economy was nonideological. The decisions made by experts tending to the financial machine were were strictly tactical. Any mistakes were a matter of pulling the wrong lever or setting a dial too high.
The financial crisis exploded this myth. “The failures of the crash and the bailout were not technocratic failures,” says University of Georgia law professor Mehrsa Baradaran. “They were about power.”
[...]
Geithner hadn’t set the dials wrong. He had made a choice about who deserved the government’s full attention and how aid would be distributed. And he had done it without any meaningful input from Congress, or even a public debate.
“It led to a breakdown and a lack of trust in institutions,” says Admati. “What we witnessed here … is kind of ominous. It raised a lot of questions about who controls society ― corporations or the elected government.”
[...]
The crisis wasn’t just a breakdown of regulatory oversight. It was a failure of the democratic process, of economic management as an apolitical, technocratic field.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fi ... 32ebf92396
Socialism without freedom is fascism.