Whilst the Congo has continued its horrific war, the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan go on, and Cholera grips much of Zimbabwe, the talk in most Western parliaments is on finance. Over the last three months the Western financial system has come amazingly close to collapsing entirely. I saw an advertisement the other day, for one of Britains largest banks where the slogan was ‘Officially Britains safest bank’. I stopped to think about this. The implication, which was quite correct, was that some of the banks were not safe. That is entirely correct. Several of the UK’s biggest banks have come close to collapsing entirely, and have not done so only because of vast state aid, with its attendant nationalisation. In the US it was, if anything, worse with old, respected institutions disappearing entirely.
Its no secret why this happened. Whichever way the question is looked at the culprits are clear. Bankers and their thousands of drone-like derivative parasites. These creatures built a structure which was sustained by fictional money, founded on the idea, that values of property and stock would keep going up. Such a constant rise of course could only be sustained by ordinary people putting more and money into the system. Politicians needless to say failed in their duty to take an objective look, and try and put a brake on this.
Now as I write this I cannot help thinking that this sounds something like an event which defined Albanian financial life for a decade or more, with ordinary people being conned by ‘experts’ and politicians into believing that it was safe to keep pumping money into financial institutions without real capitalisation. Romania and Russia also suffered…… Pyramid schemes.
Oh, how Westerners laughed at those poor ignorant Eastern Europeans! Didn’t they realise that you simply cannot expect that money will keep on materialising? Planning your finances on the basis that someone else will keep pumping money in to support your profits is quite hopeless. Really they will just have to learn.
And now look at them. The entire Western financial structure was based on exactly this premise- that money would just keep appearing, that property and stock prices would keep going up. The British were obsessed for ten years or so with house prices, for example. There was a presumption that they would just keep on rising. I think there was a subconscious realisation that it might slow down some time. But it could never fall could it? I have been listening and reading about this remarkable event since it began to unravel about a year ago. I have not seen anything to indicate that we were doing anything significantly different to those Albanians and Romanians a decade ago. We put our trust in a big pyramid scheme, and look what happened. Oh those poor ignorant Westerners!
