The rot may have happened in more extremely unregulated financial markets like New York and London, but Paris and Frankfurt are not immune, not by any stretch of the imagination, because even the best front-end and back-end risk management and control systems can contain the damage that the system inevitably provokes via speculative bubbles which have been with us as long as their has been a bourgeoisie and the expression, via markets, of their economic interests.
We give unmerited cover to neo-liberalism in particular, and liberalism in general, by insisting there is a difference between a "financial" economy and the "real" economy. And even in a properly constituted socialist economy, command or otherwise, one sees cadres and decision makers who determine credit and capital allocation, who could not really be called anything else but financial analysts when observed in the present systems doing to much damage to workers today. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
Having more socialism, regulation or whatever might well have the opposite effect. In for example Sweden, the stagnation did not begin with deregulation but with overregulation, which broke the back of the almost constant century-long rocket development of my country, between 1870-1970, perfectly exemplified by how both left and right politicians jointly destroyed the most high-tech industry we had.
It took a quarter of a century to deal with the fallout and get back on track. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I much prefer the capital allocation of the French technocats after WWII than the current one. They took pride in building systems that worked, not just in accumulating money.
Finance distorts the incentives by allowing selfish personal ones to be fulfilled via macroeconomic tools. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Happy New Year to you too, by the way! Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
We give unmerited cover to neo-liberalism in particular, and liberalism in general, by insisting there is a difference between a "financial" economy and the "real" economy.
There is a difference.
The financial economy is an intermediary layer between producers and consumers.
The big change is the emergence of direct "Peer to peer" connections. This is about to change the game IMHO and will disintermediate what is now an unnecessary layer. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
The requirement is still there for providers of financial services. But as value adding partners, not as value extracting middlemen.
It's a market approach: but it's a market operating on a "Not for Loss" basis, rather than "For Profit". There is no "Profit" and no "Loss" within a partnership framework. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
