Communism: the Saviour of the US Economy

The president looks blankly at his nervous economic advisors. He wants to know how bad the financial crisis is. The men from the treasury glance at each other for morale support. Phrases like “meltdown” and “cataclysmic destruction of western economies” are bandied about. Out in the real world, the hero is running through deserted streets, his high-heeled love-interest in tow. As they stumble through rubble, financial institutions literally crumble around them. I wake up and realise it was only a nightmare.

Of course, we are going through economic turmoil we have not seen in our collective living memory, but it’s going to be ok. Honestly. George Bush is pumping almost incalculable amounts of tax-payers money into these long standing financial institutions. National banks around the world are throwing into global economies, wads of cash as if they were nothing more than bits of paper.

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, allowed a small bank that invested well during the times of hedonistic loan agreements, to buy HBOS bank, the UK’s largest mortgage provider: A bank that didn’t behave responsibly with its customer’s money when times were good.

One would have thought that such actions by our leaders and experienced financial institutions would kill off any concerns that the world as we know it from falling around our ears, but the fact is – such actions have made no difference to our deep concerns. Even the most optimistic speculators believe the worst is yet to come.

So why aren’t all these safety measures making a difference? Well, there is the obvious fact that these politicians and financiers are the fat cats and their government cronies who got us into this mess in the first place.

There is also the realisation that successive governments on both sides of the Atlantic have a tradition of knee-jerk reactionary policy making. In the 1980s the Republicans and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives backed Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden under an ill-thought through policy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, without spending a moment’s worth of analysis on possible consequences of such a strategy.

In the UK, the rail industry was quickly privatised in a bid to save money in such a fashion that the British taxpayer now pays more in rail subsidies than it did when the state owned the railways. Of course, the British people get nothing of the huge profits the transport moguls enjoy. Roads, prisons, fuel and crime have all suffered from short-term, short-sighted policies. How can we believe this current financial crisis has benefited from the luxury of a calmly approached risk assessment? There has hardly been time to report the loss of one bank before another was seen teetering on the brink.