I am not for one moment suggesting that all banks have been run sensibly in the past, but the very fact that our infinitely greater dependency upon them nowadays was brought about in part by governments (as has already been observed) must surely tempt some people to question the wisdom of such governments coming to own such banks; .
Indeed, ah. But the interesting question is: which is worse, governments doing banking or bankers doing government?
That's abit like asking which is correct - eight plus eight IS fifteen or eight plus eight ARE fifteen (and it is probably not lost on you that either is infinitely more accurate than anything up with which most of the banks could of late have come!)...
it seems to me that the two functions (each in itself a facet of the capitalist system) have become entwined in a most unholy tangle in recent years. I mentioned earlier that lay people can hardly be blamed for failing to understand the nuts & bolts of finance; but it seems that people who should know better came to believe that wealth could be created and managed merely by shuffling figures cleverly enough. They are now learning that the 'wealth' so created is of a different order from 'sound money'. I'm afraid I'm going to continue in my previous pessimistic vein and say that worse is probably to come. Our betters still seem to think there will be some sort of fix involving cutting interest rates; and it seems to me you need only something approaching '11-plus' arithmetic to see that this can only represent a futher resort to funny money. I suppose we can be thankful for small mercies - am I the only one who remembers Jack Straw and his plan to involve the banks as partners in one of the many incarnations of the national ID-card scheme?
Good points all, but governments themselves also include many who are little better than lay people when it comes to economics and finance - yet another reason why it seems folly in the extreme to expect governments to provide guaranteed universal financial panaceas merely by flexing muscles and assuming ownershiop of banks. Cutting interest rates is almost certainly a necessary measure as of right now, although that does not of itself an overall solution make (far from it, in fact); it's hard to implement it when inflation is on the rise but, although this has been the case this year until recently, the desperate retail price competition and substantial falls in oil prices that we are now experiencing suggest that this trend is being reversed, possibly quite severaly, which should at least offer another glimmer of hope to all those suffering from the effects of the current crisis.
At the same time, it's all very well people self-righteously declaring that others shouldn't borrow beyond their means because, whilst such a homily might seem sensible in theory, in practice many people would never be able to afford to purchase their own homes or set up their own businesses unless they did just that; even in a market with plummeting house prices, the former would still not be possible for most people, since salaries, employment prospects and business proft-making usually tend to fall in line with such house price reductions, so few if any can expect to be any better off.
Whilst my observations so far are seemingly pessimistic there is a level on which they offer a glimmer of hope. As a revolutionary socialist I welcome the insight that recent events might offer into the fundamental inability of capitalism to serve the interests of the majority. Even if we overlook the dreadful abject poverty that the global system visits on people less privileged than us there is surely enough local evidence to show the arbitrary and inequitable tendencies of the system. Does anybody, for example, believe in a 'property-owning democracy' any more? Remember this one - the one where those lucky enough to live in decent council houses were given a free gift at the expense of those living in jerry-built boxes that weren't worth owning (not to mention the future generations who would never get social housing as it had all been given to the property-owning democrats)? Perhaps there were enough winners, and relatives of winners, from that little lottery to mask its essentially malign nature; but now we have the further phenomenon of one group of people benefiting from a housing bubble which threatens not only to prejudice the housing prospects of another group but to wipe out their savings into the bargain.
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It is an unalloyed pleaure to be able to exchange civilised thoughts and ideas on this kind of thing with a self-confessed revolutionary socialist when I am so far from being any such thing myself! Whatever the insights to which you refer and which have been usefully highlighted by Richard, I do not believe that capitalism is of necessity fundamentally incapable of serving the interests of the majority; there is no excuse for its abuse by anyone, of course and there can surely be no doubt that the present woes arise largely from such abuses of capitalism, so what those prophecies demonstrate to me is that the rincipal problem with capitalism is the extent to which it can be abused and the often dire and widespread consequences of such abuse. Charlie and Freddie lived in an age without the travel and electronic communication facilities to which we have become accustomed and without the global enmeshing of just about everything including financial issues; their predictions may have been largely accurate but I cannot help but question how useful they can be in practical terms in the present age. Margaret Thatcher's self-made cliché about capitalism being the turning of sixpence into a shilling may indeed be just that, but like some other clichés, it is not without its inherent validity; it is perhaps no wonder, therefore, that even some unrelenting fundamentalist capitalists harbour at least as much distrust of global banking systems and government interference in fiscal activity as some anti-capitalists do. In the meantime, perhaps we could give some consideration to a discussion of the remark ascribed to Warren Buffett and cited in yesterday's edition of
The Sunday Times which seeks to counsel us to accept the advice to be fearful when others are being greedy and greedy when others are being fearful - given the spped of communication nowadays that's probably turned into another sixpence/shilling cliché already. There certainly are people who still believe at least in the property-owning part of a property-owning democracy; the difficulties in getting on the property ladder are, of course, obvious but that hasn't stopped most people from trying to get on it in UK (France has less entrenched a tradition of home ownership, but the French will suffer just as badly from what's going on and at least some of them may well blame the Brits and Yanks for visiting at least some of it on them).
An anecdote by way of closing. On my way to visit a sick relative I follow more or less the same route I took to school thirty-odd years ago. In those days, and right up to last week, there was a tiny prefab on the dock road that served as premises for the local bookie - long since taken over by William Hill. Last week I noticed it had closed - and 200 yards away, where iirc the bakers used to be, the same William Hill has opened a gleaming new shop three times the size of the one that closed. Now it might be coincidence that one of the few industries that thrive in a slump is gambling; or it might not. Revoluition, anyone?
For "bakers" I at first read "bankers"! There's gambling and gambling; whilst I know the kind to which you refer here, I cannot help but regard my own life as a musician as one in which gambling of a somewhat different kind inevitably plays a substantial part. As to "come the revolution", the very fact that so many revolutions have come and gone about which we are now far better placed to read than was once the case and we still have inhabit and function in an inevitably ever-increasing boom-and-bust, plus-ça-chage-plus c'est la même chose demi-monde is surely ample evidence both that none is likely and that, were there to be one, it would make no long-term difference; sorry to sound cynical, but...
