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Capitalism Without Conscience Business & Innovation Michel Santi Capitalism without Conscience P.I.E. Peter Lang In this striking new book it is argued that the outraged attitudes of neoliberals and many of those who work in financial institutions with regard to the size of public deficits are far from being genuine and merely mask a desire to dismantle social programs and reduce the size of government. The author makes a persuasive case that neoliberals actively seek the deepening of the financial crisis to support their ideological demands for the shrinking of government expenditure. Indeed, he argues that neoliberals have an interest in encouraging a psychosis about public deficits in the general population to justify the cuts to public spending that will deny services to those same citizens. Michel SANTI is a French-Swiss economist who advises central banks and international institutions. He was formerly head of the trading floor at several Swiss banks and managed his own investment management firm in Geneva. P.I.E. Peter Lang Bruxelles Capitalism without Conscience P.I.E. Peter Lang Bruxelles Bern Berlin Frankfurt am Main New York Oxford Wien Michel SANTI Capitalism without Conscience Series “Business & Innovation” n° 7 Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org D/2013/5678/55 ISSN 2034-5402 • ISBN 978-2-87574-072-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-0352-6316-9 (E-PDF) • DOI 10.3726/978-3-0352-6316-9 Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This publication has been peer reviewed. © Michel Santi, 2013 Peter Lang S.A. International Academic Publishers Brussels www.peterlang.com Contents 1. A Sisyphus Myth for Modern Times................................................ 9 2. Money – Monopoly of the State and the Solution to the Crisis ... 15 3. Public Deficits – A Stick Shift to Revive Economic Activity........ 21 4. Cleaning up the Financial System – A Prerequisite to Reducing Deficits ........................................................................ 29 5. Spend more to Earn more............................................................... 33 6. Deficits Created by Under-exploited Resources ........................... 37 7. Public Deficits and Redistribution of Resources within Society................................................................................... 41 8. National Currency – The Supreme Weapon against Deficits ...... 45 9. Currency War or Attempts at Reflation?...................................... 51 10. Public Debt: Reflection of a Sovereign Nation............................ 57 11. Central Banks, the Ultimate Safeguards against Depression .... 63 12. Europe: How many Divisions? ..................................................... 73 13. A Mercantile Europe..................................................................... 81 14. An Unnecessary Crisis and Completely Avoidable in Europe........................................................................................ 89 15. Cyprus, or the Supreme Contradictions of Neoliberalism......... 97 16. Is Financial Innovation a Curse? ............................................... 101 17. The Moral of History or Immoral History? .............................. 105 18. God’s Work?................................................................................ 111 19. Who do the Rating Agencies Work for?.................................... 115 20. Neoliberalism and Alienation ..................................................... 119 21. The Respect of Uncertainty ........................................................ 125 22. Economic Science or Economic Subjectivity?........................... 131 23. Keynesian Humility or Neoliberal Arrogance?......................... 137 24. Financial Repression and Regulation ........................................ 143 25. Inflation: Servicing Growth and Employment! ........................ 149 26. Regulation: Deconstruct and Stabilize....................................... 153 7 27. Redefining the State – A Lever of Public Health ...................... 159 28. Profit only for the Horizon and only for Ambition................... 163 29. Enshrine and Reevaluate Work ................................................. 169 30. We Need to Free Sisyphus........................................................... 175 8 1 A Sisyphus Myth for Modern Times How could one not remember The Prisoner – the cult British 60s se- ries in which a giant bubble frantically chased the hero played by Patrick McGoohan? These days, our world is in a similar situation – each and every one of us are hostages of bubbles because the world is full of them, and not just from the speculative bubbles that plague our markets. Indeed, there is nothing easier than differentiating the bubble that im- prisons and isolates our politicians, the salary and bonuses bubble for the executive managers of large companies and in the finance world, the youth unemployment bubble, and finally the inequality bubble. Just like the bubble that tirelessly chased the prisoner of our TV series, it would seem that our financial system has been affected by a similar curse because the collapse of a bubble displaces like clockwork the specula- tive fever of another instrument or another market, which then blows up to make another speculative bubble! Indeed, financially we are progres- sively losing control of our lives. It wasn’t for any reason that Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize winner in Economics, questioned whether or not a person’s life nowadays depends on “their income or the education provided by their parents”. Financial deregulation has given rise to almost twenty-five years of banking and stock-market crises. This laissez-faire, having spread throughout the English-speaking world to Continental Europe and reaching Latin America and Asia, is the culmination of a planet that has been progressively plagued by speculative bubbles, which have blown up to some devastating financial, economic and of course human, ef- fects. A non-exhaustive list covering modern times would go from the resounding failure in 1984 of what was then the seventh largest Ameri- can bank – “The Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust” – to the Wall Street Crash in October 1987, to Japan’s Lost Decade, starting in 1990. It would further include the banking crisis in the Scandinavian countries between 1987 and 1991, the violent financial shake-up in Mexico in 1994, the 1997 Asian debacle, the 1998 Russian crash, the implosion of technology stocks from the year 2000, with the grand finale of the current crisis that started with subprime mortgages in the Spring of 2007. The latter remains more persistent than the others in the sense that the brief lull periods have been followed by ever more serious developments since 2007, and in different locations. The current up- 9 Capitalism without Conscience heaval is also vastly more complex than those that came before it, probably due to the liquefaction of financial products, whose sophistica- tion can in no way be compared to the products wielded in the nineties. Nevertheless, the first stage was punctuated by significant crashes, like those of Northern Rock in Great Britain (Fall 2007) and Bear Stearns in the United States (March 2008), existential threats to American mort- gage giants (Fannie Mae et Freddie Mac ending up nationalized) and to AIG, the largest insurance company, ending with one of the most dra- matic exits of its kind with Lehman Brothers. These last ones created unparalleled effects given that they all occurred in Fall 2008. If the orthodox economists and conservative political directors agreed today on austerity being the only remedy to the crisis of the European periphery countries, the streaks of bad luck in countries such as Greece and Spain must therefore be analyzed from a different angle, with the neoliberal circle of influence being greatly less favorable. The diagnostic arising from current public deficits, accused of being respon- sible for all of our sorrows, deliberately avoids the pending questions by only engaging organizational aspects and the consequences of actions being settled with massive public debts. We forget, for example, that even in 2008 Spain respected the Maastricht criteria (the utmost acco- lade of financial orthodox) and that it was considered as an excellent student of the Euro Zone. We also tend to ignore that the Greek crisis was part of a sequence set off by the liberalization of the world-wide financial system, of which the establishing of the Euro Zone formed a supplementary stage. This persistence in laying down the budgetary rigor does nothing more than mask the immense labyrinth of financial innovation. High finance had indeed managed during the 2000s to completely separate the
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