Olly Zanetti: Intelligence crunch
So, the FTSE has climbed back over the 5000 mark for the first time since September 2008. Several major European economies are recording growth and, as the Financial Times notes in last Saturday's special report, big corporate mergers are back and “glasses are clinking again in the City of London.” Well, huh-fucking-rah.
When the shit hit the fan twelve months ago with the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, the financial apocalypse that followed would, we were lead to believe, be a tipping point. The commentators bayed for change, and governments, throwing themselves in the direction of the nearest bandwagon, promised the same. We had been living in financial la-la land, with an economy founded on made up money. We had been deceived, they said, and it was never going to be this way again.
Yet, the world over, government money was piled into the banks – even though it was largely the failures of their practices that had provoked the mess. This was justified by the idea that their parent organisations were too large to fail. At the same time, spurious schemes to boost consumer spending were instigated: VAT was reduced, putting, wait for it, literally pence back into the pockets of consumers; even better, plans was devised to subsidise posh people upgrading their cars. Great.
And so, with all the risk borne by the poor (when governments spend money supporting banks and big businesses and are forced to recoup it, public services like health care or financial support on which the poor disproportionately rely, are inevitably the first to be cut), the status quo – a system which consolidated wealth into the hands of the already wealthy – was saved.
Though, as the FT columnists are keen to point out, the current buoyancy in the markets does not categorically mean we're out of recession, further growth is likely to be not far over the horizon. So we’re sorted, right? However, in all the excitement, it seems this 'change' thing also supposedly in the pipeline, has been dumped by the wayside. Instead, we’ve gone back to business as usual.
So, one year on we - people that is, not governments – need to properly take stock. Do we really want to continue with a system that fleeces the poor, makes money for the rich, and lies barefaced to the populace that wealth will eventually trickle down to everyone? The current economic structure, known as neoliberalism, has been around since the 1970s, during which time the gap between richest and poorest has widened the world over. And yet, we use neoliberalism statistics in the form of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures (i.e. the value of products and services a nation state produces per year) as the measure of our success.
We need a seachange in public attitude in which monetary wealth ceases to be prioritised over other measures like happiness, the environment or equality. And with everyone from crazy French president Nicolas Sarkozy, to British left-leaning economic thinktank, the NEF, pushing for new thinking, it’s about time we started listening.
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