You remember that trader on BBC? “The Collapse is Coming and Goldman Sachs Rules The World” Now read that:

You remember that fellow trader Alessio Rastani, whose interview on the BBC went viral because he was claiming that “The Collapse is Coming and Goldman Sachs Rules The World”?

And before that, you remember the origin of the financial crisis? The call for public money to save the private financial institutions? The privatisation of profits and socialisation of debts?

Well, it has not damaged the rating of bankers compared to politicians. Once at the root of the crisis, bankers are now portrayed as the only chance to get us out of it. And if they are not ruling the world yet, the Goldman Sachs boys are definitively one step closer to having a big say in Europe…

In a desperate attempt to appease ‘the Market’, European countries are falling like dominoes and accepting to be ruled by governments made of bankers introduced as ‘academics’. Prime Ministers in Greece and Italy are actually former Goldman Sachs employees. So is the Governor of the European Central Bank.

We should remember that Goldman Sachs played a leading role using swaps to hide the public debts in European countries. We should also remember that Goldman Sachs is on the Too Big Too Fail list.

The media used to call the US administration Government Sachs. This is not a sensationalised conspiracy theory, this is called ‘conflict of interests’. In the US as in Europe, how can you possibly expect bankers to regulate the financial markets? You may as well ask the animals to run the zoo, or the addicts to takeover the drug rehab centre!

The new Greek Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos, was the Governor of the Greek Central Bank during the move from the Drachma to the Euro, which led his country close to bankruptcy. Mario Monti, the Italian Head of Government is the former ‘European Commissioner for Internal Market, Financial Services and Financial Integration, Customs and Taxation‘ and thus promoted deregulation policies, which played a key role in the financial crisis. As for Mario Braghi, the ECB governor, he was elected in 2006 Chairman of the Financial Stability Forum, which became Financial Stability Board in spring 2009.

More, Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister, rejected politicians from is brand new government to avoid ‘arguments’.. he meant ‘politics’ – because those arguments have a name: it’s called Parliamentary Democracy -.

The agenda is pretty clear: privatization. This is what is happening elsewhere, the UK National Health Service is under privatization, Greece is privatizing its infrastructures, Spain and Ireland are going for it too.

In addition, European Governments will cut all public spending. The European answer to the debt crisis is a recession, which will make the crisis last as sure as it did under Edgar Hoover  until Roosevelt decided to relaunch US government spending. So long for the ‘countercyclical’ policies. The shock doctrine described by Naomi Klein is now in full stream. It might be good from a US geopolitical point of view (see the Economist on this) to counter the rise of China but what about the 99%’s living standards? What about Europe?

{ NKN, Paris – leLaissezFaire, Sydney – 17 November 2011 }

Alessio Rastani:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lqN3amj6AcE
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/28/world/europe/uk-trader-viral/

First published on http://www.theotherschoolofeconomics.org/?p=3050