A Last Chance
Posted by John Malloy on 11/06/2008
Leaders meet in Washington on 15 November for a summit to attempt to resuscitate a world finance system currently on life support. Paul Mason looks at what went wrong…
The giant video screen at 745 Seventh Avenue, in Manhattan, is still lit up: only now, instead of the old Lehman Brothers promo, with its tossing oceans and desert sunsets, it projects the ice-blue bling of Barclays Capital, five-storeys high. The problem is, though the lights are still on for finance capital, ideologically there’s nobody home.
Lehman’s bankruptcy marked the end of a 20-year experiment in financial deregulation. But it was Alan Greenspan’s congressional testimony, a month later, that marked the collapse of something bigger: the neoliberal ideology that has underpinned it all.
It was Greenspan who had begun ripping away restrictions on financial speculation and investment banking in 1987. Last month, he said: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact . . . Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shock and disbelief.”
The belief in self-interest as the guiding principle of commerce is as old as Adam Smith. What happened with the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism was something different: the principle of rational self-interest was elevated to replace regulation and the state. Selfishness became a virtue. Inspired by Ayn Rand’s credo – “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” – the giants of global finance revelled in amoralism. Morgan Stanley boss John Mack’s legendary trading-floor motto – “There’s blood in the water, let’s go kill somebody” – sums up the era.
But the theory was flawed. Instead of safeguarding the property of shareholders, self-regulation drove the system to the point of collapse. Trillions of dollars worth of capital has been destroyed. “My view of the range of dispersion of outcomes has been shaken,” Greenspan conceded. That’s a logical response when the range of outcomes is clustered around the collapse of the savings system, the evaporation of global credit and the bankruptcy of most banks.
But selfishness was not the only tenet of neo-liberalism. Any definition of the term would include: a belief in the market as the only guarantor of prosperity and democracy; the futility of state intervention in pursuit of social justice; the creative destruction of cherished institutions and stable communities; the shrinkage of the state to regulatory functions only, and then as minimal as possible.
And the problem for the G20 leaders who will assemble at the Washington summit on 15 Nov ember is this: every single one of them has, to a greater or lesser extent, bought into the neoliberal ideology. It has dictated the direction of travel even in economies such as Brazil, India, Indonesia and China, classified as “mostly unfree” on the neoliberal league table.
The summit’s most pressing task is to come up with a co-ordinated crisis response: for all the rhetoric, this is a firefighting operation not a second Bretton Woods. In the end, the route to a Bretton Woods-style settlement may be impassable for the weakened, multi-polar capitalism represented by the G20. But, even to begin that journey, there must be an honest reckoning with neoliberalism.
An ideology does three things: it justifies the economic dominance of a ruling group; it is transmitted through that group’s control of the media and education; and it describes the experience of millions of people accurately enough for them to accept it as truth. But it does not have to be logical. For this reason, picking logical flaws in neoliberalism has been an exercise with diminishing returns.
For example, Milton Friedman’s assertion that free-market capitalism and democracy are mutually reinforcing always looked a non-sequitur after he hotfooted it to Chile in 1975, personally urging General Pinochet to inflict a neoliberal economic “shock”, even as the secret police were administering electric shocks to the genitals of oppositionists. But his theories continued to inspire policymakers.
Instead of logic, any balance sheet of neoliberalism has to begin from its outcomes. I will list five negative outcomes for countries following the Anglo-Saxon model:
In the first place, rising inequality. Between 1947 and 1973 the income of the poorest fifth of US families grew 116 per cent, higher than any other group. From 1974 to 2004 it grew by just 2.8 per cent. In the UK, the share of national income received by the bottom 10 per cent fell from 4.2 per cent in 1979 to 2.7 per cent in 2002.
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