The Coming Change

I believe the world of Capitalism as we know it is dying. I do not mean Capitalism is dying, for Capitalism is a concept which can put on a coat of many colors; all ideas changes and evolve. I mean Capitalism as we know it, the Exploitation Capitalism which is divorced from Community and Morality is dying.

What does that mean? Briefly, any form of Capitalism which creates a disaster comparable to the fiscal crisis starting in 2008 in the USA, followed soon thereafter by Europe, is a Capitalism that recognizes no network of bonds and commitments to a community, a community being an extended group that possesses a common moral logic.

Look at Reuter's this morning:

There Is No Sovereign Debt Crisis In Europe
http://blogs.reuters.com/macroscope/2013/05/15/there-is-no-sovereign-debt-crisis-in-europe/

Evidence that Europe’s austerity policies are not working was in ample supply this morning. The euro zone as a whole is now in its longest recession since the start of monetary union. France has succumbed to the region’s retrenchment. Italy’s GDP slump is now the lengthiest on record. And Greece, still in depression, shrank another 5.3 percent in the first quarter.

To understand why this is happening, Brown University professor Mark Blyth says it is necessary to forget everything you think you know about the euro zone crisis. The monetary union’s troubles are not, as often depicted, the result of runaway spending by bloated, profligate states that are finally being forced to pay the piper. Instead, argues Blyth, it is merely a sequel to the U.S. financial meltdown that started, like its American counterpart, with dangerously-indebted risk-taking on the part of a super-sized banking sector...

In other words, revisit the sources of the hit-and-run and see again that it was the recklessness of Exploitative Capitalism that caused the accident. Yet, to amend this, many are saying that not only should the common people pay once for the banks, but they should pay twice, thrice, and four times and more for the folly of the financial and political elites!

In a new book entitled “Austerity: The history of a dangerous idea,” Blythe writes that sovereign budgets have come under strain primarily because taxpayers of various nations have been forced to shoulder the burden of failed banking systems.

The way austerity is being represented by both politicians and the media – as the payback for something called the ‘sovereign debt crisis,’ supposedly brought on by states that apparently ‘spent too much’ – is a quite fundamental misrepresentation of the facts. These problems, including the crisis in the bond markets, started with the banks and will end with the banks. The current mess is not a sovereign debt crisis generated by excessive spending for anyone except the Greeks. For everyone else, the problem is the banks that sovereigns have to take responsibility for, especially in the euro zone. That we call it a ‘sovereign debt crisis’ suggests a very interesting politics of ’bait and switch’ at play.

So why all the misunderstanding? Why has the crisis become conflated with a government debt problem in the public imagination? According to Blythe, this is a convenient way for Wall Street to again saddle the state with massive banking sector losses.

The cost of bailing, recapitalizing, and otherwise saving the global banking system has been, depending on how you count it, between 3 and 13 trillion dollars. Most of that ended up on the balance sheets of governments as they absorb the costs of the bust, which is why we mistakenly call this a sovereign debt crisis when in fact it is a transmuted and well-camouflaged banking crisis.

We are witnessing the birth pains of the Capitalism of the future, but the old first-born Capitalism will fight the arrival of a new heir on the scene.

--