The transition from economic anarchy to a rà ©gime which deliberately aims at controlling and directing economic forces in the interest of social justice and social stability, will present enormous difficulties both technical and political. I suggest, nevertheless, that the true destiny of New Liberalism is to seek their solution.
Second is that an awareness of political economy simply must inform any attempt to suggest what policies, protocols, problems, or prospects are important or necessary. THC has repeatedly made this point. Perhaps another plea from Harvard might emphasize this contention in a firm enough fashion.
When the history of the current financial crisis comes to be written, the battle of the index entries will surely be won by central bankers not politicians. The name Bernanke will appear on many more pages than Bush, King more often than Brown, and Trichet will trump even Sarkozy. Most of the time, central banks strive to be dull places; the people who run them relish their obscurity. But when crisis strikes, the limelight shines.
If this is not stringent enough, then the potency of Mr. Higham's 'I-was-there' incision ought to sway even the most blindly anti-idelogical ideologist. He shows that, when one has access to data, every seeming technocratic economic output results from complex measures of class interest, financial greed, and political pirateering. He is speaking of Hjalmar Schact, whose supposed centrism made him ideal as Germany's central banker, at least until he threw himself wholeheartedly behind the little mustachioed Austrian corporal with a bug up his behind about Jewish folks.
Sensing Adolf Hitler's lust for war and conquest, Schacht, even before Hitler rose to power in the Reichstag, pushed for an institution that would retain channels of communication and collusion between the world's financial leaders even in the event of an international conflict. It was written into the Bank's charter, concurred in by the respective governments, that the BIS should be immune from seizure, closure, or censure, whether or not its owners were at war. These owners included the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York (among whose directors were Harold S. Vanderbilt and Wendell Willkie), the Bank of England, the Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other central banks.
Third is that hidden agendas, concerning empire and profit and market-predominance at the very least, simply must be something that those who would understand these matters seek to bring to light. Every single honest accounting of such matters as these importunes that onlookers cut through camouflage to find such always-extant concrete expressions of bias and greed and 'lust' for power.
Even so stalwart a sycophant for capital as Liaquat Ahamed, the broker who penned Lords of Finance: 1929, the Great Depression, and the Bankers Who Broke The World, notes this tendency. He intersperses literally every section of his addictively readable tome with the guidelines that hid away behind the surface pronouncements , often referencing the sacred anonymity of such weird monied men as Montagu Norman, head of the Bank of England, to further exemplify the hidden agenda.
Even so viscerally bourgeois a publication as the London Times , in its adulatory review of Ahamed's volume, cannot stay away from the behind-the-scenes plotting that rules the surface. Such is so much the case that denial is an awful sort of folly.
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