Читать книгу NoNonsense The Money Crisis - Peter Stalker - Страница 8

Foreword

For years, the world of finance had become more and more distant from the ordinary citizen, its dynamics increasingly shrouded by arcane terms such as short-selling, credit default swaps and securitization. With banks pushing credit cards on people, with seeming disregard for their credit history, and offering them mortgages at low interest rates, many were happy to be swept along by the financial flow without really understanding what was going on. When people were advised by bankers that keeping their money in savings accounts was old-fashioned, and they were foregoing tremendous profits by not putting their money in high-interest-bearing accounts that would allow the banks to make money for them, they were all too happy to oblige, accepting their banker’s word that there was no way for them to lose.

In 2008 that fantastic world collapsed, and millions of unsuspecting citizens were dragged to the brink of personal disaster by forces they could not understand. The banks were bailed out with vast sums of taxpayers’ money and the price of the resultant debts has been paid by ordinary people all over the world. Meanwhile the bankers and speculators have not only gone unpunished but have continued to rake in their huge bonuses.

Had Peter Stalker’s concise explanation of the money crisis been available earlier, many people it might have reached may well have been more circumspect in relating to the financial economy. Stalker does an excellent job of deconstructing finance, taking us from the origins of money to the development of banks, on to the world of high finance, and on to the great crash of 2007-2008. Complex terms such as futures and derivatives are explained simply, though there is a limit to understanding the dynamics of some these instruments. Even the US billionaire investor Warren Buffet admitted he could not understand how derivatives worked, eventually calling them ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’.

The author ends this NoNonsense book with many reasonable proposals to regulate finance. This writer would add others. I would abolish the G-20, the Financial Stability Forum, the Basel Process, and the IMF, and support the establishment of a global financial authority under the umbrella of the United Nations. The aim of financial reform must no longer be to allow a few to corner financial profits. It must be, as the author says, to get banking and finance back to its primordial task of connecting savers to the people who need the money.

Walden Bello

waldenbello.org

Author of Capitalism’s Last Stand (Verso, 2013);

Adjunct Professor, State University of New York at Binghamton; Member of the Board, Focus on the Global South.