I don’t quite understand how this kind of nonsense gets passed off as rational. It seems like all you need to say is something is ‘unregulated’ and come up with a catchy derogatory term for capitalism (or what passes as capitalism these days) and suddenly you have a rational explanation for what happened? Throw in a few lines about communal responsibilities and amoral business practices and presto! You have completed all the necessary steps in creating a statist economic argument.
It’s quite odd. They seem to have identified the cause of the problem quite precisely:
All of which is true. The crisis was caused by the fact that bankers weren’t playing with their own money but were playing with money they’d pulled out of thin air via the process of fractional reserve banking… and thus essentially the only real money involved was that of savers.
But then they go on to draw the rather contradictory conclusion that this is the result of a lack of regulation. All they really need to do to solve the problem is remove the central bank (i.e. axe a whole bunch of regulations whose sole purpose is to coordinate a parasitic banking cartel).
I imagine conclusions like that wouldn’t wash too well in the mass media though so you can see why they opted for the much more palatible option of increased regulation - using the metaphor that the economy is “out of control” like a car with no one behind the wheel and that all that’s required is to get someone nice and sensisble behind the wheel to “control” it. Besides which, you’re talking about a bunch of European bureaucrats here and they are, by nature, a bunch of socialists with less economic sense than your common squirrel - so they no doubt fully believe what it is they’re saying (god help us).
Yeah, the ‘fictitious capital’ part sounded separate from the whole article. It’s like whoever wrote it had a momentarily lapse of sanity, only to lapse back into superficial dogma a moment later.
Oddly and sadly enough, this is a factual statement. Squirrels have the intelligence to save a few nuts for the winter.
