What happened to the biggest financial crisis in living memory? A year ago we were staring meltdown in the face: now, big City bonuses are back, and the banks, having taken billions of pounds of public money to stay afloat, act as if nothing had happened.
There was talk of the end of capitalism as we know it. Instead, the hubris of the financiers continues unabated. Politicians spoke of re-regulating financial institutions after the post-1980s free-for-all. Now, they speak only of cuts.
As the Archbishop of Canterbury observed on Newsnight (BBC2, 15 September), there has been a “failure to name what was wrong” ”” a lack of repentance. The voices expressing regret, or calling for change, have had little impact on policy. Bonuses may be tweaked, but this will not reform a system that is indifferent to widening inequality and extreme volatility. Serious public attention has yet to turn towards those who have lost their jobs or whose security has been destroyed.
This is not a painless recession; nor is it over yet. But the level of political and moral debate about the crisis is woeful. Why, for instance, is it so hard to have a grown-up disÂcussion about taxation? PoliÂticians are distinctly unconvincing as they try to explain how they will deal with the debt created by bailing out the banks without saying that taxes could, and perhaps should, rise.
By all means let taxes rise…let them rise on banking institutions that took the bailout money. Let them rise on bonuses for those being paid more than 4 times what their employees are paid.
We should have let the banks fail. No company is “too big to fail”. Let them declare bankruptcy and let their creditors be paid first by court decree, rather than the CEOs and other executives that lead them to bankcruptcy. I knew, when AIG had their $200,000 party using TARP funds, that nothing would change for the elitests.
This is the stuff that revolutions are built on. They need to teach history to these folks, or they are doomed to repeat it.
Even the government is not too big too fail. Unfortunately, too many people—politicians in particular—seem to believe we can borrow, spend, and tax our way into prosperity.
In early November, the Faith in Business ministry of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, in partnership with St. George’s House, Windsor, will be hosting a consultation at St. George’s House of two dozen leading financiers, business academics, and business people, to seek to address the question where we go from here in the wake of the economic crisis. This will then feed into a conference being planned prior to Easter 2010, and could very well shape the program and shape of Ridley’s Faith in Business work for many years to come. We believe that this is a time of opportunity if we will be grasp it.