Blame it on the French

This weekend's edition of 'The Financial Times of London' [26-27 January 2008] has a telling Pym cartoon: An avalache Recession in a billowing cloud of gathering snow is descending menacingly on the annual confab of makers and shakers and blowhards of the world's business, financial, and political community who haven't the slightest klew as to what disaster is awaiting them. Since they are at 6's & 7's to explain the wild roller coaster ride of ups and downs this past week in the world markets, many find an easy excuse by blaming the banal French trader Gerviel at Societe Generale for the percipitious downturn in bourses around the globe! Oh Lord, save us from the damn French! Bless the Yanks for boldly trimming the US prime rate by 75 basis points who rode as they did in the Great War and the second world war to our rescue!
Eyewash! The fault as we in the English speaking world never cease to hear is a line from Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar'--'the fault dear Brutus lies not in the stars but in us', or for the more religiously minded--'you can see the speck of dirt in your neighbour's eye but not the mote in your own'.
Easy money and the scam game of sophist financial instruments known in this world of acronyms as CD's, ABS's, CMBS have come to call for payment. And no one can really meet what's due but central banks who cannot nor won't allow economies to krash. The pain is in the relaxation and frivilous application of regulations and surveillance of the markets, or as in the case of the US, under the stewardship of Robert Rubin now at the troubled CitiGroup of separation of what banks and financial institutions can and cannot do--otherwise known as the Glass Segall[sic] Act, a cornerstone of FDR's New Deal to avoid the pitfalls and traps of the tripwire of a world depression that the Austiran KreditAnstalt tiggered. So although no one is whispering low depression, the naming of recession is coming more and more to the ears of the ordinary rate or taxpayer who for the past 8 years has never had it bad...in the US at least.
The devil may care insouciance of bankers, industrialists, the super rich, the coupon clippers, the venal politicians, the warmongers and rapists of the poor and yes the middling classes has much to own up to. Since this class of vermin is threatened to its foundations, they react in panic [vide Herr Bush's bathroom attendant Bernanke at the Fed!], and crown themselves with laurels of leadership and decisiveness, but they are doing this not for you nor for me but to save their miserable class of bloodsuckers...and in tow, they've a gutless press who entertain but never inform the public at large. And why should they? The media is corporately and oligarchily controlled, and so why should a Murdoch or a General Electric tell us the truth? Yet the man and woman on the street know the score but are so demoralised or lack the will to form political parties and pressure groups to impose their demands. But the coming storm may chasten the rotten stinking fish of the ruling classes! And ain't that a kick in the head?