Finanskrisen/The Great Recession
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Filosofen Karl Popper myntade en gång uttrycket ”stegvis social ingenjörskonst”, piecemeal social engineering, med vilket han menade det slags projekt som människan stegvis kan överblicka, hantera följderna av, och till nöds backa från.
Detta till skillnad från något han kallade utopisk social ingenjörskonst och som han starkt varnade för.
Vad slags ingenjörskonst som euron till sist visar sig vara produkten av ligger förhoppningsvis fortfarande i de europeiska nationernas händer. Vad de gemensamt har byggt upp bör de rimligen också gemensamt kunna reparera och restaurera.
Var finns utgången? är annars en bra fråga som helst bör ställas innan man går in.
Var är utgången ur EMU?
Göran Rosenberg, kolumn DN 23/7 2010
"The total gross value of interventions on behalf of banks has been $14,000bn.
This is state capitalism."
Victory in the cold war was a start as well as an ending
In the case of this crisis, the failure lies not so much with the market system as a whole,
but with defects in the world’s financial and monetary systems.
Martin Wolf, FT November 10 2009
For those born, like me, shortly after the second world war, the cold war was the defining intellectual and political struggle of our lifetimes. With the collapse of communism ended a catastrophic epoch of millenarian politics and the delusion of a rationally planned economy. The freedom offered by democracy and the prosperity supplied by markets won. The fact that communism expired not with a bang, but with a whimper, we owe largely to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yet 2009 is a sobering year from which to look back. A year ago, capitalism careered over a cliff. With vast effort, states have put it back on the road. According to Piergiorgio Alessandri and Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England, in a superb new paper, the total gross value of interventions on behalf of banks has been $14,000bn (€9,400bn, £8,400bn). This is state capitalism.
Yet the crisis brings important lessons. The philosopher Karl Popper laid down the right approach. He distinguished the “piecemeal social engineering” intended to ameliorate specific ills from the “utopian social engineering” intended to transform society in its entirety – an aim that, in practice, “has led only to the use of violence in place of reason”.
The reformer must identify the cause of the malady before attempting treatment. In the case of this crisis, the failure lies not so much with the market system as a whole, but with defects in the world’s financial and monetary systems.
Some of these failings are inescapable. The future is inherently uncertain. Big mistakes will be made. Where prevailing paradigms lead to risk-taking on an excessive scale, corrections are likely to be brutal.
Where risk-taking involves large-scale leveraging of the balance sheets of the financial sector, corrections are likely to mean a collapse in both intermediation and the economy. Should collapse not be prevented, the consequences may, history tells us, be dramatic.
1968 - Tänk om dom fått igenom sina förslag
Många 68-or försöker skratta bort sina felsteg. Alla har väl varit unga och radikala, ha, ha, ha.
I Kambodja skrattar man inte åt sådana skämt. Inte heller i Kina, där man upplevt Kulturrevolutionen. Inte heller i Östeuropa.