Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ewzimm 3996 days ago
This seems like a bit of a strawman version of the Greek crisis in relation to capitalism, attributing to human failures actions which were a result of a complex series of coercive acts. The worldwide financial crisis was created because of strong incentives on financial institutions to game the system for profit. This led to a worldwide breakdown of economies, but nations were not equally able to respond with economic stimuli. The Greeks were in a particularly bad situation because of a wealthy class which has been able to avoid taxation. Corrupt government also played a very important part in the process.

But the underlying cause of the crisis was the fact that the rules of capitalism have the property of being exploitable by large financial institutions unless they are under strict public oversight, and even this has been shown to be ineffective. Rational self-interest by banks which damaged the world economy forced Greece into a series of austerity measures which progressively weakened their economy and their ability to pay their debts, locking them into a series of pressure to take yet more loans under terms which lowered their ability to repay them. The logical end of this was their most recent deal which surrendered national sovereignty over their economy.

So what we see from this example is that capitalism has shifted most of the power to those most able to manipulate it, financial institutions, and led to the degredation of national sovereignty. The extreme end of this scenario would be a world without any nations controlled entirely by banks, but I doubt we will get to that point before alternative models take hold, as very few people want to live in that kind of world.

1 comments

More specifically, nations are captured by their SIFI banks and used as a front to coopt the power of sovereigns.