About 5 000 unemployed people queue to apply for one of 2Â 000 jobs outside City Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1930 during the Great Depression. Photograph: AP
Abby Cohen is a doyen of Wall Street. ”You know who she is,” whispered the woman next to me. ”When she talks the markets react.” Maybe. But the markets were not so pliable of late. There was more spin in the Cohen-spiel than a Shane Warne googly; Goldman Sachs’s senior analyst knew she was talking to a group of senior business leaders from around the world (plus me), and she was trying to bludgeon some confidence into the room.
Listening to her talk about the financial markets’ crisis last week in New York underlined just how desperate the bankers are. The carnage has been fascinating and profoundly damaging to the interests of ordinary working people throughout the world. California barely had enough cash to pay its public servants. For a measly (though at the time no doubt alluring) extra quarter of a percent of interest, the United Kingdom’s Kent County Council had invested in Iceland; now the Iceland banks have gone to the wall and Kent is cutting public services.
Nor is the middle class immune. The Michigan professor with whom I was working and who is close to retirement had lost $250Â 000 of his pension annuity in a week. Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue had sold out of its stock of books on the Great Depression. The similarities are strikingly obvious. Then, just as now, a vast, hubristic bubble of greed burst. As it burst, so cash and credit were squeezed. The global economy ground to a halt. People starved in America.
Then, the financial markets stabilised, as they will now, but the recession will linger longer and more deeply. Possibly, emerging markets in China and India will cushion the blow, but we’d better prepare ourselves for the social upheaval and warfare of the 1930s.
Then, global leaders got together to create the Bretton Woods institutions; now, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is calling for a new Bretton Woods — understandably, since the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have appeared so structurally ill-equipped to cope with either the causes or the effects of the financial chaos (a crisis that has given Brown’s political career mouth-to-mouth resuscitation).
In the week he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, Paul Krugman claimed that Brown had ”saved the world”. Whatever. But this is a decisive moment. Whereas George W Bush was compelled to throw nearly a trillion dollars of public money into the pot to bail out the banks, and did so through gritted teeth, Brown has done so with enthusiasm; he is by instinct a reformer and believes that government should play a pivotal role in the economy.
The Financial Times — the world’s greatest newspaper (bar this one, naturally) — has caught up with events fast, its doctrinal infatuation with the ”free market” long loosened, whereas the poor old Economist is now trapped in a vortex of confusion. The week before last, its edition’s front page was titled ”Saving the system”: on page 15, its leader column complained that governments had not acted fast enough and needed to do much more, but its special report concluded that ”freer and more Âflexible markets will still do more for the world economy than the heavy hand of government”.
While the Economist dithers, rendered loskop by the torment of the ruined edifice of a system it has for so long lauded, let us be clear: by hook or by crook — and more by crook than hook, in fact — one model of capitalism, that of the Thatcherite/Milton Friedman laissez-faire variety, has run its course.
JM Keynes is back in vogue. And so is big government. This, surely, is an opportunity to re-craft modern democracy as well as modern capitalism. It will need imagination and courage. And it will probably need things to get even more precarious first; after all, the welfare state emerged from the bloody embers of the past world war; total destruction has proved to be a powerful driver of change.
There is, however, one big difference with the 1930s: there the peril came from poverty and conflict. Now it comes from poverty, conflict and climate change. Yet the conceptual didactics are the same. Just as the crazy, delusional world of bonds, securities and derivatives was inherently unstable, so too is the way in which the world consumes its resources. There is a powerful symbiosis at work here — the way in which we use, govern and consume financial capital on the one hand, and human, social and natural capital on the other, are entirely unsustainable.
If only we — and our leaders — can see it and act upon it. Will South Africa have a voice on this? And, amusingly, at the very moment when the structural systemics are so ripe and vulnerable for radical reform, what did the SACP have to say? Its website trumpets the ”Beast is in the open” — but this, alas, turns out to be a reference to the Lekota breakaway and not an analysis of the end of Thatcherite Âcapitalism.
Will the left find a creative, influential voice, or will it be the Abby Cohens of this world who are the architects of the reform of the system that they created and then went on to destroy?