• Impossible to certify the end of capitalism’s global crisis
Joaquín Rivery Tur
Joaquín Rivery Tur
THEY may be the 20 countries with the most economic weight in the world, but they are not wizards, nor are their computers fortune-tellers. Nobody on the planet can sign the death certificate of capitalism’s global crisis. What just took place in Pittsburgh, in the United States, is best described as buck passing.
The Group of Eight (G8: United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, France and Italy plus Russia) was unable to deal with the global crisis, much less with controlling the tangled neoliberal financial web of the capitalist system, and had no choice but to pass it on to the Group of 20, possibly to dilute the responsibility of the world’s most developed countries for the economic turmoil into which the planet has sunk, and to look to another 12 nations to share the blame.
In reality, the Pittsburgh Summit represents the total failure of the richest nations in their desire to rule and exploit a world that is totally ungovernable for two reasons; one, the social movements are increasingly up in arms over the generalized injustice and, two; the large financial corporations have rooted their power within the highest layers of officials, so as to have free reign for their profit ambitions and, therefore, they cannot be controlled. Governments have always been accomplices.
According to the news agencies, the leaders of the G20 — within which the seven richest nations have greater ability to exert pressure, more influence and the power to coerce — agreed that the new group is to be transformed into "a principal forum for international economic cooperation."
That is an ambiguous sentence. It assumes that the fundamental purpose of the meeting was to collectively attain greater control over financial corporations in order to avert – as far as possible – the risks of a crisis as profound as the one humanity is currently experiencing. In fact, in order to do so, the seven richest countries demonstrated their will to increase by at least 5% the voting power of emerging countries — such as China, India, Brazil and others — within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as if that could actually change the relationship of forces, and above all, as if the move signifies a major change in the international financial architecture, which the underdeveloped countries have been demanding.
The summit called for stricter regulations on banking activities and limiting bonuses paid to banking/financing executives, who had the power to raise their own bonuses by millions, even in cases where their companies were showing losses that resulted in bankruptcy.
The problem is that a 5% increase in voting power for emerging countries does not mean, for example, that the United States will lose its veto power in the IMF or the World Bank. Instead, it retains a strong lever of pressure, mostly on the Third World, which desperately needs help and investments to pull it out of underdevelopment, but without those nations becoming part of the crazy model of U.S. consumption, which is leading the world to environmental destruction due to climate change and the depredation of nature.
The measures approved in Pittsburgh are an attempt to avoid the phenomena that led to the formation of financial bubbles with a tremendous capacity for explosion and the creation of new crises, but the most serious problem will be how to really control the financial giants, and how to dictate mandatory regulations to govern their fraudulent operations. Is that possible in unbridled capitalism?
It is very difficult not to hold the IMF responsible in good part for what is happening internationally, because its experts should have realized that the financial bubble was about to burst.
On top of the repeated affirmations about how everybody is supposedly emerging from the crisis, in a contradictory fashion, the G20 agreed not to withdraw government aid packages to the major corporations because of a risk of another downturn. Even Chinese President Hu Jintao stated that the alleged recovery "is not as yet solid," and he wasn’t exactly referring to his own country, where not even the crisis has been able to deter its booming economic growth.
Apparently, nobody has learned anything. The G8 (which still exists) has incorporated another group of countries into its vicissitudes, but even that is not a solution, because it is a question of agreements within capitalist globalization, whose neoliberal character is incompatible with government controls. Nevertheless, protectionism is still growing.
The big banks want deregulation, absolute freedom to cheat and take risks in order to satisfy the adrenaline needs produced by financial speculators’ ambition for profits.
With respect to the famous bail-out, in early September, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in Washington revealed that in the second quarter, banks with capitalization and bad loan problems (impossible to collect) totaled 416; in other words, 111 more than in the previous period. A very befogged atmosphere.
The IMF put the frosting on the cake of the crisis a few days ago, when it announced that the planet-wide financial hurricane will affect economic growth for at least seven years, and suggested — now! — the implementation of structural reforms. The result of the crisis forecast by everybody is less employment, less growth, less investment and less productivity. The problem is not one of phenomenon, but of essence. It is called capitalism, no matter how many times you spin the wheel.
granma.cu
