Telling Tales

Um, let me try to work this one out.

The government have been subsidising financial institutions to fake the interest rates to enable money flows that enable the government to do things off balance sheet that enable it to fake the data on which they base economic and budgetary policy.

This is why I pay more in taxes, why my savings earn interest rates at the lowest level in my life, why my obligations to a whole raft of service providers increases in cost more than the posted inflation figures and why when moving money it is taking several visits to the bank to persuade them to let me use my money.

This kind of thing is supposed to be new.  Those of us who have delved into the history of economic crashes, financial malpractice and money know that for long before the 20^th Century this was the norm, notably in Britain and Ireland.

It took two world wars and the huge disruptions that followed to put in place laws and arrangements that were rather more reliable and equitable.  The more open politics and the demands of ordinary people with votes helped towards this.

Then we threw it all away in the final quarter of the 20^th Century.  There were many reasons for this.  One was the consolidation of the media and its merging into the structure of politics.  The other was that we were offered an impossible future.

Power was not for the ugly, the academic or the plain ordinary man or woman.  It was for the pretty, the persuasive and the pampered who offered us easy money and easier living, all of which we now have to pay for.

In some parts of the media there are commentators who are telling us to blame ourselves because we liked it that way.  Some of us did, many of us were told we had no option.  In any case our children were targeted to demand more.

What also was lost was the moral imperative that affected much of politics in the middle years of the 20^th Century.  It was always a tenuous proposition and often politics was at the margins of it but there was enough to remind us of folly.

What is striking is that in all the recommendations for this history or that history to be taught to our children it is impossible to find even in the history which is taught any reference to the financial background to so many of the disasters of the past.

There is an old hymn, “Tell Me The Old Old Story” which refers to the Bible.  In reality the old old story is that if you let people loose and allow them to control the monetary systems and methods they will almost certainly abuse them for profit and leave misery and mess in their wake.

Then all you can do is pray and probably that will not work.