It may not seem so to the hysterical Media, but people actually still have confidence in Banks. We are all still depositing cash, cheques and are still using ATMs, debit, credit cards and online banking. What we don’t have, is confidence in the banking systems, the stock market and the systems of credit brokering/exchange that are now manifestly broken.
The Financial System, in the spirit of Barack Obama, needs ‘Change’.
Money itself will still remain at the core of every society whether we like it or not but the system that distributes money, stores and manages wealth has seized up. It needs to evolve and become a necessary lubricant of society not a poison.
Evolution in biological terms takes millennia and authorities tell us this is driven by mutation and survival of the fittest in a competitive struggle for survival. However, evolution in the financial world only needs intelligent planning and direction. It should only need a decade.
The trouble is that people still think of change and evolution in terms of the familiar biological model – ie. competition and survival of the fittest. Financial organisations and economies including our own have been destabilised by this too simplistic world-view. The banking system needs change but not to change or be regulated in some radical way that results in its destruction.
Dinosaurs roam the planet
Banks stride the global financial swamps like the dinosaurs of the Lost World or Jurassic Park. Like dinosaurs they have specialised (mortgageosaur, investosaur, pensionodactyl, bankosaurus) and are fast and efficient at what they do. They are brilliantly coloured and quick to gobble up their prey. However in the biological world, dinosaurs were killed off by a meteorite, toxic vegetation and an Ice Age and were survived by warm furry animals fleet of foot and more adapted to their localised environment. Let us now presume that the financial world has been hit by its own version of an Ice Age of credit freezing, a meteorite of toxic debt and poisoned by gorging on junk subprime. Who can survive this?
As the giant global saurean institutions crash and tumble all around and turn into financial fossils we must look for smaller furrier banks and financial institutions. Those that have not overgrown or overspecialised those that are still localised and exhibit characteristics of neoteny.
These are the monetary systems that have been there all the time, maybe only at a local level barely surviving in an environment of stomping dinosaurian feet and flashing fangs but who, with a change in the environment, could emerge and evolve into the new monetary systems. This should be the new evolutionary direction for Finance Wales and any Wales localised institutions which are presently the equivalent of small furry animals on a global evolutionary scale but still neotenous in form. With intelligent direction it should be capable of surviving into the future.
Finance Wales
So how should Finance Wales change and mutate to a form that is recognisably the same but fitter to service the needs of Welsh society and economy?
Actually it is not difficult to envisage the form that Finance Wales should adopt and how it should operate. The difficult bit is mustering the political will from politicians who have fossilised pre-meteorite mindsets and who appear to be frozen in an Ice Age of political theory and economic dogma when society has moved on.
Regrettably, Gordon Brown appears to be the only Western politician who instinctively understands that the Rule Book of financial/economic management, prudence, probity, borrowing, and money supply is now irrelevant to coping with the financial and economic storms that lie ahead. He has binned it. He has guessed the future. Gordon Brown is ‘winging’ it and it shows.
David Cameron and the Tories are like baby kangaroos caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Frozen whilst the monetary lubricants that have marinaded their soft Etonian lives from birth drain away into a toxic sump. They will lose the next General Election in May. Mr.Cameron is NOT winging it and it shows.
… to be continued.
Pt 2. An evolved banking system based on credit unions.
“Regrettably, Gordon Brown appears to be the only Western politician who instinctively understands that the Rule Book of financial/economic management, prudence, probity, borrowing, and money supply is now irrelevant to coping with the financial and economic storms that lie ahead. He has binned it. He has guessed the future. Gordon Brown is ‘winging’ it and it shows.”
You must be joking right?
He, as Chancellor during the 10 years leading up to this crisis, is largely responsible for it. He is hoping that the population of the UK will spend their way out of this mess…..using money that they do not have. We are already the most indebted ‘nation’ in the G7 and it’s this indebtedness which has got us into this mess. And his panacea of using the same medicine which got us into this mess to get us out of it is a good one? This debt has to be cleared….that is payed down…..both on a government level and personal level. He is ensuring that this economic hardship will last a lot longer than it needs to.
I agree that the Tories don’t have much to say….but believe me, they don’t need to say much as Gordon Brown’s chickens will come home to roost in the next year.
Dai…
This should also be seen in the context of ‘Politician of the Year’. Gordon Brown epitomises all that we have now come to expect of politicians most of whom are no longer ‘pillars of society’ or thought leaders’ and who are perceived to have their noses ‘in the trough’. GB understands the mess that he has undoubtedly (partially) caused. He has also realised that older rules of ‘civic responsibility’ do not apply, nor does there appear to be punishment for those that have ‘made a mess of things’. This is self evident. He has been liberated from whatever constraints that usually apply, he no longer gives a damn about what people think, so he is making it up as he goes along.ie.winging it.
The Tory’s are trapped by their history and circumstance. People hear their political’ fine words’ but know that’s all it is… fine words. I personally think that there may well be a complete fragmentation of UK politics into minor parties, single issue parties and ‘personality’ cults. As a Plaid Cymru supporter I hope they can come through this stronger but I’m not holding my breath.
Thanks for your explanation Syncretist. Well Plaid Cymru will need a more charismatic leader to begin with….although IWJ is no fool.
I do think that New Labour are sitting ducks…….the Biships recently had a go at them……I suppose because no other political party had been doing so…….but even they were 5 or so years too late. I sometimes wonder if the other parties are so beferft of ideas that they only believe that an economy is healthy if the population keeps on spending which is dependent on house prices continually increasing giving them the false impression that they are getting richer. This is only sustainable while the emerging economies contintue to lend us money…..but one day……and that day is fast approaching…….when they will say ‘enough is enough. Then we will see a collapse in the currency and rampant inflation. People have to start saving and repair their own balance sheets and start making ‘things’ again……which other people will actually want. But I don’t expect any politician to pass on this message……yet, but the people will understand it sooner or later. We have just witnessed a few shots across the bows.