The corporate monster is destroying the world, tearing up its soil to gobble up its precious resources, fouling its air, polluting its water and damaging its climate, while rewarding the few with untold riches, but leaving the masses in poverty. That’s how things work, unless they are prevented. Free-market ideology is having a hard time right now. But maybe not hard enough.
Continue reading Moral Responsibilities of Corporate Officials
Around 80% of publicly quoted shareholdings are now controlled by financial institutions, rather than the end shareholders. The traders acting for these institutions have quite different objectives from those of the ultimate shareholders. Members of a company pension scheme, for example, are likely to have a personal desire for the survival and longevity of their employing company. However, unbeknown to them, the investment decisions made on their behalf for their pension fund, are made on the basis of short term gains, which may well be best served by the acquisition and break up of that same company and the redundancy of most of its employees. But it is worse than that.
Continue reading Ultra-Fast Destruction of Real Economy Firms
The question really is what good did economics ever do that isn’t readily available from common sense? Economics has real world impact (“we are ruled by little else” as Keynes famously said), but where it leads to an impact which is distinctive from one which would result from applied common sense, the impact appears to be invariably bad. Of course, definitions of bad may be subjective. It could have two quite separate meanings: bad in the sense that it is counterproductive in its own terms, most usually this would mean damaging to economic growth; or bad in that it does more harm than good in such dimensions as fairness and justice. Examples of bad impacts might include free market economics resulting in great injustice and inequality as well as the creation of inevitably bursting bubbles.
The Economist, an increasingly dogmatic apologist for the free market ideology, invited for its current issue, six academic economists to identify how they thought the financial crisis had changed the subject of economics. The answer is not a lot. So far as methods of teaching and research are concerned, nothing has changed, or is likely to change any time soon.
Vince Cable’s closing speech to the Lib-Dem’s first in-government conference has been greeted by City and business types as ‘intemperate’, as ‘emotional language’ and ‘playing to the gallery’. But he is surely right to suggest that good real economy businesses are being destroyed for the short term gain of City speculators and their ‘accomplices’ who make fat fees from takeover deals. Cable is merely making a statement of truth, which has been highlighted several times on this site regarding particular situations such as the Kraft takeover of Cadbury.
Moreover, he is also right to suggest that, left to its own devices, capitalism tends to the establishment of monopolistic positions. Again, as is highlighted elsewhere on this site, you can have free markets, or you can have competitive markets. But you can’t have both. Competition has to be protected, or it will be destroyed by those same speculators and their accomplices.
David Cameron’s special advisory committee of ten on economic strategy includes five business graduates, five knights of the realm, three retailers, three asset strippers, two accountants, a banker, a lord, an advertising exec, a publishing exec, and Sir James Dyson. Only the last named has a background in manufacturing and is likely to have got his hands dirty at work.
The forthcoming Oslo conference of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) is to discuss ways of dealing with unemployment arising from the 2007-8 credit crunch. As noted elsewhere on this site, the question is one of emphasis between, on the one hand, repaying the public indebtedness which was rashly incurred as a result of private greed, and on the other hand, the protection and regeneration of employment, particularly for the most vulnerable.
The Hayek / Mises argument that any small step to the left leads inevitably to full on totalitarian socialism, might have had something going for it when the world was beset by Hitler, Stalin, and the fascist governments of Spain, Portugal and Southern America. And later, when national-socialism and fascism had become history, but communism seemed to be prospering under leadership from the Chinese as well as the Soviets, fear of centrally planned totalitarian socialism was not wholly unreasonable. But since the collapse of communism, there seems to be a rather limited rationale for fearing any initiative which might betoken even the slightest move to the left. Centrally planned totalitarian government really is not inevitable, or even feasible.
The little UK bank reporting season is over. £15Bn profits have been reported. Bonuses are being calculated. The time they took us all over the brink is becoming a distant memory, along with the ‘too big to fail’ mantra. Sir John Vickers’ commission on banking regulation won’t report for another twelve months and by then the boot will be firmly on the other foot. Government will need the bank’s profits to push share prices up so the public holdings can be disposed of at a profit, or at least at not too big a loss. It will be business as usual, at least till the next time.
Keynes recognised that the legislation protecting worker’s rights might lead to powerful trades unions, motivated by political ideals rather than the long term interests of their members, being the cause of wages led inflation damaging economic activity. His mistake was to argue that it was a political problem for governments, rather than a problem for economics. So no action was taken till the advent of the Thatcher government.
Today the boot is on the other foot. Free market fundamentalism is no less political than the unions were 30 years ago. The fervent ideological belief in private industry being good, public bad, regulation bad, and above all, the primacy of shareholder property rights and the purpose of industry being to maximise their value … all that is equally damaging to industry, perhaps even more so, than was unbridled union power.
Fighting for Fairness by Remaking the Real Economy 