Socrates said that ignorance must be the root of all evil, because no one deliberately sets out to be bad.
But the economic “medicine” of driving debtors into poverty and forcing the selloff of their public domain has become socially accepted wisdom taught in today’s business schools. One would think that after fifty years of austerity programs and privatization selloffs to pay bad debts, the world has learned enough about causes and consequences.
The banking profession chooses deliberately to be ignorant. “Good accepted practice” is bolstered by Nobel Economics Prizes to provide a cloak of plausible deniability when markets “unexpectedly” are hollowed out and new investment slows as a result of financially bleeding economies, medieval-style while wealth is siphoned up to the top of the economic pyramid.
Greece: No Deal without a National Referendum by Michael Hudson, Global Economic Intersect
3 comments:
I note the excerpt refers to the Nobel Prize for economics, which "is not one of the Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895"
The fact it is awarded by a bank is worth noting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences
A little one sided. Stiglitz got the Nobel for demonstrating that Information Asymmetry destroys the theory of efficient markets, Krugman got the Nobel and I doubt he's ever been regarded as being on the side of the bad guys. Hence the committee is clearly not utterly committed to maintaining the kleptocracy.
Hi Jim
A "Senior Economist" interviewed on Morning report today (18 June, from Westpac, I think) talked about how Greece had no choice but to implement the forced austerity measures. He compared their situation to New Zealand's in the late 1980s and early 90s when, according to him, we had no choice but to sell off assets, etc. The disastrous results for New Zealand are now remembered by some (economists, at least) as some kind of success story. It's amazing how policies that failed in one country (I'm remembering Chile now) become the template to apply to another!
Mark McGuire
http://markmcguire.net/
@mark_mcguire
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