Greed, Revolution and Governance (Naked Capitalism)

Naked Capitalism is one of my daily must reads, and I thoroughly enjoy sharing this material on occasion.  Yves Smith has penned a piece this morning that rings genuinely true with me - and below I present two passages that emphasize why I think she has her head screwed on straight, has a clear perspective of our current reality, and expresses it in a manner that is a easy to read and understand.

"My personal belief is that we are at the confluence of extremely difficult societal challenges. One is that we are at the end of an economic paradigm (this is something I discuss longer form in ECONNED): that a model based on shared prosperity and wage growth changed in the 1980s to one favoring capital and using asset bubbles and consumer borrowings to mask wage stagnation. That has led to an oversized, predatory banking system, and unresolved problem of excessive private sector leverage and destabilizing levels of international capital flows. That alone is monstrously difficult to resolve.

 But this economic breakdown is taking place alongside a crisis of overpopulation which is leading to a rapid degradation of the environment, increasingly desperate energy development strategies, and radical and probably dangerous approaches to food production. It took World War II to resolve the political dislocation that came out of our last global financial crisis, so our record on managing big banking problems alone isn’t so hot. It’s hard to see how to navigate through this higher-stakes complex of problems, particularly since much of the business elite has decided to use the perturbations to advance their agenda of a counterrevolution, to at least roll back New Deal style social guarantees and better yet, bourgeois democracy if they can. So political and societal effort is being diverted to that set of struggles, pulling attention away from the pressing ecological issues and the lesser but still pressing problem of the role of banks and financial markets."

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