I once wrote in this blog that Angela Merkel is a secret Stasi agent whose mission is to bring Communism back not just to eastern Europe but to the whole of Europe this time. This conspiracy theory, as all conspiracy theories, was based on the result she would achieve, that could be blamed on sinister and devious plans.
Well though it was and remains a joke of course (sick or otherwise), it does seem even more appropriate now that she has struck at the very heart of capitalism. Savings. When is a saver not a saver? When s/he deposits money in a Eurozone bank. Then he is magically transformed into an “Investor”! And must pay the price for his greed!!!
And this is all very well and a beautiful expression of Schauble’s penchant for meeting out harsh punishment to those he dislikes, such as that swarthy lower species that lives in the south, but it is hardly very sensible policy to rebuild your economy along accepted capitalist lines, now is it?
The trouble is, decision makers in this godawful nightmare of a mess they have plunged Europe in,to have an extremely limited perception. For them an economy has only two facets. Debt and deficits. Nothing else! Nothing else at all! Neither growth (which you would have thought the number one concern of any economy), nor unemployment, nor even production.
And as to the wizard wheeze of deciding to turn savers into investors and tax their savings away… well this appears to have already led to a capital flight not from the south to the north, but the hell out of the Euro area altogether.
Now, for all the remarks that taxpayers should not be obliged to bail out failed banks, there is something very wrong here and indicative of limited small thinking. Are we to assume that savers are not tax payers? And what about bank failures? Are we to assume that the ordinary saver, with the minutest proportion of the bank’s assets is responsible for vetting the financial statements of an anyway deregulated devious bank?
The operative word here is “deregulated”. All this farce and pain being bandied about with such relish by the likes of Schauble, Rehn and Dijsselbloem are mere fig leaves for the real problem they would rather not touch.
BANKS NEED TO BE REGULATED! Had regulations been restored fully and properly by everyone, Germany included, much of all this subsequent mess would have been avoided.
But oh no. Let the real speculators/investors keep running wild and just stick it to the ordinary saver, the back bone of the capitalist system, oh and turn him into the “evil investor” while you are at it.
How can one not start concocting conspiracy theories in the light of all this nonsense? It’s just that a conspiracy, however devious and criminal, somehow feels safer than the realisation that Europe is being run by a bunch of arrant, low minded, blinkered and bigotted incompetents.