Bankers NOT banksters

It pretty easy to become furious with the moneychangers these days.  The damage they are causing to the real economy is crippling.  Yet to hear guys like Jamie Dimon talk, they are performing a necessary social service.  And he has a point—even if we were to eliminate all the hopelessly corrupt banking institutions like IMF, we would soon discover that we needed something very much like them.

The problem isn't that banking is fundamentally necessary, its that for those necessary services it provides, it charges WAY too much.  So I am especially pleased that Michael Hudson has decided to answer the question—what would a good banking system look like.

What Would a “Good” Banking System Look Like?
Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This
by MICHAEL HUDSON   JANUARY 29, 2012

In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Prof. Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.

If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges. more