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Will Hutton

A systemic financial crisis is the culmination of three decades of neo-liberal dogma. Its lesson is the urgent need to rebuild the world's economic foundations, says Will Hutton.

6 - 10 - 2008

I never imagined I would live through events like those of the past three weeks. The western banking system faces disintegration. Economists and policy-makers are at loggerheads over how to intervene to stop the panic that is sweeping the world and inspire sufficient trust for the key money and credit markets to reopen.

This is a crisis that has been thirty years in the making - a Gordian knot of libertarian free-market fundamentalism, unregulated globalisation, the collapse of social and political forces committed to fairness, the explosive impact of financial innovations such as "securitisation", and sheer greed. Each has contributed to the fiasco - and all now need to be unravelled if the economy is to have a sustained recovery.

(To read on, click here)

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Will Hutton is chief executive of the Work Foundation. He writes a weekly column in the Observer. His books include The World We’re In (Little, Brown, 2002), A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World (WW Norton, 2003), and The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century (Little, Brown, 2008)

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Comments

Gary Duke (not verified) said:

Mon, 2008-10-06 18:29

Will Hutton puts forward the argument for a 'fairer' capitalism yet misses a few obvious truths about capitalism. Firstly, it's a bloody system marked by its propensity towards extreme violence and war. A very wasteful attribute. It is also marked by its complete disregard for the environment as it is its complete disregard for ordinary people, the poor sods who will end up bailing out the rotten corpse of capitalism once again.

But the real question has to be asked: when has, or indeed, when could such a thing as 'fair' capitalism exist. Capitalism as a system is premised on the basis of a fundamental form of exploitation: the theft of surplus value (profit) from the direct producer (the worker) by the owner of the means of production (the capitalist). All the 'unfairer' bits of capitalism flow inexorably from this basic relationship. Theft is the kernel of the system and as it expands, its ability to magnify this attribute also expands exponentially.

The markets are based on little more than gambling on the future profitability of certain sectors of the economy. For the economy to grow increased exploitation in the form of lengthening the working day, lowering wages or increasing productivity (less workers producing the same amount in the workplace) is the time-honoured practice. Gambling, and a superstitious belief in the 'magical' ability of money to somehow expand itself, are what lay at the foot of the current crisis. Sadly the old picture of boom and bust - of crises of overproduction (in the UK over 800,000 empty properties while hundreds of thousands of people desperately need to be housed) of commodities left unsold or rotting on the shelves while people starve in the undeveloped world; while further thousands of pensioners die from the lack of means to pay for food or heating each winter and the energy companies post record profits. All the politicians agree that they will, like Mr Hutton, do what is necessary to save this rotten system in order to restore its health so that it can resume the process of theft, deceit and destruction. That it can bathe in the blood of future generations.

Who apart from the revolutionary left is demanding the nationalization of the profits of the banks and energy companies (for a start)?

No Will, I think what we need is a fairer system. The trouble is it ain't gonna be capitalism

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John O'Brien (not verified) said:

Mon, 2008-10-06 19:26

The root cause of the current financial crisis is not free market capitalism, but the backdoor imposition of Marxist concepts into the mortgage industry by congress. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was a crass abuse of authority on the part of its authors. Banks were not only told to ignore an applicant's credit history, but were threatened with sanctions by the government if they failed to comply with the act.

There is not only not going to be a fairer form of capitalism, its is doubtful that capitalism will even survive the constant barrage of collectivist assaults on our republic.

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rmurdoch (not verified) said:

Mon, 2008-10-13 17:03

People take positions like this because they conform to their ideology, not because they have the faintest idea what they are talking about.

No, in fact it was the CRA that caused the problem. (too bad, I know you wanted to blame the poor)

From here
"Conservative critics also blame the subprime lending mess on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 31-year-old law aimed at freeing credit for underserved neighborhoods.

Congress created the CRA in 1977 to reverse years of redlining and other restrictive banking practices that locked the poor, and especially minorities, out of homeownership and the tax breaks and wealth creation it affords. The CRA requires federally regulated and insured financial institutions to show that they're lending and investing in their communities.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote recently that while the goal of the CRA was admirable, "it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — who in turn pressured banks and other lenders — to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity."

Fannie and Freddie, however, didn't pressure lenders to sell them more loans; they struggled to keep pace with their private sector competitors. In fact, their regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, imposed new restrictions in 2006 that led to Fannie and Freddie losing even more market share in the booming subprime market.

What's more, only commercial banks and thrifts must follow CRA rules. The investment banks don't, nor did the now-bankrupt non-bank lenders such as New Century Financial Corp. and Ameriquest that underwrote most of the subprime loans.

These private non-bank lenders enjoyed a regulatory gap, allowing them to be regulated by 50 different state banking supervisors instead of the federal government. And mortgage brokers, who also weren't subject to federal regulation or the CRA, originated most of the subprime loans.

In a speech last March, Janet Yellen, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, debunked the notion that the push for affordable housing created today's problems.

"Most of the loans made by depository institutions examined under the CRA have not been higher-priced loans," she said. "The CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."

In a book on the sub-prime lending collapse published in June 2007, the late Federal Reserve Governor Ed Gramlich wrote that only one-third of all CRA loans had interest rates high enough to be considered sub-prime and that to the pleasant surprise of commercial banks there were low default rates. Banks that participated in CRA lending had found, he wrote, "that this new lending is good business.""

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psikeyhackr (not verified) said:

Mon, 2008-10-06 20:57

The invisible hand has become the invisible pickpocket.

Double-entry accounting is 700 years old. Shouldn't it be easy for everyone with the computers we have today? But do you hear the so called capitalists saying that accounting should be mandatory in the schools today? But the credit card companies are sending their cards to college freshmen who were never told what NET WORTH is.

There have been 200,000,000+ cars in the US since 1995. If each car lost $1,500 in depreciation each year that would be $300,000,000,000 lost every year. Have any of our economists noticed? That amounts to FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS since 1995. But the economists have defined the depreciation of durable consumer goods out of existence. They treat automobiles just like bananas.

It should be subtracted from GDP to compute NDP. We are running a planet with 7,000,000,000 people on bad algebra. If I wasn't on the planet it would be HYSTERICALLY FUNNY.

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alfredo.bremont said:

Thu, 2008-10-09 19:24

Gary duke has said all it is to say, the system must end a new system will have to be put in place. however this is not what the coming president will do, regardless of who he is neither is what Warren buffet has in mind. what he hopes is to buy the lot at a very cheap price reduce the managers to employers and the CEO to privileged managers. the poor will become slave of a modern middle age, the media will become his right arm of defense and conquer.

what is happening is just a rearrangement and the same system with a new face. as the system is base on speculation and dishonest profit. therefore it is impossible and unnatural to exist on a system were profit is the only means of existence. this demands a dominant and a dominated.

and this demands that at one point we destroy to rebuild, just like 1914 and 1939.

therefore a human system is possible but it is only possible if you the citizens build it believe on it and chose the right individuals that will make this realm a fact.

today those individuals are put aside just like Orwell's animal farm, and they have being there for a long while, it is time to liberate men and put the pigs were they belong.

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Jeff Mowatt said:

Fri, 2008-10-17 10:24

I have a tale about fairer capitalism.....

I'd not read about stakeholder capitalism before, but was aware of an idea developng around the same time for a more inclusive capitalism, which the author, now my colleague described as people-centered economics, with this conclusion.

"Economics, and indeed human civilization, can
only be measured and calibrated in terms of human beings.
Everything in economics has to be adjusted for
people, first, and abandoning the illusory numerical
analyses that inevitably put numbers ahead of people,
capitalism ahead of democracy, and degradation ahead
of compassion "

An appointment as honorary researcher to President Clinton's re-election committee gave the opportunity to pitch this inclusive capitalism at the White House. Shortly after, he became a causualty, one of America's homeless.

http://www.p-ced.com/about/history/

All changed in 1999 when he siezed the opportunity to travel to Russia in the wake of their economic collapse, spending what he had left in funds to research the paper for the Tomsk Initiative, which leveraged the first moral collateral based microcredit bank in Russia. Tomsk/Seversk is chosen for it's significance as a centre for nuclear research. This in direct contrast to the Harvard (HIID) initiative that preceded the collapse was a microeconomic approach.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/russia/

Replicated several times in Russia it set the precedent which led to the RMC (Russian Microfinance Centre) in 2002 and a similar initiative in Tblisi in 2003.

Moving on to Ukraine, identifying first the vulnerable position of Ukraine's repatriated Tatars, he was obliged to block his own project due to interference, government tried to bypass the plan and add their own components which he saw as non-transparent.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/crimea/

He returns to homelessness in the US, where he blogs and fast for economic rights and is given an exit, with the opportunity to set up the model in the UK.

He describes the project failure, the swords to ploughshares approach and the concept of the more inclusive capitalism in an interview with a diapora leader in Washington.

http://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/economicdev.html

Next target is the UK, not quite ready for the profit for purpose model and a failure to attract seed funding for a community enterprise. After 3 months as a visitor his attempt to re-enter, has him marked as an economic migrant

He returns to Ukraine as the Orange Revolution begins and we start work on a 'Marshall Plan' with the aim of demonstrating how Ukraine can improve democratic government and avoid social implosion due to corruption, poverty and an HIV epidemic, resulting in a shrinking population.

The paper was delivered to Ukraine's government 2 years ago in October 2006 copied at the same time to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/national/

Then at Davos 2008, a similar concept is announced. Economic experts gather to conclude it won't work

http://creativecapitalismblog.com/

Today we find our own FCO doing similar things in relation to Russia, arms reduction and ending poverty. The foundation work, delivered by the people-centered model, cost the UK nothing.

http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/

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