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Tuesday 30th September, 2008. Anglo-American finance ministers and central bankers, like little Dutch boys, try desperately to plug leaks in the bursting dyke that is the international financial system. In the US, treasury secretary Hank Paulson hoped for $700bn to plug the gaping hole in Wall Street’s banks. In the UK, the government is
Lawmakers in the US struggle to come to terms with the scale of the financial crisis, the Paulson solution, and the role of government in resolving this crisis. Republicans, particularly conflicted, sabotaged the $700 billion bail-out last Thursday. At this moment Alan Greenspan proferrs advice from the lofty heights of the pedestal he still, astonishingly, stands on. “As a practical matter” he and others write in the Wall St. Journal (26.09.08) and “at the current stage of the crisis, the only way that financial institutions can continue to function is for the government to provide financial support.”
I’ve dubbed the 9th August, 2007 ‘debtonation day’ – because on that day banks froze lending to each other, central banks panicked and began providing ‘liquidity’ – i.e. new loans to banks in trouble – and the Credit Crunch took hold. By strange coincidence, it was on the 9th August (see Charles Kindleberger in ‘The World in Depression’) that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York raised interest rates from 5 to 6% – an act that helped precipitate the Great Crash and then the Great Depression. The Fed had started ‘tightening’ i.e. increasing the real cost of borrowing in 1928, and persisted in this tight monetary policy after the Crash had started. The Fed had been determined to raise interest rates to (finally) prick a bubble of its own creation: the easy credit bubble that fuelled the stock market of the roaring 20s. Taking away the punch bowl by raising interest rates, proved very unhelpful to bankrupts and debtors – of which there were many millions in 1929. |
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