Fri, 26 Aug 2011
An Irreversible Disease
In May 2011, The Post-Keynesian conference was held at Roskilde University, Denmark.
The economist James Galbraith (son of J.K. Galbraith) gave a talk about the European Economic Crises. The language he uses is eye-opening and brutal :
I say incurable. This is the diagnosis of an irreversible disease. The
corruption and collapse of the rule of law, in the financial sphere, is
basically irreparable. It’s not just that restoring trust takes a long time.
It’s that under the new technological order in this field, it can not be done.
The technologies are designed to sow and foster distrust and that is the
consequence of using them. The recent experience proves this, it seems to me.
And therefore there can be no return to the way things were before. In other
words, we are at the end of the illusion of a market place in the financial
sphere.
The text of the talk was on Naked Capitalism.
How bad are things? Pretty bad I fear and with worse to come. I just don't see the will or capacity to fix the system anymore. This means that things could get very rough in the next few years.