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THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE
Zakaria’s Capitalist Manifesto is another such grandly fuzzy apologia, a broad exercise in shifting any blame for a big crisis away from a certain unblamable segment of society, only this one is much worse. In his take on the financial crisis he offers a few basic points:
1. Gosh it sucks that the crisis happened, but it’s not as bad as people say. Remember how people used to pick on Internet stocks — well, look at Twitter!
2. The solution to what ails capitalism is more capitalism.
3. There will be a great public desire to tighten up the laws governing the economic sector, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
4. You know what’s a great idea? Voluntary self-regulation.
5. You can make all sorts of interesting collages just using a bunch of dollar bills and a Photoshop program.
6. If we could just all learn to be better people, everything will turn out fine.
His description of the root causes of this financial crisis are about what you’d expect from a man who invoked
The Great Gatsby to explain the mentality of the murderer of 4,000 people. When he mentions the objectionable behaviors that led to the loss of trillions of dollars in wealth and untold numbers of lost jobs and misery, he does so with distant, clinical language, like he’s describing something seen through a telescope, disappearing over the horizon. In fact his method of describing the “moral crisis” that led to the financial implosion was to begrudgingly admit that many people were less than nice. Here’s how he put it:
quote:
Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system—capitalism, socialism, whatever—can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.
This is a beautiful piece of writing. Describing the misdeeds of Wall Street in the last decade by saying “few people acted… nobly” is sort of like saying that Stalin was “not always sociable” or O.J. Simpson was “not always committed to preserving life.” I mean, talk about a freaking understatement. Forgetting entirely the other insane lies in this passage (my favorite being the one about bureuacrats not taking cash for favors — I guess he means except for Bob Rubin taking $130 million or whatever from Citi after pushing through that merger), that “not so noble” bit is where Zakaria earns his money. Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles. The crimes of this era were monstrous thieveries, committed against ordinary people in a highly systematic and organized fashion with the aid and compliance of a bought-off government, and the only way you can not perceive what happened as a profound indictment of capitalism is if you blow off the specifics entirely and try to hide the details in vague, airy words like “irresponsibility” and “excesses.”
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