IT WAS LIKE I was watching an out-take from the 90s Jim Carey film Liar Liar.
Instead of Carey playing fast-track lawyer Fletcher Reed who can't lie for 24 hours due to his son's birthday wish, it was Alession Rastinia, the hotshot city trader who boldly admitted last week on BBC News that governments don't rule the world, banks do. Or more precisely according to Rastinia, Goldman Sachs does.
Almost as if the serum hit the truth spot the American city trader blurted out: “Most traders don't really care about having a fixed economy, having a fixed situation. Our job is to make money from it. Personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession.”
The man never even batted an eyelid. Seriously!
Indeed the image of a modern carpetbagger sprung to mind as I watched him being interviewed. There was not even a sliver of shame.
But you know what? After listening to him open mouthed I had a ‘halle-flippin-lujah’ moment. At last here was someone – fake or otherwise - prepared to come on national television and tell it like it is regardless of how ugly a shadow the truth casts. As he put it, recession is something he dreams about.
His interview went some way to reinforcing my long held view that at the root of the present economic problems is a core of self-serving individuals, organisations, corporations and governments who are happily making money in the midst of the financial chaos. Why then should they try and stop it? It’s like a weapons manufacturer rubbing their hands in glee when countries go to war. As bullets fly and people die tills ring. Kerching! It’s simply the way the capitalist system works.
I couldn’t help but reflect on the great 1939 Sydney Steinbeck classic The Grapes of Wrath which tells the story of the Great Depression and the life of the poor sharecroppers who sought a future against the backdrop of crippling drought and economic financial hardship.
In his narrative Steinbeck wrote “The bank as something more than men. I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.”
I say we can. After all it’s our money with which they speculate.
As the world governments scramble to save failing financial institutions by squeezing the living daylights out of the working class and those who drive the real economy we absolutely need to teach the likes of Alession Rastinia and his paymasters the biggest juiciest lesson ever.
At the risk of sounding like a raving anarchist, we need to consider the power that we, the regular nine-to-five folks hold. It is our money, no matter how little we have, that they use to keep us poor and in despair.
If all the depositors in a bank were to come to every single branch it operated and asked for all of their money back, the bank would instantly go bankrupt.
Something I would happily endorse especially if it sends nihilistic creeps like Rastinia straight to the nearest job centre at worst, or out the window of a 50-floor penthouse window without a parachute at best.