I sympathize, but that complaint is so overly simplistic that it hurts more than it helps.
It is sellers who offer credit to buyers who pay over time, and with diverse substitutions.
That's how we create the increasingly complex transaction chains called an aggregate economy.
For the most part, banks just denominate those credits & debits, although they often act as publicly "licensed" middle-men or market-makers who manage distributed liquidity on behalf of the public at large.
Denominating distributed credit & dynamic liquidity is a necessary but not sufficient part of continuously increasing our cultural adaptive rate. Don't even think of throwing that baby out with the bathwater.
Bankers are accountants for the electorate. They are simply clerks who manage our books for us. It's up to US to regulate their behavior and pay.
An aggregate complaining about it's clerks is exactly like bad parents complaining about the behavior of their own kids.
Face it. If our aggregate is dissatisfied with their own servants, both the problem and solution are visible in the aggregate mirror. So just look closer, and help regulate this aggregate's own behavior.
Bankers are accountants for the electorate. They are simply clerks who manage our books for us. It's up to US to regulate their behavior and pay.
An aggregate complaining about it's clerks is exactly like bad parents complaining about the behavior of their own kids.
Face it. If our aggregate is dissatisfied with their own servants, both the problem and solution are visible in the aggregate mirror. So just look closer, and help regulate this aggregate's own behavior.
Complaining about YOUR OWN CLERKS is a symptom of a failed aggregate. The solution is always to examine your group's own state of distributed organization, and come up with a way to coordinate on an even larger scale.
Look no further than your own mirror. Continuously finding new methods, for continuously scaling up all the expanding features of an adaptive culture ... well, that task is up to us, not anyone else.
When you look in your mirror, do you see only the static components and static values? That's just what was already produced yesterday.
Look closer and longer and, upon reflection, discern the return on coordination and the many dynamic values, already present, plus those which are always newly emerging.
Once you can recognize dynamic value, it should be obvious how to re-regulate bankster behavior and more optimally manage the behavior our lowly bank clerks. Just start acting like a co-owner ... of democracy. If YOU don't act like an owner, don't expect your lowly clerks to not act like they own you.
Roger, then you need to take pity on the unanointed and define all those terms much better if you want any of us to follow you through derivatives, CDOs, MBSs, options, futures and the like. I don't think the bankers are as innocent as you portray at all. Tell me they aren't a huge part of the problem, like Paulson declaring that martial law would be declared if GS didn't get their trillions.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Roger: it’s very debatable as to what extent commercial banks “create debt”. Keynes said that banks do not do anything that wouldn’t happen anyway. That’s certainly true in that if there were not banks, there would still be debt.
ReplyDeleteBanks make the whole borrowing and lending process more EFFICIENT, and that doubtless increases the total amount of debt. But there’s nothing wrong with efficiency.
Banks also make debt vastly more liquid. In fact they do that on such a huge scale that that debt essentially becomes the nation’s money supply. The advocates of full reserve banking, from Abraham Lincoln onwards, claim that issuing the nation’s money should be the sole preserve of the nation – i.e. its government.
Ralph, I don't know why you seem to ignore the likes of Paulson, but will wait for both of you on that. However, you seem to be an investor in such, which is the predatory side of capitalism, as you do not support industry, just those that BET on industry, which should come under Glass-Steagall, and other SEC shortfalls that Clinton gave away, which is how your answer should have started if you're serious about saving America, but you sound like you've expatriated already and could care less.
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