Daniel Ben-Ami points out that current campaigns to vilify bankers (“banksters”) over their role in the economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 conveniently ignores the politicians’ dirty hands:
There is at least one area where mainstream politicians can legitimately claim considerable success: they have offloaded much of the blame for the economic crisis from themselves and on to banks and other financial institutions.
Much of the public has accepted the premise that greedy bankers were largely responsible for the economic turmoil that emerged in 2007-8. There is little discussion of the government’s role in creating the conditions for the financial crash, let alone any examination of the economy’s underlying weaknesses.
Criticism of the government’s economic policy is usually confined to it being heartless or ill thought out. Often the two are combined, in the accusation that the government is obeying the diktat of its banker friends by imposing cuts. Campaigners also often allege that a shady global financial network is the real power in the world. In this conspiratorial worldview, a labyrinth of offshore tax havens helps the rootless rich evade the power of national authorities.
[. . .]
But in truth, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic bear a large share of the blame for the crisis. To understand their culpability, it is necessary to go back at least to the early 1980s rather than just to 2007. For decades it was clear that investment and innovation were insufficient. Yet rather than tackle these underlying problems, the authorities pursued policies that ended up creating a credit bubble.
Public spending was kept high and interest rates artificially low. Often, governments also used additional measures to ease the supply of credit, such as reforming the financial markets. The hope was that such moves would keep the market ticking over in the short term and the economy would somehow correct itself in the longer term.
This was the backdrop to the financial crisis that emerged in 2007-8. Bankers certainly played a role, but governments created the conditions for the credit bubble to emerge. Underlying this development was the failure of politicians to tackle or even recognise structural economic weaknesses.
[. . .]
Underlying anti-banking campaigns is the common assumption that financial institutions are part of a giant global conspiracy to undermine nation states.
This view was most vividly put forward by Matt Taibbi, a campaigning American journalist, in a 2009 article in Rolling Stone magazine and in a subsequent book. He famously condemned Goldman Sachs, a top Wall Street investment bank, as ‘a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. In the UK, the New Economics Foundation, a think tank, adopted the image with a short video entitled Taming the Vampire Squid: Take Back Our Banks.
There are several reasons to object to such imagery and the conspiratorial worldview that underlies it. For one thing it is strongly reminiscent of Nazi imagery of Jews as central to an international financial conspiracy. For example, in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler talked of Jews as being ‘like leeches… they were slowly sucking the blood from the pores of the national body’.
