It is an everyday occurrence. Though, this John Cassidy story in the New Yorker that looks back a decade to the financial crisis of 2008, illuminates the degree to which economics is politics and politics is economics:
Using taxpayers’ money to bail out greedy and incompetent bankers was intrinsically political. So was quantitative easing, a tactic that other central banks also adopted, following the Fed’s lead. It worked primarily by boosting the price of financial assets that were mostly owned by rich people.
Cassidy is writing a review of the 700-page book “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World” by Adam Tooze.
The failure of the political parties that dominated the industrialized West in the late 20th Century continue to collapse and be imperiled by their complicity in this unprecedented buyout. Though they supposedly represent different “sides of the isle” in politics, the lessons from 2008 and the decade that is 2008-2018 demonstrate how they serve the owning class of the neoliberal era.
The rifts that exist within the parties hint at the coming splits that will define US politics, and politics in the industrialized west, for the next two decades. Or the first half of the 21st Century.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 