Ενώ οι απλοί άνθρωποι ανησυχούν για την λιτότητα και την
απασχόληση, οι διάδρομοι εξουσίας της ευρωζώνης έχουν υποστεί μια
αξιοσημείωτη μεταμόρφωση.
Η άνοδος του Mario Monti στην ιταλική πρωθυπουργία είναι
αξιοσημείωτη για περισσότερους λόγους από ό, τι είναι δυνατό να απαριθμήσετε.
What price
the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe
While
ordinary people fret about austerity and jobs, the eurozone's corridors of
power have been undergoing a remarkable transformation
The
ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for
more reasons than it is possible to count. ....
By replacing the
scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By
imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of
democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at
Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the
political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was
prohibitively politically toxic.
This is the most remarkable thing of all: a giant leap
forward for, or perhaps even the successful culmination of, the Goldman Sachs
Project.
It is not just Mr Monti. The European Central Bank,
another crucial player in the sovereign debt drama, is under ex-Goldman
management, and the investment bank's alumni hold sway in the corridors of
power in almost every European nation, as they have done in the US throughout
the financial crisis. Until Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund's
European division was also run by a Goldman man, Antonio Borges, who just
resigned for personal reasons.
Even before the upheaval in Italy, there was no sign of
Goldman Sachs living down its nickname as "the Vampire Squid", and
now that its tentacles reach to the top of the eurozone, sceptical voices are
raising questions over its influence. The political decisions taken in the
coming weeks will determine if the eurozone can and will pay its debts – and
Goldman's interests are intricately tied up with the answer to that question.
Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund
economist, in his book 13 Bankers, argued that Goldman Sachs and the other
large banks had become so close to government in the run-up to the financial
crisis that the US was effectively an oligarchy. At least European politicians
aren't "bought and paid for" by corporations, as in the US, he says.
"Instead what you have in Europe is a shared world-view among the policy
elite and the bankers, a shared set of goals and mutual reinforcement of illusions."
This is The Goldman Sachs Project. Put simply, it is to
hug governments close. Every business wants to advance its interests with the
regulators that can stymie them and the politicians who can give them a tax
break, but this is no mere lobbying effort. Goldman is there to provide advice
for governments and to provide financing, to send its people into public
service and to dangle lucrative jobs in front of people coming out of
government. The Project is to create such a deep exchange of people and ideas
and money that it is impossible to tell the difference between the public
interest and the Goldman Sachs interest.
Mr Monti is one of Italy's most eminent economists, and
he spent most of his career in academia and thinktankery, but it was when Mr
Berlusconi appointed him to the European Commission in 1995 that Goldman Sachs
started to get interested in him. First as commissioner for the internal
market, and then especially as commissioner for competition, he has made
decisions that could make or break the takeover and merger deals that Goldman's
bankers were working on or providing the funding for. Mr Monti also later
chaired the Italian Treasury's committee on the banking and financial system,
which set the country's financial policies.
With these connections, it was natural for Goldman to
invite him to join its board of international advisers. The bank's two
dozen-strong international advisers act as informal lobbyists for its interests
with the politicians that regulate its work. Other advisers include Otmar Issing
who, as a board member of the German Bundesbank and then the European Central
Bank, was one of the architects of the euro.
Perhaps the most prominent ex-politician inside the bank
is Peter Sutherland, Attorney General of Ireland in the 1980s and another
former EU Competition Commissioner. He is now non-executive chairman of
Goldman's UK-based broker-dealer arm, Goldman Sachs International, and until
its collapse and nationalisation he was also a non-executive director of Royal
Bank of Scotland. He has been a prominent voice within Ireland on its bailout
by the EU, arguing that the terms of emergency loans should be eased, so as not
to exacerbate the country's financial woes. The EU agreed to cut Ireland's
interest rate this summer.
Picking up well-connected policymakers on their way out
of government is only one half of the Project, sending Goldman alumni into
government is the other half. Like Mr Monti, Mario Draghi, who took over as
President of the ECB on 1 November, has been in and out of government and in
and out of Goldman. He was a member of the World Bank and managing director of
the Italian Treasury before spending three years as managing director of
Goldman Sachs International between 2002 and 2005 – only to return to
government as president of the Italian central bank.
Mr Draghi has been dogged by controversy over the
accounting tricks conducted by Italy and other nations on the eurozone
periphery as they tried to squeeze into the single currency a decade ago. By
using complex derivatives, Italy and Greece were able to slim down the apparent
size of their government debt, which euro rules mandated shouldn't be above 60
per cent of the size of the economy. And the brains behind several of those
derivatives were the men and women of Goldman Sachs.
The bank's traders created a number of financial deals
that allowed Greece to raise money to cut its budget deficit immediately, in
return for repayments over time. In one deal, Goldman channelled $1bn of
funding to the Greek government in 2002 in a transaction called a
cross-currency swap. On the other side of the deal, working in the National
Bank of Greece, was Petros Christodoulou, who had begun his career at Goldman,
and who has been promoted now to head the office managing government Greek
debt. Lucas Papademos, now installed as Prime Minister in Greece's unity
government, was a technocrat running the Central Bank of Greece at the time.
Goldman says that the debt reduction achieved by the
swaps was negligible in relation to euro rules, but it expressed some regrets
over the deals. Gerald Corrigan, a Goldman partner who came to the bank after
running the New York branch of the US Federal Reserve, told a UK parliamentary
hearing last year: "It is clear with hindsight that the standards of
transparency could have been and probably should have been higher."
When the issue was raised at confirmation hearings in the
European Parliament for his job at the ECB, Mr Draghi says he wasn't involved
in the swaps deals either at the Treasury or at Goldman.
It has proved impossible to hold the line on Greece,
which under the latest EU proposals is effectively going to default on its debt
by asking creditors to take a "voluntary" haircut of 50 per cent on
its bonds, but the current consensus in the eurozone is that the creditors of
bigger nations like Italy and Spain must be paid in full. These creditors, of
course, are the continent's big banks, and it is their health that is the
primary concern of policymakers. The combination of austerity measures imposed
by the new technocratic governments in Athens and Rome and the leaders of other
eurozone countries, such as Ireland, and rescue funds from the IMF and the
largely German-backed European Financial Stability Facility, can all be traced
to this consensus.
"My former colleagues at the IMF are running around
trying to justify bailouts of €1.5trn-€4trn, but what does that mean?"
says Simon Johnson. "It means bailing out the creditors 100 per cent. It
is another bank bailout, like in 2008: The mechanism is different, in that this
is happening at the sovereign level not the bank level, but the rationale is
the same."
So certain is the financial elite that the banks will be
bailed out, that some are placing bet-the-company wagers on just such an
outcome. Jon Corzine, a former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, returned to
Wall Street last year after almost a decade in politics and took control of a
historic firm called MF Global. He placed a $6bn bet with the firm's money that
Italian government bonds will not default.
When the bet was revealed last month, clients and trading
partners decided it was too risky to do business with MF Global and the firm
collapsed within days. It was one of the ten biggest bankruptcies in US
history.
The grave danger is that, if Italy stops paying its debts,
creditor banks could be made insolvent. Goldman Sachs, which has written
over $2trn of insurance, including an undisclosed amount on eurozone countries'
debt, would not escape unharmed, especially if some of the $2trn of insurance
it has purchased on that insurance turns out to be with a bank that has gone
under. No bank – and especially not the Vampire Squid – can easily untangle its
tentacles from the tentacles of its peers. This is the rationale for the
bailouts and the austerity, the reason we are getting more Goldman, not less.
The alternative is a second financial crisis, a second economic collapse.
Shared illusions, perhaps? Who would dare test it?
Πηγή : independent.co.uk
Επιμέλεια :
NewsRoom Mykonos Ticker
