Broken banks put state back in the driving seat - FT

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It seems only yesterday that the onward march of the Anglo-American model of liberal capitalism – small government, fiscal prudence, deregulation, flexible and open markets – set the shape and tempo of the global economy. Some European governments fought a long rearguard action against what one of my French friends calls the hyper-capitalism of the “Anglo-Saxons”.

It seems only yesterday that the onward march of the Anglo-American model of liberal capitalism – small government, fiscal prudence, deregulation, flexible and open markets – set the shape and tempo of the global economy. Some European governments fought a long rearguard action against what one of my French friends calls the hyper-capitalism of the “Anglo-Saxons”.

We are watching a bonfire of the old orthodoxies as well as of the vanities. This week Barack Obama promised to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to prop up the sinking US economy. Gordon Brown’s British government announced it would soak the rich to pay for an economic rescue package.

In between times, the Bush administration all but nationalised Citigroup, the world’s largest bank. For good measure it threw another, yes another, $800bn into the effort to thaw US credit markets. Everywhere you look, Keynes’s demand management is replacing Adam Smith’s invisible hand; printing money, a mortal sin under the fracturing Washington consensus, is the new prudence.

Something big is happening. What started out as a series of pragmatic ad hoc responses by governments and central banks is moving the boundary between state and market. Politicians are now overlaying expediency with ideology. Government is no longer a term of abuse.

Things could move still faster in the months ahead. With their myriad rescue schemes and loan guarantees, the US and British governments have nationalised their respective banking systems in all but name. The banks pretend they are still answerable to their shareholders, but it is a charade. They survive only with the explicit financial guarantee of the state.

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2e754acc-bcb3-11dd-af5a-0000779fd18c.html