Thread by @CliveWismayer

A recent history of capitalism (thread)

1981 collapse of BCCI, ‘the Paki bank’ - oh well, when you let the darkies get involved in banking, what do you expect?

1995 collapse of Barings - just a working class rogue trader, the wrong sort (never mind the greedy, incompetent ..

.. managers who failed to find out the secret of his ‘success’)

2001 Enron collapses amid a welter of fraud
2002 World Com collapses, ditto
2002 Arther Andersen, Enron’s accountants, fold - heh, well, these things happen

2007 & the years leading thereto - free money ..

.. floods the west, coming from China & Japan. Great! What to do with it? I know! Encourage a massive binge of mortgage & credit card borrowing, especially sub-prime, then bundle the resulting crap into complicated CDOs, get the ratings agencies to rate the shit triple-A & ..

.. palm it off to banks, their clients, pension funds, local & city governments & voila!

2008 shit hits fan. Lehman Bros. folds, confidence in & between the banks collapses, some banks (Northern Rock) face a run by nervous depositors.

Govt. to the rescue! Hundreds of ..

.. billions are advanced to keep the banks afloat. Rules are tightened. But, now the govts’ own credit is in question. Lenders not confident in govts that waste money on pointless crap like schools, hospitals & welfare for poor people. Hence ..

AUSTERITY!
..

Austerity creates discontent. Discontent must be channelled. Into what? A communist revolution? No, into hatred of the EU & foreigners.

2016 it turns out nationalism & populism are much more potent than anyone thought - the UK votes to leave the EU. Wow.

2016-20 the ..

scammers realise they can cash in bigtime by completely deregulating employment, consumer & environmental protections, thereby making more profit. They can also swing things so as to pay no taxes, on the back of a hoodwinked public.

This is where we are now, with ..

.. farmers waking up to what has been done to them, but not much sign of many other sectors realising the scale of the fraud.

But it’s all a single continuum of permanent fraud, going back to the relatively insignificant BCCI collapse to the huge crashing waves ..

.. of turbulence in recent times, the crisis always getting bigger.

Remember this when demented zealots like Daniel Hannan start prating about free markets. And remember who we elected to be our PM. Capitalism does not work - except for the rich.

End

As many have kindly pointed out, BCCI folded in 1991, not ‘81, which makes the timeline even stronger. Apologies for the error.

Oh, one more thing. I picked on Hannan but forgot why. He was widely quoted in 2016 saying ‘no one is talking about leaving the single market or the customes union’, which kinda bears out my theory that the scammers did not at that time realise what they were onto. They do now.