Uno spettro si aggira per il mondo: Marx? No, il ritorno in pianta stabile del Turbo-Capitalismo.
Lo profetizza FZ tracciando un canovaccio che si ripete:
1. I profeti di sventura annunciano la Fine.
2. Come orologi fermi che una volta al giorno segnano l' ora giusta, capita che c' azzecchino.
3. Nel pieno della buriana invocano riforme radicali affinchè nulla sia più come prima.
4. Le loro ricette vengono trascurate e si riparte recuperando presto il terreno perduto.
1987-1997-1998-2000-2008... sempre la stessa storia.
Consider our track record over the past 20 years, starting with the stock-market crash of 1987, when on Oct. 19 the Dow Jones lost 23 percent, the largest one-day loss in its history. The legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that he just hoped that the coming recession wouldn't prove as painful as the Great Depression. It turned out to be a blip on the way to an even bigger, longer boom. Then there was the 1997 East Asian crisis, during the depths of which Paul Krugman wrote in a Fortune cover essay, "Never in the course of economic events—not even in the early years of the Depression—has so large a part of the world economy experienced so devastating a fall from grace." He went on to argue that if Asian countries did not adopt his radical strategy—currency controls—"we could be looking at?.?.?.?the kind of slump that 60 years ago devastated societies, destabilized governments, and eventually led to war." Only one Asian country instituted currency controls, and partial ones at that. All rebounded within two years.
Each crisis convinced observers that it signaled the end of some new, dangerous feature of the economic landscape. But often that novelty accelerated in the years that followed. The 1987 crash was said to be the product of computer trading, which has, of course, expanded dramatically since then. The East Asian crisis was meant to end the happy talk about "emerging markets," which are now at the center of world growth. The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998—which then–Treasury secretary Robert Rubin described as "the worst financial crisis in 50 years"—was meant to be the end of hedge funds, which then massively expanded. The technology bubble's bursting in 2000 was supposed to put an end to the dreams of oddball Internet startups. Goodbye, Pets.com; hello, Twitter. Now we hear that this crisis is the end of derivatives. Let's see. Robert Shiller, one of the few who predicted this crash almost exactly—and the dotcom bust as well—argues that in fact we need more derivatives to make markets more stable.
Sempre la stessa storia tranne che nel 1929. Lì con FDR ci fu una reazione radicale che tentò di mutare il paradigma. E mal ce ne incolse: ci volle un quarto di secolo e una guerra mondiale per uscire dal pantano di quelle riforme mortifere.
