Over the past few days, bank share prices nose-dived again. In the space of just one week, RBS lost 72%, Barclays 55%, Lloyds 54% and HSBC lost 26%. The plunge in RBS shares is said to be the biggest in British corporate history.
But when the bankers snapped their fingers, Brown and Darling immediately jumped to attention. Within hours, they had come up with a third rescue package for the banks! This time they say it is meant to insure the banks' "toxic assets". In other words, what will be "covered", in the main, are the crazy bets placed by the banks over the past years - which, of course, have now turned out to be worthless.
But this latest bail-out is hardly chicken feed. Added to the others, it is a bit as if Brown has undertaken to refund every single non-winning lottery ticket ever since he came to power! Except that the bankers' bets are far bigger!
To all intents and purposes he is now saying to the bosses: " don't you worry your little heads about any further losses, because we will be there to cover them for you, with public funds"!
The economy's lifeblood is jobs!
Officially, this latest bail-out is meant to "encourage" the banks to lend money to businesses and home buyers. But was that not the pretext for the 2 previous rescue packages? And yet nothing materialised - despite hundreds of billions in public funds - taxpayers' money - already going into the banks coffers!
Why? Because, surprise, surprise, while offering our money to the banks, the government fails each time to introduce a mechanism to force the banks to do anything in return. Many of the pundits have pointed this out, and ask why banks are not being forced somehow to start offering loans again.
But besides his refusal to upset the finance sector by imposing any conditions on the banks, this time, the rescue package is primarily aimed at those capitalists who own the real money. It is to reassure them, since they have been pulling their money out of the banking system over the past period, thus limiting the amount of available cash that the banks have to play with.
That said, we are told that this latest bail-out, which is probably equivalent to the government's entire transport budget, is not designed to "save the banks", but to do far more than this - it is to "save the economy"! Except that the life blood of the economy is jobs. And the very same banks which have already been receiving hundreds of billions of pounds are themselves responsible for 1000s of job cuts - including those which the government has part-nationalised - like Northern Rock and RBS. But now Barclays has just announced 4,000 job cuts - after rushing out its profits statement for 2008 to explain that its profits will be "well ahead" of the £5.3 billion previously estimated!
Emergency measures are needed!
So, surely the emergency measure which is needed most urgently, is one which will prevent the current tidal wave of job cuts taking place in every single part of the economy? It is obvious that no matter how many billions the government pours into the banks' coffers, the bankers, whose job it is to make the quickest possible buck on behalf of their big shareholders, cannot be trusted to use their funds to preserve jobs. Not any more than companies can be trusted to save jobs, regardless of the subsidies they receive!
In fact the main factor causing economic paralysis today is the atomisation of existing financial reserves between competing banks, who use these solely to make profits. And there is only one cure for it. Definitely an emergency measure - the nationalisation of the whole banking system, within a single entity, owned by the state, but above all, controlled by its employees.
We have to mobilise our ranks
Such a nationalisation would not just allow a more rational organisation of the economy, allowing the pooling of all reserves - and their investment where needed - but it would also cost society a lot less than the current, on-going bail-outs of the banks! Especially as there would be no need and no justification for shareholders to be compensated.
Of course, no-one can be under any illusion that Brown, his government or the other politicians of the capitalist class, would ever implement such a policy. Not unless they were compelled to do so - by a large-scale mobilisation of our ranks..!