Bank World
April 20, 2009
American Conservative Magazine
Bank World
At the conclusion of the G-20 summit in London, leaders announced “a new world order.” President Obama, Gordon Brown, et al promised to scare away our financial calamities with colossal amounts of money—$1.1 trillion was the figure touted. All the globo-feel-goodery couldn’t disguise the lie, however: the Financial Times reported that the new commitments were probably “below $100bn, and most of those were in train without the G-20 summit.”
Yet if the masters of the universe were not able to agree on how widely they might open their taxpayers’ wallets, they could all sing the corporatist tune: a global crisis demands global solutions. In other words, we need more power.
Thus the G-20 delegates introduced a new panacea, the Financial Stability Board, to control “all systemically important financial institutions, instru- ments and markets.” That means those nasty hedge funds, assured the press officers. Yet FSB’s potential remit is far greater and more ominous. All firms may now be subjected to FSB directives on pay, compensation, and “corporate social responsibility.”
Add to that the catalogue of red-tape schemes in the summit’s closing state- ment—cloaked, as usual, by empty words about the perils of protection- ism—and you see emerging a frame- work for global fiscal governance. “The era of banking secrecy is over,” declared the G-20 heads proudly. So, too, per- haps, the wealth of nations.