Global anti-Wall Street Protests, Global Economic Crisis and Global Banking Crisis
The architects of globalization never imagined this scenario. A Wall Street banking crisis in the United States creates a global financial crisis, compelling sovereigns across the world to enact a peculiar and paradoxical policy measure; preserve profligate historical profits of masters of the private banking system, while socializing their losses. This policy of saving the banks by moving their losses onto the balance sheets of nation-states creates a global banking crisis, especially in the Eurozone, due to those banks holding loans from countries that went into deep debt to bail out those same banks. Ireland, to take an example, went from budget surplus to catastrophic fiscal deficits solely due to a decision by Dublin’s politicians to guarantee all the liabilities of their formerly privately-owned and relatively unregulated banks.
The latest policy measure is austerity, forcing the taxpayers to cover the costs of the mounting global economic crisis with higher taxes and cutbacks in social services. The paradox is that these measures negate economic growth, ensuring that the public debt cannot be repaid. All these measures are exacerbating the current and worsening global economic crisis.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, which has now gone global with a rising tide of protests throughout the world, reflects a populace that has seen its economic future being dispossessed. Deprived of hope, and with no confidence in the policymakers in government and oligarchs that largely fund and control political parties in most advanced economies, a growing number of desperate people, especially the younger and emerging generation, see protest as their only option. All these developments feed into each other, leading to a cascading effect of political instability, growing public indebtedness and economic stagnation and contraction. If nothing else, the anti-Wall Street protests are a barometer of an economic and political system in disarray. And perhaps, they are a harbinger of a new age of political unrest and economic misery of prolonged duration.
