Conştiinţa Unui Liberal de Stânga

O fobie universală

FT publică azi articolul lui Simon Schama, despre fobia Americii faţă de bănci. Merită citit, pentru a înţelege cum s-a născut fobia asta şi cum a devenit ea universală, în paranteză fie vorba. că nu-mi aduc aminte ca în România cineva să fie în tandreţuri cu banca lui. Doar cine nu are un credit nu ştie cum e să fii umilit şi cu banii luaţi!

Banca era văzută ca un Monstru, iar un preşedinte american, Andrew Jakcson, a fost reales pentru că a avut o campanie bazată pe opozuiţia monstrul vs. Poporul. Iar măsurile luate de el au dus America în pragul anarhiei monetare. În America circulau, cam pe la vremea Războiului Civil, circa 7000 de monede locale! Noroc cu războiul şi nevoia de finanţare a lui, pentru că Lincoln a fost obligat să pună piciorul în prag şi să facă ordine în sistem, în 1862.

Fragmentul ăsta mi-a plăcut, aşa că îl reproduc. Pentru că are o morală: oricât de gravă ar fi o problemă, soluţisa n-o poate da abordarea populistă. Ea doar o agravează.

"They could do worse than to take a look at the $20 bill. For there, breaking into the space separating the words “Federal” from “Reserve” is the cresting mane of Andrew Jackson, the most hair-conscious president of the United States. Aside from cultivating his pompadour as the insignia of a free frontier spirit, his locks tied in an eelskin, the seventh US president was also the sworn enemy of paper currency and central banking. Jackson, who was in the White House from 1829-1837, was a new brand of politician in American life. No one would confuse him with the Virginian gentlemen-planters who had dominated high office in the early republic. He had been Indian fighter, scourge of the British and darling of the frontier crowds. But what really got his dander up was the Bank of the United States, the institution granted the monopoly to print paper money. The “Monster”, he declared at the height of his presidential knock-down battle with its president Nicholas Biddle, “wants to kill me but I will kill it”. And destroy the Bank of the United States Jackson did, vetoing the Senate’s renewal of its charter in 1832 and running for re-election as the champion of People v Monster. The result of the liquidation of monetary regulation was predictable: wildcat speculation. Two months after Jackson left office in March 1837, the second of the great American financial meltdowns was under way (the first was in 1819). Another swiftly followed in 1839 under the administration of Jackson’s hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren. On the eve of the civil war, Jackson’s wish for monetary decentralisation had come true beyond his wildest dreams There were 7,000 local currencies circulating in the republic and an epidemic of counterfeiting. It took Lincoln’s Banking Act of 1862, born of a desperate need for dependable credit to fight the war, for a modicum of monetary order to be salvaged from what Biddle had accurately prophesied would be monetary anarchy."

PS: nu vi se pare că, pe măsură ce se afundă în criză, dolarul devine tot mai căcăniu?