The first update I want to offer to you today has to do with an anniversary. To
be precise, the 10th anniversary of the collapse of one of the oldest banks in
the United States: Lehman Brothers bank. It collapsed in September of the year
2008 and it was the kind of celebrated beginning of the crash of global
capitalism that really got going in those last three months of 2008 and into
2009 and 10. It may come as a shock to you but that was ten years ago. We are
now September 2018 and so there's a fitting opportunity to reflect on the
ten years since that crash of economics of a capitalist system, the second worst
crash in capitalism's history exceeded only by the Great Depression that began
in 1929 and did not end until 1941. Well, what is a retrospective? What is a sense
of the last ten years? I'm gonna take you very quickly through the highlights
because it's an important date and an important 10 years. The first thing that
happened after Lehman Brothers bank collapsed and basically took the whole
capitalist system with it, was that the banks (the biggest ones in this country:
Wells Fargo, City Bank, Goldman Sachs, all of them) did this remarkable thing I want
to remind you of. Having given speeches all the time, their leaders, who had in
their speechifying explained how 'the government doesn't know what it's doing
and that the best the government can do is let the bankers do their own thing
and private capitalism is its own engine of growth' all that kind of talk, all
these leaders of all these big banks discovered by early October of 2008 that
they were bankrupt and couldn't function. So they all got in their limousines or
their airplanes and went to Washington begging the government that they had
made fun of to save them. And the first thing that that government did was to
bail them out. That's what the rest of 2008, '09, '10 were all
about: saving the banks. And they did that by providing them with enormous amounts
of money and credit which they could not have gotten any other way.
So we had the most enormous bailout of our financial system, bankrupt by its own
actions, that we've ever seen. When the government was finished spending wild
amounts of money to bail out the banks it turned around and told the rest of us
that now that they had spent all this money on bailing out capitalism they
couldn't spend money on us. And so they imposed on us something called 'austerity'.
Well, in Europe they called it austerity. They tend to call things by what they
are. Here we called it 'prudent fiscal policy' but it amounted to the same thing.
The government went then to work to rebuild the big corporations, bailing
them out (General Motors, American International
Group, things like that), and there was a recovery for rich people. It's been going
on the last ten years. The result, since there was austerity for the mass of
people and a recovery and bailouts for the rich, that inequality in this country,
itself a cause of the crash, became worse over the last ten years than it was in
the years preceding the crash. It's like the banks in the heat of the crash we
said "my god they're too big to fail. We have to bail them out. They're too big to
fail. Something should be done about it". Well, nothing was. So today those same
banks are bigger than they were then when it was thought that they were too
big. And so where are we? Where does the retrospective that 10
years leave us? Well, JP Morgan, the largest bank in the United States, just this last
week released a report predicting that the next financial crash will happen in
the year 2020, less than a year and a half from right now. What a comment. Very
little learned, nothing changed. The unstable capitalist system that crashed
in 2008 is threatening us with doing it again. If you don't learn from history
you will be condemned to repeat it.