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January 15, 2013
Greg Smith highlights what business as usual at Goldman Sachs means.
Steve Bell
Smith's core argument is that:
Goldman Sachs and Wall Street had lost sight of their mission: servicing clients. That the culture was rotting, which presented a dire threat to the firm and the industry. When the client no longer trusts the bank, calamity ensues. And that the buck ultimately had to stop with the board of directors and [others] who had turned a blind eye to all that was happening right under their noses, on their watch. They had put the sole pursuit of short-term profits ahead of a reputation that had taken decades to build up, but could be destroyed in an instant. They didn’t fully realise that you can’t just say that you are different and that you put clients first: you actually have to act this way. And if you don’t, the smell of hypocrisy soon starts suffocating your employees and your clients.
The bosses knew there were problems but they wouldn't do anything about it because they were simply making too much money. Wall Street---ie., finance capital--- calls the shots in global capitalism.
Wall Street are the ones saying that the passage from the post-second world war welfare state to new global economy involves painful renunciations, less security, less guaranteed social care for the working poor. They are the apostle's for austerity politics.
Their austerity in response to the Great Recession has proven to be an economic weapon of mass destruction.The losses that austerity causes include reversing growth, causing a recession and increasing unemployment, poverty, inequality, and misery (by cutting spending programs for those in need at the time they most need them). Government stimulus spending to counter a recession, for them, is not about creating demand: it is akin to “sugar,” whose effect is fleeting.
Freedom for finance capital means freedom guaranteeing the freedom of corporations to conduct their affairs as they wished and that that government interference and economic planning leads to tyranny.The state and big corporations are seen as guardians of the neoliberal order. This form of neoliberalism is a theory of how to reengineer the state in order to guarantee the success of the market and its most important participants, modern corporations.
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