Globalisation
‘Our planet is not balanced. Too few control too much, and too many have too little to hope for. Too much turmoil, too many wars. Too much suffering.’ Depending on who you are, you might think that this is Mother Teresa or Sub-Commandante Marcos of the Zapatistas. Actually, it’s James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, speaking at the joint WB-IMF meeting in Dubai in September this year.
A few days after Wolfensohn got it off his chest, the International Herald Tribune reported that the International Monetary Fund, which bitterly attacked Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammad during the East Asian financial crisis, has since had a rethink. Aw shucks, we were, you know, sort of wrong: ‘The IMF has since accepted that Mahathir’s (capital and currency controls) formula worked.’
Around the same period, the Wall Street Journal came up with this original idea. Well, original for the Journal, anyway. It wrote: ‘Markets are a great way to organise economic activity, but they need adult supervision.’ Now had they figured this out 20 years ago, millions of poor families might have been spared a great deal of misery. Misery brought about precisely by the idea that markets could solve every single problem of the human race. An idea propagated forcefully and ruthlessly by the World Bank, the IMF and the Wall Street Journal.
Any criticism of the market as God these past two decades led to being branded a heretic. The market had all the answers. There was no miracle it could not perform. Some, like Swaminathan Aiyer, argued that markets alone could save the environment. Others, like Time magazine, asserted that hunger was but a function of anti-market systems. Want jobs? Leave it to the market. The market wasn’t just good for democracy. It was Democracy. This was the baloney of the last 15-20 years. There were other possible positions. Such as that you might need the market. As a tool, not as a tyranny. As just one...
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