A Banking Union - out of the frying pan; into the fire

The bulk of the Irish elite are sleep walking the country into an Eurozone banking union

“Ireland holds the undesirable position of being the only country currently undergoing a banking crisis that features among the top-ten of costliest banking crises along all three dimensions [..fiscal cost, increase in debt and output loss..], making it the costliest banking crisis in advanced economies since at least the Great Depression. And the crisis in Ireland is still ongoing”
(Laeven and Valencia, 2012: 19-20)

“That in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole”
Bunreacht na hÉireann, Article 45, Directive Principles of Social Policy

The bulk of the Irish elite are sleep walking the country into an Eurozone banking union. A European Council meeting on 19th and 20th December is expected to take significant steps towards the creation of this union which has been correctly described as the most significant step in EU integration since the introduction of the Euro.

Such a union would mean that control of banks and banking would be shifted to the supranational level so that big banks in the big EU countries could more easily gobble up the small banks in the smaller, while simultaneously taking another step on the road to fiscal and political union. Having given up the power to issue money by joining the Eurozone, advocates of banking union would pass control of credit in Ireland to banks outside the country.

An Eurozone banking union would progressively deprive national states of the ability to make banking and credit creation serve national developmental goals. It would make it impossible to insist that Irish banks should subscribe to its State debt.

Irish people do not need to be educated about the fact that we live under a system in which the interests of peoples and states are subordinated to those of bankers by the bulk of national politicians. This is now manifest in an immense burden of debt which now rests on governments, private citizens and business firms in countries such as Ireland. This situation has not altered by the country’s exit from the Troika programme.

Low-income workers, for instance, are heavily concerned about pensions, savings, and insurance. The burden of debt - both mortgage and personal - has become a permanent fixture of modern life. Meanwhile, inequality has been exacerbated by bankers and financiers earning astronomical incomes while the costs of crisis continues as a burden on society. 

The crisis has been a systemic upheaval rather than just the result of poor regulation, or of speculative excesses of finance. It was a crisis of financialised capitalism. Thus it will not be solved by the creation of a Banking Union. The traditional role of the capitalist financial system is to support development by mobilising loanable capital, which is then advanced to industrial enterprises. Contemporary finance mobilises idle money across society to earn a large part of its profits by concentrating on financial transactions or lending to individual workers. Under financialisation the circulation of money penetrates into every niche, even the most minor, of social and personal life. Banks have transformed themselves. They have rebalanced their lending toward individuals; they have also turned to fees and commissions from operating in open financial markets, rather than earning interest from outright lending. Thus, banks have added investment banking to their usual commercial banking activities. 

Meanwhile, public provision in pensions, housing, education, health, and so on, has retreated, forcing people to seek private provision from banks and other financial institutions. Attitudes to debt and private financial gain have also changed, encouraging workers to borrow as well as get caught in housing bubbles. 
Also large corporations in Ireland and more generally have been financing investment largely out of retained profits, while also being able to obtain external finance in open markets. They have become less dependent on banks; indeed, they possess independent capacity to engage in financial operations for their own profit. Small and medium sized businesses have not had this facility.

Rethinking the financial system is an urgent systemic and political task for what is left of Irish Democracy. Given the financialisation of our economies reorganising finance could have major ramifications for both economy and society. There could be immediate benefits for workers and others in terms of employment, housing, education, health and consumption. More broadly, finance could be restructured in ways that facilitate greater popular control, thus helping the struggle to transform the economy in a progressive direction.

It is glaringly obvious that democracy is absent from the financial sphere, with financial institutions being based on unbridled greed. The results for society have been catastrophic. A Banking Union would perpetuate this state of affairs rather than laying the basis for a progressive and humane alternative. As such it should be vigorously opposed.

Kevin McCorry

Check out more news and analysis in the latest Peoples' News:
http://www.people.ie/news/PN-95.pdf

First published on Indymedia.ie http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104369

Graphic from http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/may2010/irish_pyramid_of_crony_capitalism.png

A Banking Union - out of the frying pan; into the fire

The bulk of the Irish elite are sleep walking the country into an Eurozone banking union

“Ireland holds the undesirable position of being the only country currently undergoing a banking crisis that features among the top-ten of costliest banking crises along all three dimensions [..fiscal cost, increase in debt and output loss..], making it the costliest banking crisis in advanced economies since at least the Great Depression. And the crisis in Ireland is still ongoing”
(Laeven and Valencia, 2012: 19-20)

“That in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole”
Bunreacht na hÉireann, Article 45, Directive Principles of Social Policy

The bulk of the Irish elite are sleep walking the country into an Eurozone banking union. A European Council meeting on 19th and 20th December is expected to take significant steps towards the creation of this union which has been correctly described as the most significant step in EU integration since the introduction of the Euro.

Such a union would mean that control of banks and banking would be shifted to the supranational level so that big banks in the big EU countries could more easily gobble up the small banks in the smaller, while simultaneously taking another step on the road to fiscal and political union. Having given up the power to issue money by joining the Eurozone, advocates of banking union would pass control of credit in Ireland to banks outside the country.

An Eurozone banking union would progressively deprive national states of the ability to make banking and credit creation serve national developmental goals. It would make it impossible to insist that Irish banks should subscribe to its State debt.

Irish people do not need to be educated about the fact that we live under a system in which the interests of peoples and states are subordinated to those of bankers by the bulk of national politicians. This is now manifest in an immense burden of debt which now rests on governments, private citizens and business firms in countries such as Ireland. This situation has not altered by the country’s exit from the Troika programme.

Low-income workers, for instance, are heavily concerned about pensions, savings, and insurance. The burden of debt - both mortgage and personal - has become a permanent fixture of modern life. Meanwhile, inequality has been exacerbated by bankers and financiers earning astronomical incomes while the costs of crisis continues as a burden on society. 

The crisis has been a systemic upheaval rather than just the result of poor regulation, or of speculative excesses of finance. It was a crisis of financialised capitalism. Thus it will not be solved by the creation of a Banking Union. The traditional role of the capitalist financial system is to support development by mobilising loanable capital, which is then advanced to industrial enterprises. Contemporary finance mobilises idle money across society to earn a large part of its profits by concentrating on financial transactions or lending to individual workers. Under financialisation the circulation of money penetrates into every niche, even the most minor, of social and personal life. Banks have transformed themselves. They have rebalanced their lending toward individuals; they have also turned to fees and commissions from operating in open financial markets, rather than earning interest from outright lending. Thus, banks have added investment banking to their usual commercial banking activities. 

Meanwhile, public provision in pensions, housing, education, health, and so on, has retreated, forcing people to seek private provision from banks and other financial institutions. Attitudes to debt and private financial gain have also changed, encouraging workers to borrow as well as get caught in housing bubbles. 
Also large corporations in Ireland and more generally have been financing investment largely out of retained profits, while also being able to obtain external finance in open markets. They have become less dependent on banks; indeed, they possess independent capacity to engage in financial operations for their own profit. Small and medium sized businesses have not had this facility.

Rethinking the financial system is an urgent systemic and political task for what is left of Irish Democracy. Given the financialisation of our economies reorganising finance could have major ramifications for both economy and society. There could be immediate benefits for workers and others in terms of employment, housing, education, health and consumption. More broadly, finance could be restructured in ways that facilitate greater popular control, thus helping the struggle to transform the economy in a progressive direction.

It is glaringly obvious that democracy is absent from the financial sphere, with financial institutions being based on unbridled greed. The results for society have been catastrophic. A Banking Union would perpetuate this state of affairs rather than laying the basis for a progressive and humane alternative. As such it should be vigorously opposed.

Kevin McCorry

Check out more news and analysis in the latest Peoples' News:
http://www.people.ie/news/PN-95.pdf

First published on Indymedia.ie http://www.indymedia.ie/article/104369

Graphic from http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/may2010/irish_pyramid_of_crony_capitalism.png

The Austerity Treaty (and its discontents)

One aspect of the voting pattern in the referendum on the Fiscal Compact Treaty on 31 May last that was strangely remarked upon by, among others, the Financial Times and the Economist was what the Financial Times called the “class divide” that it revealed.

Five constituencies voted No, three of them Dublin working-class constituencies—Dublin North-West, Dublin South-West, and Dublin South-Central—and the two Donegal constituencies. Academic gurus were cited as finding a growing “left-right” divide in Irish politics, caused by austerity.

Four major unions—UNITE, the TEEU, Mandate, and the CPSU—campaigned for a No vote, on the grounds that the Fiscal Compact regime would not create jobs and is in effect anti-worker.

The referendum clearly revealed an understandable measure of alienation among a section of the working class at the price that it is being forced to pay by the present economic crisis.

But that alienation was not a sufficient basis on which to mobilise a No majority in the referendum, much less to build a politics that can get the country out of the crisis.

The Yes campaign was based on the usual combination of patronage and blather but also skilfully used the fear that a No vote would cut the country off from access to economic recovery. A No vote would mean the country being barred from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

The No campaign emphasised austerity but largely failed to bring home the fact that there were significant issues about the European Stability Mechanism.

There was little understanding that constitutionally the ESM Treaty and the amendment to an existing EU treaty authorising the ESM Treatyrequire a further referendum in Ireland, and that politically the EU treaty amendment provides Ireland with a veto that is a powerful bargaining card with which to bargain for relief on the private bank debt.

Compliant media failed to tell the people that in fact the ESM was much more complex than what it was being portrayed as, and that in fact “best boy and girl in the class” behaviour can get us nothing but more and more austerity.

Enda Kenny’s reflections a couple of days after the referendum are very revealing about how he understands his role as head of the government of what its constitution still describes as a “sovereign, democratic, independent State.” He proclaimed that the Yes majority “strengthened Dublin’s hand in its negotiations in Europe over introducing measures to boost growth and in dealing with the tens of billions of euros of bank debt that Ireland had assumed during the crisis.”

He was probably not even aware of how ironic his statement was. In four years the state will be marking the hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Proclamation, which asserts “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies.” The great and the good of the state will be dancing at the crossroads to mark the event.

Having to “negotiate” with others so as to be able to “introduce measures to boost growth” is clearly not the mark of “unfettered control,” nor is having to lay out 40 per cent of the state’s GDP to bail out banks on the instructions of others an assertion of “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland.”

But even more bizarre was the admission made a few days before the referendum by the Fianna Fáil leader Mícheál Martin about the blanket bank guarantee by the Fianna Fáil and Green Party coalition government on 30 September 2008, which shifted the debt of insolvent private banks onto Irish taxpayers: “We did it for the euro . . . We did it to prevent contagion across the euro zone.”

As a historian, Mr Martin would be aware of another act by Ireland as a small nation in the interests of a great-power enterprise. The price paid was of a different kind, but in both cases the action was not truly a self-determined one but rather that of a dependent.

On 20 September 1914, a little over a month after the outbreak of the First World War, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party in the British House of Commons, made his call at Woodenbridge, Co. Wicklow, for Irishmen to fight for the British Empire “wherever the firing-line extends.”

Many answered his call, and nearly fifty thousand were killed.

Same man—different message

Speaking in Paris last week, Leo Varadkar said that Ireland has paid a high price for being in the euro in not being able to inflict losses on bank bond-holders, and that if this country had not been in the euro such bond-holders in Irish banks would have been “burned.”

“Without the backing and restraints of the ECB we would certainly have had to embark on more aggressive bank resolution policies, which would have meant passing on major losses to financial institutions here in Paris and elsewhere,” he continued, obviously feeling that it was safe enough to spell out in Paris a reality that he would not dare tackle at home.

It’s straightforward enough, really. As he said. “Being part of the euro also prevented the Government from devaluing our currency, which would have enabled us to ease the burden of the financial crisis.

“Had it not been for our membership of the euro and the constraints that go with it, Ireland would have pursued, and would have had to pursue, very different policies. We would certainly have devalued our currency, giving us an unfair competitive advantage over our neighbours.”

But surely if one’s loyalty is to ones own country, whose people elected you to government, you would act in their interest first? Instead we are treated to this outstanding example of Europhilia in a government minister. Needless to remark, devaluation is all about competitive advantage, so Leo wasn’t really serious.

But he was serious enough when he said last month that he is concerned that a referendum on the planned EU Permanent Austerity Treaty would focus not on its content but on domestic issues. He said he did not think referendums are “very democratic,” and that, by and large, referendum campaigns in the past were never about what they are supposed to be about. He would be concerned that a vote on the EU plan would focus on extraneous issues, such as septic tanks, bond-holders, the banking crisis, or Government cut-backs.

Enough!