Tag Archive for 'Will Hutton'

Unlocking the metaphor of frozen interbank lending

Published
by
dk.au
1 year, 5 months ago
in Markets, Sociology and Technology
. 13 Comments

Tony Jones asked Will Hutton last night whether the interbank credit market was “run by cowboys or run by reputable people?” But between these two moral poles is enormous material and cultural complexity:

If a bank wants to borrow money, a broker needs quickly to find someone prepared to lend at an attractive rate; if a bank wants to lend, he – it’s a predominantly male profession – needs to find a borrower ready to pay a good rate. So a broker needs continuously to know who wants to borrow, who is prepared to lend, and on what terms. As one of them said to me, a broker might ‘speak to his big clients … have conversations with them maybe twenty-five times a day, which is twenty-five times as often as they speak to their wives’.
A broker needs to pass information to his clients as well as to receive it: that’s a major part of what they want from him, and a good reason to use the voicebox rather than the screen.

Continue reading ‘Unlocking the metaphor of frozen interbank lending’

The state of capitalism today II

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 5 months ago
in Apocalypse, Disasters, Economics, Europe, Foreign Elections, International, Markets, Media, Nationalism, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 28 Comments

SocProf over at The Global Sociology Blog and I must be reading the same things, and thinking along similar lines, because I had planned to link to precisely the same articles she highlights in an update to my recent post on the state of the global financial crisis.

In The Guardian, Will Hutton explains why measures to halt the cascading crisis have been ineffectual to date. He might have made more explicit the implication that one of the basic structural problems is that action taken at the level of the nation state can be counter-productive given the disseminations and movements of capital, and that there are real domestic political barriers to coordinated action, as well as all the obvious problems of concertation through institutions such as the EU and the G20.

But he does make this point – harmonising with the note I’ve been sounding repeatedly – very clearly indeed:

There was no effective opposition. The left and organised labour collapsed as intellectual, social and political forces; there was no conviction that any alternative to this shareholder value-driven, financial, ’securitised’ capitalism existed, or any political muscle to support it even if there were. Mainstream culture moved away from public purpose and fairness; the new priorities were individual self-fulfilment, personal experience and loyalty to self.

Hutton is perhaps more sanguine than I am, though, about the capacity of state action to turn all this around. Continue reading ‘The state of capitalism today II’