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The governments of the Czech Republic and Hungary recently fell almost simultaneously. It was late March and in both cases something happened unusual. The main opposition parties, after having succeeded in undermining the governing coalitions, paradoxically have shown no interest in calling immediate early elections which they would be very likely to win – and thus be able to form their own governments. Instead, all the major parliamentary parties rediscovered common ground for collaboration and decided to form a so-called “government of technocrats” headed and formed by unknown bureaucrats or businessmen with no visible connection to any political party.
I’ve just been reading a great analysis of recent events in Hungary where the economic crisis has produced a strikingly unified action amongst the political class. The political contest that supposedly characterises post-communist democracy in Eastern Europe has magically vanished and the real structures of power and control find themselves foregrounded as the brittle neoliberalism on the periphery of the European system threatens to implode in the face of massive capital flight, shrinking tax revenues and the austerity measures resulting from acceptance of the IMF’s loan. If you transplant the chain of events into the context of British party politics they become rather bizarre. As the New Statesman article puts it,
Bajnai [the New Hungarian Prime Minister] is not a member of any political party, but a friend and former business partner of both Gyurcsány and the SZDSZ leader, János Kóka. Imagine if in Britain the Lib Dems held the balance of power in the next parliament and Nick Clegg installed an old business buddy, who was not an MP, as PM.
However it’s in this apparent absurdity that the ideological logic of neoliberalism stands revealed. The austerity measures demanded – after all, there is no alternative - are claimed to be purely technical and the government is acting post-politically as it shits all over any substantive concept of a democratic politics. In effect you have the suspension of liberal democracy and, for all intents and purposes, a coup on behalf of the economic elite of Hungary. Yet within the symbolic universe of neoliberal parliamentary democracy it’s all perfectly coherent and proper.
Setting up of the “governments of technocrats” is a way of leaving the dirty work of destroying millions of lives of working people to individuals without a direct political allegiance to any parliamentary party and without any responsibility to answer to any of their voters. In reality it is a political coup against all the workers, a method aimed at confusing and disorientating people. It is a cunning move aimed at pushing through drastic austerity programmes, according to the script of world capital and its major institution IMF, euphemistically called “reforms”. How long all this will last is another matter.
A deeply cynical and political move to preempt social transformation through the seizure and consolidation of power can be presented as a formally sound and non-political response to changing circumstances: not only revealing the investment of the entirety of the political class in the maintenance of the status quo – and thus the profoundly hollow nature of substantive democracy – but also the immensely oppressive and quasi-fascist potentialities contained with neoliberal discourses of governance. You can’t help but wonder what similar events in the UK would look like?
As a result, Parliament itself no longer looks like our greatest national institution. Instead, it has been exposed as an organised criminal conspiracy whose primary purpose is to defraud the taxpayer and serve the vested interest of a venal political class.
From the Daily Mail’s website. Where’s this all going to lead? I was listening to a lecture by David Harvey recently where he makes a convincing case that while the financial crisis is unlikely to lead to anything other than a consolidation of class power: witness the recent large-scale acquisitions in finance and beyond, as those left standing rationally take the opportunity to take over fallen rivals on the cheap. However the process of this is likely to engender a new legitimation crisis as the theory and the practice of neoliberalism stand more publicly contrasted than ever before, with the former increasingly represented in the popular consciousness as a facile and deeply ideological legitimation of the latter. The contradictions inherent in it are coming to the fore as, far from there being no alternative, the bail out of the system involves massive coordinated and concerted action of a sort that is so utterly at odds with the fundamental premises of the vast ideological edifice that’s been so painstakingly constructed over the last few decades. In short: (1) people are going to be much less likely to believe this sort of bullshit when the contradictions inherent in it have been so clearly exposes (2) people are going to be much less moved by neoliberalism’s lop-sided conceptions of individual freedom and consumer sovereignty at a time of global recession.
Against this background, what should we make of the current backlash – albeit led by the right-wing press – against MP expenses? The kind of uber-mundane ‘corruption’ of which they’re being accused is very much a product of the managerialism that has come to dominate the political class, understanding themselves as the technocratic stewards of a fundamentally managerial project: governance of a post-industrial nation in a globalised and post-adversarial world. This perhaps accounts for the vacuousness of New Labour’s ‘morality’ as they have attempted to reimpose explicitly moral concerns on a set of institutional and cultural structure that systematically precludes them. I think it’s important that proper criticism doesn’t lead to popular calls to return to the good old days - when politicians were moral and selfless – but rather to tracing out the causal links between large scale economic restructuring over the last few decades and the culture and practice of modern politics. So that far from being a isolated phenomenon, explicable purely in terms of the poor characters of today’s modern politicians – as opposed to the noble statesman in days of yore – they are both symptom of a wider neoliberalization of social life, as well as a major agentive force in entrenching and exasperating that process.
the immediate problem is the financial system. The roots go back to the early 1970s, when finance was liberalized; it was freed from the constraints of the post-war period. Now, the constraints of the post-war period, roughly 1945 to 1970, they were instituted by the United States and Britain for a reason, one, because it was assumed correctly that allowing governments to control capital movements and currencies would provide a basis for rapidly expanding growth and trade and so on, which indeed happened. That’s called the golden age of modern capitalism. Whereas freeing these constraints would retard growth and development, as indeed it has done. But there was a second reason, which isn’t being discussed much: allowing governments to control capital movements provides them with a certain space for introducing what we call welfare state programs. If capital movements are free, attacks on currencies are free, there’s what economists call a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders who actually vote, every minute in fact. If they don’t like what a government is doing, they attack the currency, there’s capital flow…
When the $700 billion bailout was announced, the public was outraged. There was furious objection, so much so that the House of Representatives had to vote it down. Now, on the surface, that looks like an exercise of democracy, but it isn’t. Even in a dictatorship, if the dictator does something outrageous, the public can riot and he’ll have to back down. Now, in a democracy, functioning democracy, what happens is different: not just shouting “no,” which is what happened, but active popular organizations like unions or political clubs or whatever would be coming forth with specific proposals and demanding that their representatives implement them.
And there are proposals; there’s quite a lot of proposals on the table. Joseph Stiglitz, who’s [inaudible] from outer space, made a very simple point. He said if we put money into the banks, pour liquidity into the banks, we can pour it in, and they’ll pour it out—mergers and acquisition, anything—for their own benefit, ’cause that’s what they’re in business for, for their benefit, not for our benefit. So he said we have to have veto power. Well, veto power means voting rights, and if it’s a real democracy, voting rights means popular participation and initiative. Well, the initiative should be coming from the population, like with health care, where the population has definite views. But the country is so depoliticized that popular views are considered politically impossible, lacking political support. Well, that’s what’s called a democratic deficit: formal democratic institutions, but not functioning. And we have to overcome that. That underlies lots of issues.
t’s well known among economists that markets are inefficient from the narrowest perspective. So let’s make it simple. Suppose you sell me a car, okay? We may make a good deal for ourselves, but we’re not taking into account the effect on him. It’s what’s called an externality. And there’s an effect. If you sell me a car, it increases gas prices, it increases pollution, it increases congestion. And that extends very broadly; these so-called externalities can be very large.
Now, in financial institutions it’s far worse. They are in the business of taking risks. If they’re well managed, say, Goldman Sachs, they calculate the potential cost to themselves if there’s a loss. But the important words are “to themselves.” They don’t calculate in what’s called systemic risk, the effect on the whole system if I go bust, you know, and it has a huge effect. The result is that risk-taking is under-priced, meaning there’s a lot more of it than there would be in a reasonable system. And so, therefore, it was predicted right off that when financial liberalization took place, there would be more regular financial crises and deeper ones. And this particular one is accelerated by the fact that there was a subprime housing bubble and many other factors, so it became far more severe than anyone expected. But it’s built into the system. Now, this was kind of combined with a kind of religious market fundamentalism based on doctrines of, you know, self-regulating markets and so on, which are pure fantasy. So the regulatory apparatus was dismantled. Well, that accelerates the pace of potential financial crisis. And along with that came the creation of highly exotic financial instruments.
Well, all of this combined, it was pretty clear the early part of this decade that a major crisis was brewing. Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, refused to prick the bubble as could have been done in simple ways, on the basis of religious belief in self-regulating markets. And finally it came to this catastrophe where there’s a credit freeze, the system’s freezing up. Something has to be done, and it’s interesting what the choices are. It goes back to our earlier discussion. So this morning on the radio, George Bush announced that the government is intervening in the banks, but we want to make sure that we go back to the profit motive, not policy motives, not political motives. What are political motives? Well, that means participation of the population in making decisions. So we hate democracy; we don’t want the public to be involved in decisions about things; we want to go back to the profit motive, meaning that a private tyranny, which is what a corporation is, should look out for itself, not for the public interest.
In fact, since financial liberalization was instituted about thirty five years ago, there has been a trend of increasing regularity of crises and deeper crises, and the reasons are intrinsic and understood. They have to do fundamentally with well understood inefficiencies of markets. So, for example, if you and I make a transaction, say you sell me a car, we may make a good bargain for ourselves, but we don’t take into account the effect on others. If I buy a car from you it increases the use of gas, it increases pollution, it increases congestion, and so on. But we don’t count those effects. These are what are called by economists externalities, and are not counted into market calculations.
These externalities can be quite huge. In the case of financial institutions, they are particularly large. The task of a financial institution is to take risks. Now if it is a well managed financial institution, say Goldman Sachs, it will take into account risks to itself, but the crucial phrase here is to itself. It does not take into account systemic risks, risks to the whole system if Goldman Sachs takes a substantial loss. And what that means is that risks are underpriced. There are more risks taken than should be taken in an efficiently working system that was accounting for all the implications. More, this mispricing is simply built into the market system and the liberalization of finance.
The consequences of underpricing risks are that risks become more frequent, and, when there are failures the costs are higher than taken into account. Crises become more frequent and also rise in scale as the scope and range of financial transactions increases. Of course, all this is increased still further by the fanaticism of the market fundamentalists who dismantled the regulatory apparatus and permitted the creation of exotic and opaque financial instruments. It is a kind of irrational fundamentalism because it is clear that weakening regulatory mechanisms in a market system has a built-in risk of disastrous crisis. These are senseless acts except in that they are in the short-term interest of the masters of the economy and of the society. The financial corporations can and did make tremendous short term profits from pursuing extremely risky actions, including especially deregulation, which harm the general economy, but don’t harm them, at least in the short term that guides planning.
The system we live in should be called state capitalism, not just capitalism. So, take the United States. The economy relies very heavily on the state sector. There is a lot of agony now about socialization of the economy, but that is a bad joke. The advanced economy, high technology and so forth, has always relied extensively on the dynamic state sector of the economy. That’s true of computers, the internet, aircraft, biotechnology, just about everywhere you look. MIT, where I am speaking to you, is a kind of funnel into which the public pours money and out of it comes the technology of the future which will be handed over to private power for profit. So what you have is a system of socialization of cost and risk and privatization of profit. And that’s not just in the financial system. It is the whole advanced economy.
So, for the financial system it will probably turn out pretty much as Stiglitz describes. It is the end of a certain era of financial liberalization driven by market fundamentalism. The Wall Street Journal laments that Wall Street as we have known it is gone with the collapse of the investment banks. And there will be some steps toward regulation. So that’s true. But the proposals that are being made, which are major and severe, nonetheless do not change the structure of the underlying basic institutions. There is no threat to state capitalism. Its core institutions will remain basically unchanged and even unshaken. They may rearrange themselves in various ways with some conglomerates taking over others and some even being semi-nationalized in a weak sense, without infringing much on private monopolization of decision making. Still, as things stand now, property relations and the distribution of power and wealth won’t alter much though the era of neoliberalism operative for roughly thirty five years will surely be modified in a significant fashion.
There is a tremendous amount of mythology to be dismantled here, including the talk about the great growth and escape from poverty which, as I said earlier, isn’t false, but is missing the fact that it took place overwhelmingly in areas that ignored the neoliberal rules, while the areas that kept to the rules are the ones that suffered. The same holds in the U.S. To the extent that the neoliberal rules were applied, it was quite harmful to the majority of the population. So to talk about these matters, we first have to sweep away a lot of mythology and then, when we look, we see that a state capitalist economy that has, particularly since the Second World War, relied very heavily on the state sector, is now returning to reliance on the state sector to manage the collapsing financial system, its collapse being the predictable result of financial liberalization. The underlying institutional structure itself is being modified, but not in fundamental ways.
But if you look at the U.S., even with all the damage Bush has done, it is still the biggest homogeneous economy, with the largest internal market, the strongest and technologically most advanced military force, with annual expenses comparable to the rest of the world combined, and an archipelago of military bases throughout the world. These are sources of continuity even though the neoliberal order is eroding both within the U.S. and Europe and internationally, as there is more and more opposition to it. So there are opportunities for real change, but how far they will go depends on people, what we are willing to undertake.
The simultaneous unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.
The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.
Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.
Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.
The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.
The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.
Financial liberalization has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programs and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalization. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.
The cost of the global rescue package is, as the frontpage of today’s Telegraph screams, over £2 trillion. Britain has pledged £500 billion to bail out its banks, the EU states have committed £1.16 trillion and America has invested £457 billion in an effort which, commentators are finally beginning to remark upon, will undoubtedly have huge ramifications for political debates on taxation and social spending. Presumably this is equally true of defence spending though there will inevitably be more resistance to this and in an increasingly mutlipolar world the geopolitical ramifications will take a generation to fully play themselves out. If this rescue plan does nothing more than restore neoliberalism for business as usual then a truly grievous crime has been committed here.
There’s an interesting article on the Economist website discussing the ambiguities in the French response to the crisis.
There is nonetheless a common thread in European responses to America’s troubles. It goes like this. We always knew that unbridled free markets were a mistake, yet we were derided for saying this; and now we are all paying the price for your excesses. In the face of popular consternation at capitalist decadence, the activist state is newly in fashion—and Europeans are taking the credit for it.
Yet there are doubts whether this will really alter any country’s policies. A good test is France. Judging by his recent declarations, the centre-right MrSarkozy has taken a decidedly leftward turn. In the space of two days, he twice laid into free-market capitalism. “Laissez-faire is finished,” he declared in Toulon. “The all-powerful market that is always right is finished.”
But does this imply a genuine shift of economic policy? In the past Mr Sarkozy has been labelled l’Américain, but in truth Sarkonomics has always defied classification. In industrial policy, he has a long record of supporting state bail-outs. As finance minister in 2004, he fought off European Commission disapproval to use state money to rescue Alstom, an engineering firm. In campaign speeches in 2007, he declared that “free trade cannot be a dogma” and called for financial capitalism to be “moralised”.
Yet Mr Sarkozy has also gone out of his way to press on the French the need to respond to, not deny, globalisation. He has implored the country that invented the 35-hour week to work more, take more initiative and expect fewer hand-outs from the state. He has exempted overtime work from taxes and social charges. He is tightening welfare rules to cut benefits if the jobless refuse more than two reasonable offers of work. He has strengthened the competition watchdog, and made it easier for discount retailers to set up shop. MrSarkozy was elected because French voters knew, however reluctantly, that they had to adapt to global capitalism.
It underscores the risk that the political elites who’ve presided over this mess will capitalize on the anti-finance sentiment that’s been building over the last month with shallow performances rather than substantive policy shifts. It seems the long-term political outcomes of the crisis depend a lot on whether the depoliticization of economic policy we’ve seen in the capitalist world over the last two decades gives to a renewed normative treatment of economic issues. This is why it’s important to resist any attempt to portray the issue as a merely technical one, that it’s simply a flaw in the regulatory architecture of global financial markets rather than a problem in the rather opaque normative assumptions underlying it. I’m just about to listen to this week’s moral maze which (according to the advert) covers the moralization of the crisis: the emerging moral narrative of greed and self-interest inevitably leading to breakdown and anomie. Given I start my PHD on Monday, on moral understanding and socio-economic life, I’m finding this all rather interesting.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich didn’t mince words, either. “You can’t be for capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down, and you can’t be for a welfare state for the rich,” Mr. Gingrich told me last week. “The entire policy from Fannie Mae to AIG is a disaster. We need to recognize that most of the American economy is healthy, but Washington and Wall Street are sick. The politicians here would like to change America to be more like Washington, but we need to change Washington to be like the rest of America,” he said.
Weirdly enough I think he’s right about all of this, even down to localizing the problem in the financial sector. Seeing Gingrich be so outspoken at the current time has left me wondering how much of a divergence there is between the ‘true’ free-market capitalists who are still consistently making their case and opposing the bailout and the neoliberals who’ll happily proclaim it as a development model for the world while it serves their interests yet call upon unprecedented state intervention when this serves their interests too. They may give notional assent to a belief in free-market but how much can they possibly believe in them?
In mid September the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, told an American news network that the developing crisis was “by far” the first he had seen in his entire career. He went on to call it “probably [a] once-in a century type of event” (1). This blunt statement of the severity of the crisis was all the more pronounced given that Greenspan himself, through his stewardship of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, had been a key policy maker throughout the period when, most commentators agree, the crisis began to develop. The Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Joseph Stiglitz argues that “key regulators like Alan Greenspan didn’t really believe in regulation” and played a crucial role in calling for ’self-regulation’ rather than state-intervention to preserve the integrity of financial markets (2). It was assumed that any risks inherent in free-markets would be inevitably be outweighed by the wealth that would be created through freeing corporations from regulatory constraint. There was seen to be no need or right for the state to intervene in financial markets.
Even earlier on this year, as the Credit Crunch began to develop, Greenspan was still using his public role to make this case. He told the Financial Times earlier this year that he hoped “one of the causalities [of the current crisis] will not be reliance on counterparty surveillance, and more generally financial self-regulation, as the fundamental balance mechanism for global finance”(3). Once again it is demanded that financial markets be left alone and for financial institutions to police themselves. Yet all around us, evidence suggests the necessity of regulating financial markets mounts up, as corporate failure after corporate failure leaves those who were previously so vocal in decrying government intervention instead demanding that government’s bail them out. As the argument goes: these institutions are simply too big and too important to be allowed to fail, to let them do so would be a dereliction of the government’s duty towards all those who would be affected by the failure.
Certainly it’s true that the impact of these corporate failures would have serious social consequences given their size and the extent of their business dealings. Even so, bailing them out violates one of the basic principles of market economics: as an Economist article on the crisis put it “capitalism requires people to pay for their mistakes”(4) but not, of course, on this occasion. Since the fall of the USSR, political and economic elites have engaged in a theoretically specious triumphalism about the victory of global capitalism that has simply refused to accept that social considerations may justify market interventions. Yet throughout that time they’ve forcefully campaigned for government intervention when their own risk-adverse behaviour, with the American sub-prime mortgages scandal being the most recent of many examples, places their futures in jeopardy. Essentially, it’s being asked that the risks resulting from the anarchic financial markets that have developed over the past two decades be absorbed by the public while the (vast) profits resulting from them are rightfully private. The fact that these bailouts have largely been unconditional, allowing the corporations involved to simply resume business as usual, has only compounded the problem.
Economics refers to it as ‘moral hazard’: the tendency of parties insulated from risk to act differently from how they would were they full exposed to it. Such moral hazards are endemic in the Anglo-American financial sector and, even with the mounting crisis around us, prominent opinion formers are still decrying the attempt to tackle them. As the MIT Economist Ricardo Caballero argues on his Financial Times blog, letting corporations fail “simultaneously hampers the private sector’s ability to solve the crisis and exacerbates the likelihood of further panics” because the ensuing conception of a climate unamenable to business leaves corporations unwilling to take risks (5). Yet given that it’s the non risk-adverse behaviour of corporations, particularly within the financial sector, that has led to the current crisis, the notion that private risk-taking is a long-term route to macroeconomic stability carries little weight. Rather than trying to prop up a failing system, we should be critically scrutinizing the assumptions that underlie the arrangement of Anglo-American capitalism over the last two decades. It’s impossible to ignore the immense growth of wealth within the UK and America over that time but it’s important to look at how that wealth is created and how it is distributed. With the decline in British industry, the growing financial services sector has come to be a crucially important sector of the British economy, currently representing 9.4% of UK GDP (6).
However much of this growth has come about as a result of an unparalleled program of financial deregulation instituted by the Thatcher government and known as the ‘big bang’ (7). The sudden freeing of finance capitalism from long-standing regulatory constraints is at the root of much of the irresponsible business practice that has led to the current crisis. Likewise, at the start of Margaret Thatcher’s government, the richest fifth of the population accounted for 43 per cent of all earned income, and the poorest fifth 2.4 per cent. In 1996, the last year of the Conservative government, the figures were 50 per cent and 2.6 per cent respectively. In 1996, the last year of the Conservative government, the figures were 50 per cent and 2.6 per cent respectively. As the Cambridge political scientist Noreena Hertz puts it, “the poor are getting a smaller slice of a much bigger pie”(8). Moreover, it’s getting more difficult for the disadvantaged to get a bigger slice of the pie. A recent LSE study found social mobility in Britain to be lower than all the western democracies other than the America. As the authors put it, “while the gap in opportunities between the rich and poor is similar in Britain and the US, in the US it is at least static, while in Britain it is getting wider”(9).
The last twenty years of Anglo-American capitalism has led to greater wealth but greater inequality and greater insecurity. Politicians and opinion-formers are reluctantly confronting the issue but new regulation has thus far been designed to smooth the current crisis rather than to confront the problems underlying it. Genuine national debate on these issues has for too long been obscured by fuzzy ideological fault lines of capitalism/socialism yet in a world of declining western power we have a new opportunity to reconsider the economic life of the nation. After all, the Great Depression led to the New Deal in America, as the massive social harm caused by excessive corporate power led to a profound reorientation of American economic life. Does the current crisis not present us with a similar opportunity?
1 http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=631251
2 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/17/stiglitz.crisis/
3 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/edbdbcf6-f360-11dc-b6bc-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
4 http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=12263158
5 http://blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/07/moral-hazard-misconception/
6 http://www.bba.org.uk/bba/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=145&a=12022
7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)
8 Hertz, N (2002) The Silent Takeover p. 59
9http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.htm
