Since 1980, the share of national income for the bottom 99 percent of workers has decreased by 15 percent. On top of that, the compensation packages for top executives of large companies is 300 times that of the average worker. Forty years ago, executives were compensated a mere 40 times more than the average American worker.
Prostý, ale spíše hluboký, závěr je, že pokud nejsou trhy (a hlavně ty finanční) řádně regulovány, nemohou konat zázraky pro společnost tím, že budou alokovat zdroje vždy tam, kde jsou nejvíce produktivně využity. Máme dostatek teoretických a empirických důkazů, co se stane, pokud je tato pravda narušena.
“To be talking about reducing the state further when effectively what you are doing is reducing taxes like inheritance tax and at the same time you are cutting benefits – that is class war.”
At the same time, there is no shortage of money waiting to be put to productive use. Just a few years ago, Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, talked about a global savings glut. And yet investment projects with high social returns were being starved of funds.
Piketty said that while Germany never repaid its massive debts after both world wars, it has continuously demanded that other nations, especially Greece, pay theirs.
When any one person, or firm, or state saves, that’s individually rational. But if we all do it at once, that’s collectively suicidal. Someone has to spend for there to be an income generated from which someone else can save.
The roots of the crisis lie far away from Greece; they lie in the architecture of European banking. When the euro came into existence in 1999, not only did the Greeks get to borrow like the Germans, everyone’s banks got to borrow and lend in what was effectively a cheap foreign currency. And with super-low rates, countries clamoring to get into the euro, and a continent-wide credit boom underway, it made sense for national banks to expand private lending as far as the euro could reach.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
