We should remember the famous song from Bob Fosse’s film. In the context of “Cabaret”, it forebode nothing good: a kind of end of times, a global agony coupled with a dark crisis of civilization and a vertiginous decline in ethics. In just a few weeks, the world of international finance, which the end of the Cold War had, if one dares say, credited with a sense of omnipotence, pitifully displayed its flaws and incompetencies. Beyond revealing the reckless lightness of bankers, the subprime crisis also allowed for the observation of the shifting of monetary centers of gravity to other geographic areas, as well as a beginning of the reversal of financial flows to the detriment of Western states. Built on reserves fueled by high growth rates—1000 billion dollars for China—or the outcome of exploding oil revenues, the sovereign funds of Abu Dhabi or Singapore today, and those of Beijing or Moscow tomorrow, are called upon to rescue iconic institutions or industries on Wall Street, Zürich or London. They become the subject of all ambivalence: are they solely driven by profit logics, or do they conceal political ulterior motives in controlling the companies in which they invest?
The completely irrational movements of global stock markets, labeled one day as a “crash” only to recover the next day based on rumors about the possible intervention of “credit enhancers,” speak volumes about the logic of immediacy, to say the least, as well as on the relative disconnection of the markets from economic realities. The massive fraud within Société Générale, which reason makes it difficult to attribute solely to a trader, represents a diversion of professionalism in favor of an operation worthy of a gambling streak.
“Global mutation of finances, crumbling of the banking system, lack of long-term vision and obsession with the instant, lack of professionalism,” these are the bitter conclusions drawn by one of the bankers present at the Davos forum. There is no need to go so far. It is enough to read the impressive report from the Commission chaired by Jacques Attali on “the liberation of French growth” to discover a catalog of all the ills affecting our country and list the 316 remedies that should be administered to it. Its guiding principle: a sentence in the introduction: “If the political, economic, commercial, environmental, financial, and social governance of the planet can organize itself, global growth will sustain very durably above 5% per year.” How indeed to explain that despite the good American growth, at least until recently, the term “working poor”—those who must take on two jobs to survive—has emerged on the other side of the Atlantic? How to understand that despite the excellent results of German foreign trade, “statistics show that Germany has become a low-wage country?” As for France, “in 40 years,” explains Jacques Attali, “the annual growth rate of the French economy has dropped from 5% to 1.7% per year while global growth has moved in the opposite direction. According to him, the cause is the conservatism of a political model inherited from the Second World War, the slowness of reforms, and meticulous state regulations—switching from 49 to 50 employees entails applying 34 additional legislations; in short, France has become ‘a society of connivances and privileges’.”
Rest assured: some financiers do not hesitate to explain that these upheavals which they consider beneficial, aim to purify the market, to “sanitize” it. Some of their analysis, the five largest financial institutions on Wall Street, as revealed by a major newspaper, paid their employees $66 billion in 2007, an increase of 9%. Clearly, only the losses will be shared by all. The prestigious closing ball of Davos, offered this year by France, can peacefully open.
