Bankocracy

Description

This great book with its ugle title tells an ugly tale beautifully. Vast, Deep, sweeping and indispensable. – James K Galbraith, author of Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe.

Governments of the most industrialised countries have dramatically increased their public debt to bail out the private banks after the most disastrous economic and financial meltdown in capitalist history since the 1930s. Paying debts and reducing fiscal deficits have become the perfect pretexts to enforce austerity measures everywhere. The Troika (European Commission, ECB and IMF) and all EU governments have launched an unprecedented attack on the social and economic rights of their peoples. This book will enable the reader to understand how the crisis developed: the consequences of deregulating the banking system, the logic underpinning private banks’ responses, and the crimes they perpetrate on a daily basis with the collusion of governments and central banks. It argues for socialisation, rather than ‘nationalisation’, of the banking sector so that it becomes a proper public service under citizen control and monitoring. It argues for the cancellation of illegitimate public debt that largely results from bank bail-outs. It uses simple straightforward language to make it possible for anyone to understand the current crisis and see coherent alternatives to current policies.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist. Several of his books have been published in more than a dozen languages and have become reference works on questions of debt and the international financial institutions: Debt, the IMF and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers (2010); The World Bank: A Critical Primer (2008); Your Money or Your Life (2005).

Review

http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/time-to-dump-greed-for-need/article18950836.ece