The banks won’t be opening on Monday

Let us make no mistake: the massive economic imbalances and inequalities are not an anomaly but well and try integral to the system itself. Capital has of course always garnered more power than work, but this phenomenon is now reaching quite terrifying levels. It only needed a virus to destabilise – irreparably I think – the structure that is at great risk of imploding as soon as the rug of liquidities created by banks is swept from under it. Obviously, no one is ever really ready for such exogenous crashes. However, the widespread, guilt-laden madness of the last twenty years and this intolerable greed of gain that makes us tiptoe around an erupting volcano – and take pleasure in doing so! – are only serving to accelerate the system’s collapse, when both society and its leaders are everything but ready for the disaster that lurks around the corner. 

So who will be able to do anything when stock markets crash by 50 or 60%, when credit is strictly rationed, when employment reaches historic lows, and when the effects of central bank stimulus packages – by definition temporary – start to wither away? No one will then be inclined to take on any risk and therefore to make any investment, which would in no case be rescued by banks that would basically all be endemically fragile. Salvation is no longer to be expected from our central banks that will have exhausted everything in their armoury and that will have no other alternative than to trigger the devastation of negative interest rates, indicating a true paradigm shift. Don’t get your hopes up either for governments that are now all overindebted after the pandemic, of which some – and not the smaller ones – will go bankrupt due to the costs required to fund their way of life that they will no longer be able to afford thanks to the surge in rates and the credit crisis.

This won’t be anything like the crisis of 2008 that saw an unprecedented dissolving of assets and a destructive loss of confidence among operators that had literally frozen all financial markets, and therefore the whole economy. The dominoes will fall one after another, with a disconcerting ease. Once somehow propped up by our governments and central banks, this catastrophe will spread absolute panic throughout, which will lead to the use of money being halted, including with bank cards. No, the banks won’t be opening on Monday. This “invisible hand” that is meant to bring us wealth and progress – that is in truth nothing more than just the market – must therefore quickly be restrained, or even erased, because so far it has only succeeded in creating financial, commercial and ecological inequality. This fallible human construction – that has failed – has only protected its own kind: investors, speculators, creditors. Governments must now act as if we were at war: nationalise finance, bring capital back from offshore, and keep strict control over the flow of money and over exchange rates. To preserve our way of life.