TO say that the international banking system and the world stock markets are in a state described as ‘nervous’ is to do great injustice to the depth of the panic gripping them.
The latest manifestation of their unease is the warning issued over the weekend by their representatives about the dangers of the European Central Bank turning off the tap of free money under its Quantitative Easing programme.
QE was announced last year by the ECB as a last ditch attempt to revive the collapsed capitalist economies of the Eurozone by printing worthless paper money and handing it to the banks.
Under their plan the ECB would pump 60 billion euros (£44 billion) a month to the banks for the next 18 months – a total of nearly 1.1 trillion euros.
QE started just one month ago yet already the banks are screaming that it might be ended before it has run its 18 months course, cutting off their fix of free money and plunging the financial markets into a crash.
The chief economist at Lombard Street Research has been quoted as saying that if the scheme was wound up early it ‘would unravel the corporate earnings story in Europe’.
Experts in the realm of international finance are warning that any move to end QE in Europe would lead to a ‘taper tantrum’ in the world markets.
This refers to the chaos caused in the capitalist markets in 2013 when the US Fed started to warn that it intended to taper off its own QE programme.
Given that the ECB has issued no warnings that it intended to end the scheme prematurely why are the banks and financiers so panic-stricken?
The answer lies in the certain knowledge that all the claims about QE kick-starting the capitalist economies of the Eurozone are about to be shown as worthless.
All this free money, which is supposed to filter down into the economy and boost manufacturing industries, while at the same time forcing down the euro thus making European goods more competitive for export, in fact goes straight into the pockets of the bankers and speculators for them to use on the world markets.
This drives up the price of shares to the unprecedented levels of today – levels that exceed the previously high ones achieved just before the crash of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.
Ending it would indeed not just ‘unravel’ their earnings but drive them into bankruptcy.
This is modern capitalism in its death agony – dominated by an international banking system that survives temporarily on free money handed to it by state central banks, while its propagandists insist that the banking system must be rescued as and when necessary by the working class sacrificing its jobs, wages and the future if its children – so that the bankrupt, historically out-of-date system can survive a little longer, destroying hundreds of millions of lives.
Even the most ardent advocates of QE in Europe agree that at best it is a temporary measure to try and delay a crash.
The German government in particular has insisted that along with QE must come even greater ‘structural reforms’ throughout the Eurozone.
By structural reforms they mean an all out civil war against every single gain made by the working class.
However, it is not just the crisis in the Eurozone. Analysts are warning that the British general election will trigger ‘shocks’ on the stock exchanges for months after the results are in.
They fear that the British workers have had enough and are about to erupt and rise up!
These prophets of doom are not just worried about what party wins, but that the issues that emerge after the election will concentrate the minds of the workers and focus them on the question that the working class must take the power in Britain and elsewhere, as the only way of preventing this crisis-ridden capitalist system dragging humanity over the edge of the abyss.
The bosses and the bankers are haunted by the spectre of the British socialist revolution. There is no doubt that they will shortly experience its reality.
