IN what must be the most blinding statement of the obvious, senior members of the Bank of England admitted yesterday that they did not have a clue about the next financial crash, apart from the fact that one was well on the way.
This admission came from Gertjan Vlieghe a leading policy maker on the Bank’s monetary policy committee who was appearing before MPs to try and explain why all the economic forecasts have proved so disastrously wrong.
Explaining why the Bank had completely missed the historic crash of the banks and world financial system in 2008, Vlieghe informed the MPs that they were certain of missing the next big one as well saying: ‘We are probably not going to forecast the next financial crisis, or forecast the next recession. Our models are just not that good.’
His admission that the Bank with all its highly paid experts in bourgeois economics were in fact completely useless when it comes to understanding capitalism’s crisis was reinforced by the Bank’s chief economist Andy Haldane. Haldane was forced to concede at the same hearing that the Bank found it difficult to convey a sense of uncertainty to the wider world, saying: ‘We know that people find risk hard to understand; I find it hard to understand.’
In that brief and somewhat agonising admission, Haldane has expressed all the despair of those responsible for trying to keep a bankrupt British capitalist system from complete and utter collapse. They know full well that a cataclysmic crash is coming; all the signs are there regardless of what their ‘models’ tell them.
Ever since the crash of 2008, every central bank has been forced to print or rather, electronically conjure up, trillions of worthless dollars, pounds, euros and yen in order to keep the banks and financial system of capitalism from going bust. All this orgy of worthless money has simply built up debt to a colossal amount.
It has created even bigger financial bubbles throughout the world whereby stock markets boom and billions are made on paper, while at the same time manufacturing industry collapses and the working class are hammered by austerity.
This is the truth, that Haldane and his fellow economists find it hard to understand and even harder to accept that the capitalist financial crisis is already here and that it cannot be resolved through the weapons of bourgeois economics. In short, they know that a banking crash is on the immediate agenda and along with it, revolution.
The capitalist class will not simply throw in the towel and leave the scene of history. Their tame economists may not understand what is going on but the ruling class is certain that in any financial Armageddon they will survive at the expense of the working class.
They know instinctively that this crisis can only be resolved in a class war with workers to dump its full effects on them through the most savage austerity cuts, cuts that are designed to destroy all the gains made by the working class, gains like the NHS and welfare state that capitalism can no longer afford.
Haldane may find it hard to accept this reality but workers are forced to live with it every day of their lives as secure jobs go to be replaced with poverty level zero-hours contracts while benefits are cut, hospitals closed and the entire welfare state declared unaffordable by the Tories.
This in turn has produced a revolutionary upsurge amongst workers in Britain and across the world not prepared to accept seeing their lives destroyed to keep the banks going.
This has created the political uncertainty that so obsesses bourgeois politicians and economists as workers turn on the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie, creating turmoil in the ‘old order’ as the economic crisis fuels the massive political crisis gripping capitalism.
Immediately on the agenda is a massive confrontation between a bankrupt capitalist class and a working class revolutionised by this crisis. The urgent issue today is the building of a new revolutionary leadership within the working class that will lead the working class to power by putting an end to capitalism forever through the victory of the socialist revolution.
