JUST TEN YEARS after the 2008 great banking disaster began – with the working class still paying the price for it with massively savaged living standards – Wall Street has just had its biggest fall since 1931, during the ‘Great Depression’!
Lehman Brothers held over $600,000,000,000 in assets in 2008 but had become a ‘real estate hedge fund’, a huge criminal network, ‘disguised as an investment bank’. It completely collapsed overnight. Ten years later, we are staring a new massive banking collapse in the face, combining with and transforming Trump’s trade war into a freeze-up of world trade of a truly calamitous nature for capitalism – threatening another great depression.
As Talleyrand said of the Bourbons after their restoration after Waterloo in 1815 – ‘They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.’ They were soon swept away in the revolution of 1830. The same fate awaits the modern Bourbons, the class of bankers and bosses, and their governments whose fate is being decided by the massive financial and industrial crash that is fast approaching.
There is little doubt that the second financial disaster in just 10 years will be greeted by the working class with truly massive anger, which will have an essentially revolutionary essence that will lead directly to socialist revolutions.
The bankers’ and their governments’ answer to the 2008 crisis was a combination of a ruthless and savage austerity attack, destroying the living standards of the working class of the world, combined with ‘quantitative easing’.
Quantitative easing was and is the creation of trillions in electronic money that has no value at all, but has been used by the banks to purchase real value. Quantitative Easing was and is one big fraud!
Then popped up Trump, the arch-opportunist, promising the US workers and bosses that putting the US first and crucifying the rest of the world was the way forward for the USA, and was the only way to maintain the loyalty of the US working class and prevent revolution. His mantra was lower and lower interest rates leading to massive extension of debt.
Last Monday, the Dow Jones index of 30 leading companies fell more than 650 points and is on track for its worst December since 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression after the 1929 crash.
Many financial markets in Asia, Europe and North America were closed on Tuesday for Christmas. The bosses dread what is about to happen when they open! In China, the Shanghai composite index fell more than 2% on Tuesday morning.
US-China trade war tensions are at the point of explosion, and there are now reports that President Donald Trump is discussing firing the chairman of the US central bank, Jerome Powell, which will touch off a major share price collapse.
At the same time, the US government has also entered a partial shutdown after Congress refused to fund President Trump’s planned US-Mexico border wall. Trump thinks that capitalism can be commanded by the wishes of men and women as to what will or will not happen.
On the contrary, capitalism works according to its own laws of motion which no number of human or other sacrifices can mollify. It was Karl Marx who investigated and brought to light these laws of motion of capitalism in particular its law of value.
He established that capitalism and its laws of motion are the master. Its major law, the law of value, is now tearing Trump and his plans to pieces and threatening a major collapse of capitalism, just ten years after the last major collapse.
Trump’s fall will be many times more spectacular than Gordon Brown’s, when he sold off the gold reserves for paper money and said that there would never be another boom-to-bust crisis. On Monday, President Trump lashed out at the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, as the stock market plunged. The president said the Fed was ‘the only problem’ as he discussed sacking its chairman. The president adventurer is coming unstuck.
The WRP urges the working class to get ready to overthrow capitalism with socialist revolutions or else face super-austerity, that is complete pauperisation or vagabondage in the crisis that is developing.
