This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon

25th February 2012

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Sex, Lies, and International Banking

The villain of the hour is the wealthy banker, and a wealthy banker in the present age of globalization is synonymous with an international banker. For “international bankers” to be the target of choice for public outrage ought to be a little unsettling for anyone with a minimal knowledge of history, and who is aware of the last time that this particular class was scapegoated.

No better story could emerge to fuel to anger toward international bankers than the fall, and then the fall again (without any rise between these falls), of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF and once a presidential hopeful for France.

The falls of DSK, as he is sometimes identified for the sake of brevity, had every element necessary for a first-class scandal: sex and money, expensive hotels in big cities, political and financial power, the mighty brought low by the word of the humble. The DSK scandal has not merely been a scandal; it has been a morality tale for our time.

In fact, morality tales are the order of the day. While business was booming and everyone was getting rich, no one much cared whether what happened was right or wrong: events had the ultimate sanction: they were successful.

Now that things are not going so swimmingly, there is an upsurge in reporting the public’s outrage, and I have no doubt that the public experiences a higher degree of outrage when the poorly performing economy is impacting their lives in very real ways.

I recommend the reader take a look at Banker bashing in Britain: The British lose faith in meritocracy and Economics and society: Barrier to a  breakthrough by Robin Harding, the latter especially concerned with “rent-seeking.”

Both of these stories were interesting on their own (I encourage the reader to make his or her way through them) and doubly interesting in their historical context. I wrote about rent-seeking behavior in Ratepayers: Everyday Life in Late Industrialized Capitalism as well as the logical consequence of the rentier economy, Crony Capitalism: Macro-Parasitism under Industrialization. I am tempted to revisit this topic, but I must desist until I have something new to say.

Should the reader still feel the need for additional salacious material (if the above hasn’t quite lived up to the title of “Sex, Lies, and International Banking” — something I couldn’t resist, for obvious reasons), I recommend  Venus in Furs at the Bull and Bear in the Financial Times, as well as the letter written in response to this story, Creative name for oldest profession.

Tagged: Dominique Strauss-KahnDSKbankingpoliticsscapegoatingoutrage

  1. geopolicraticus posted this