Gold News

Capitalism Has No Friends

Beware those with solutions to fix capitalism...

THE FINANCIAL TIMES has carried on its series on 'Capitalism in Crisis' much longer than we expected. Longer than seems decent, actually. The crisis will be over before the series ends, writes Daily Reckoning founder Bill Bonner.

Each of the Davos-list celebrities to write on the subject basically 'talks his own book.' The politicians tell us that they can fix what is wrong with capitalism. The regulators want more regulations; do-gooders urge us to rely more on good works. The economists have their economic solutions. The entrepreneurs put their faith in can-do hustlers.

Bill Clinton used to be a sharp politician. Now, judging from his comments in the FT, he has moved rapidly from becoming an elder statesman to the kind of senility that affects aging world improvers. Try to figure out what this means:

"Governments, businesses and extra-governmental organizations [can] work together to share expertise and implement lasting solutions...

"What we need is innovation, imagination and commitment. The most effective global citizens will be those who succeed in merging their business and philanthropic missions to build a future of shared prosperity and shared responsibility."

Those are words that could have been written by a dull-witted robot...or Thomas Friedman.

The words were empty; at least they were not stupid. But there were plenty of stupid words, too, in the series. A representative of Occupy London wrote to say that Friedrich Hayek had "helped us to find capitalism's flaws." Hayek pointed out that the widely distributed knowledge of a market economy was much better for making decisions than the centralized information and planning of a state-directed system. But the Occupy writer missed the point completely. He quoted Hayek and then went on to suggest the very sort of meddles that Hayek warned against.

Some writers seemed to have nothing to say whatever. Others seemed to have nothing to say about capitalism; it was as if they had not thought about it. And some, we couldn't figure out what they were talking about.

All in all, the series has been a big letdown. Capitalism has no real friends and no clear defenders, not at the FT.

We will have to do the job ourselves.

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New York Times best-selling finance author Bill Bonner founded The Agora, a worldwide community for private researchers and publishers, in 1979. Financial analysts within the group exposed and predicted some of the world's biggest shifts since, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, to the collapse of the Dot Com (2000) and then mortgage finance (2008) bubbles, and the election of President Trump (2016). Sharing his personal thoughts and opinions each day from 1999 in the globally successful Daily Reckoning and then his Diary of a Rogue Economist, Bonner now makes his views and ideas available alongside analysis from a small hand-picked team of specialists through Bonner Private Research.

See full archive of Bill Bonner articles

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