One year after the financial crisis epitomised by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, there have been many opinions about the causes, symptoms and prognoses expressed by various financial writers. One of the most insightful came from Gillian Tett, the Financial Times editor who put down her thought in the recently published book: Fool's Gold.
In her interview with Singapore's Business Times (published on 14 November), she said:
'The real question is why banks were allowed to make such big profits in the first place. Having 40 per cent of corporate profits coming from the financial sector is simply mad. At the end of the day, finance is a utility. If you had a situation where water companies were representing 40 percent of all corporate profits, you would say something's gone badly wrong, they must be fiddling with the water.
'Finance after all is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But that simple truth got completely lost over the last few years.'
And as an anthropologist by training, her macro view of human society's structure certainly provides firm explanation on why financial re-regulation is so slow to take-off and so hard to achieve, particularly in the context of U.S. where lobbying is the bloodstream of the political system.
'[I]n most societies, you have an elite who will try to stay in power, not just by controlling the means of production, but also by controlling the way people think.
'So in almost any society, the rhetoric of the dominant elite is often riddled with hypocrisy, and is basically all about trying to maintain the system.'
As the saying goes: "There is nothing new under the Sun."
