Irresponsible political groupthink
Nov. 24th, 2008 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbHas anyone noticed how carefully President-elect Obama has been keeping his distance from the G20 and APEC meetings and their decisions? It looks as if he is not altogether convinced of the wisdom of the path they seem to be choosing; in which case, I must say that I agree.
The common citizen is proving, in this crisis, much wiser than his mob of rulers. The common citizen knows all too well that to keep going on the kind of splurges that have informed and been encouraged by popular culture for the last thirty years at least will not make his or her family accounts any steadier, will not improve his or her job prospects, and will not even do much to cheer anyone up – there are too many reason to fear active and prowling the stage, this grim winter season. Common citizens will not be so stupid as to waste any money that might reach them on Christmas spending sprees or other unnecessary bouts of expense, merely because their betters demand that they should. And so all the “fiscal stimulus packages” being hawked by all these grand gatherums are doomed in advance. All they show is the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the international political class.
I never did like these increasingly frequent social occasions for the mighty of the earth, from Davos to the various Groups – Seven, Eight, Twenty – to the musical-political shindig for Africa three years ago. They all smell to me of paternalism, isolation from the public, and ultimately the denial of democracy. The more politicians and billionaires find occasion to support each other, the less dependent they will be on the public – and the more democracy will become a hollow shell. We are already sufficiently far along that road, thank you very much. But it is also the case that this particular meeting positively did harm, in my view. The policy they adopted was the wrong one. Those who know me know what I think of this country’s governing caste, with no distinction of party; and it should have been enough to warn any reasonable man of danger, that the policy adopted by the Group of Twenty was advocated by none other than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Where does the crisis come from? It is not a secret: from a gangrenous mass of bad debt accumulated over thirty years of bipartisan malgovernment, especially in the USA and in the UK. The cure – the obvious cure – is to drain the swamp of toxic debt, whatever it costs, and at the same time to encourage the reconstruction of wholesome, genuine capital and cash investment in productive activities. No doubt, such a cure would hurt. Companies whose balance sheets list unrecoverable bad debts as assets would have to write them off; huge amounts of property would have to be sold at fire sale prices, depressing markets and discouraging investment; oceans of taxpayers’ money would have to be distracted from their natural purposes simply to locate and mop up bad debts; and, quite possibly, whole groups of contracts – especially in that area of futures and derivatives which Warren Buffett described six years ago as financial weapons of mass destruction – would have to be declared invalid and cancelled, for it is quite possible that their full application would literally destroy every shred of capital in the world. And this would hurt. Nobody who thinks they own an asset like to be told that that asset is worthless, or illegal, or nonexistent. They have paid good money for it, and now that money is gone. No doubt this kind of cure would meet great resistance – and considering the immense influence of lawyers and accountants in advanced economies, formidable obstacles on the ground.
However, the simple argument for it is that if the swamp of toxic debt is not drained by clear and purposeful government action, then it will be destroyed, razed, fire-levelled by the markets, in a far more destructive manner. Why do they think that the markets have been heading south, across the world, for months now, and in spite of frequent rallies? Because the issue of toxic debt cannot be avoided. In dozens of different ways, it keeps on coming up in the balance sheets of company after company, bank after bank. And the markets are now so twitchy that the slightest breath of distrust sets off a collapse. Already many stock exchanges are down by a third from their historic (and recent) record highs, with no prospect of regaining the lost ground. Once a pathology of fear and suspicion has set in, it will last long after the fear has ceased to be justified. And it will deal unfairly: sound companies will be destroyed by ill-judged rumours, while plague carriers whose accountants are clever at disguising black holes will go on polluting the stock exchange. Anyone who thinks that the world can escape severe punishment for the excesses of the last thirty years is still mired in the same thinking that has led to this pass.
Yet the assembled notabilities’ recipe to get the economy moving is “more of the same”. Tax cuts, stimuli to get people buying things – never mind what and why. The ignorance of popular mood and mind that this shows is one reason why politicians talking only to each other is bad. Nobody seems to understand that the public is simply in no mood to go on the kind of merry shopping sprees that doped and distorted the economy of recent decades. John Q and Jane W Public are rightly concerned about their jobs; and if people are not sure that they will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future, they will not spend money. John Q and Jane W are also scared that their long-term prospects may be undermined by the long collapse of the financial markets that were supposed to finance their retirement packages. And this means that any money they make is going to go into savings, or even – and who can blame them – into their mattresses. In the present atmosphere, distrust of the financial institutions is simply rational, and the public is rational. It has to be, because it is John Q and Jane W’s own futures that are at stake.
That is what makes a bunch of privileged nonentities talking to each other and reinforcing each other’s prejudices such a disastrous way to govern. The whole plan for the resurrection of the corpse of world economy is based on complete ignorance of how John Q and Jane W Public actually think. It is based on a view of the public as this mindless vegetable that can simply be primed to produce fruit in the form of increased spending by pumping a little manure in at the right end. You and you and you and I, my readers and my friends and I, may not see the right way very clearly, but at least every single one of us knows that this is not it.
Barack Obama may be a Chicago machine politician who has got to the top by sagacious manipulation of public emotion and accumulated guilt; he may be a ruthless and extreme champion of abortion; he may have abominable supporters; but if he avoids this particular trap, he will have shown that he fits his post more than some who have got it by less, um, curious means. The President of the United States is the one person in the world (with the possible exception of the Pope of Rome) charged with making real decisions without having a social support network. He is not allowed to blame anyone else; if he effs up, he effs up – which is why three hundred million people spend two years selecting him (or her – soon, ladies, soon). As a distinguished holder of the office said, the buck stops here. (And this man left his office under the burden of immense unpopularity because of the decisions he had taken – until the public and the press began to realize that they had not really been so bad after all. That is another burden for a responsible man, and one reason why people dodge responsibility even if they lust for power.) An indecisive or easily manipulated President is a disaster – the Buchanan kind – because even a bad decision is better than no decision. This article is not about Bush II, but that is exactly one of the major faults I see in him; and it is not surprising that he featured as the figurehead of the Group of 20 summit.
I have therefore been greatly heartened by President-elect Obama’s visible unwillingness to align himself with the Group decisions. I am never going to support him until he changes his mind on the right of babies to life, but if we have to have an enemy at the White House, we might as well have one who makes up his own mind. He has to show that he can think outside the groupthink of his social group – because the heads of state and government and their prospective successors and near colleagues in the world today amount to a social group, a social class, in themselves. It was the never-enough-quoted Chesterton who said that an aristocracy is a group of men small enough to be insolent, but large enough to be irresponsible; and I am afraid that the group of men who gather more and more frequently to set the political direction of the world fits the bill to a nicety.
The Washington summit of the new Group of 20 has served two purposes. The first was to flatter the egos of a number of near-great powers with an old lust to be reckoned as Great (Brazil and India in particular) and middle-level countries and national leaders – Turkey, Indonesia, Italy (alas), Argentina, etc – that could hardly believe that they were counted among the Greats. The second was to develop a common view of the problem, so that the individual policies of each government should have a kind of international blessing behind them.
This is not about developing an effective policy or policies. To develop a policy that the rest of the world had to follow, whether it will or nill, three or four powers would have been enough: the EU – overruling national representations –, the USA, China, and possibly Japan (whose huge economic strength tends to be nullified by political ineffectiveness). The point was rather to develop a group position, a common viewpoint to which individual governments could appeal if their activities were questioned. It has been said that the meeting was ineffective, dealing out a number of generalities and no step by step plans. To which I answer: first, thank God for that – it shows that the convened governments were not altogether suicidal; and second, that was largely the point. However willing to contribute to groupthink each government may be, they do not altogether want to go so far as to tie their own hands. That is possibly one bright spot in the landscape.
At the back of this political operation lies fear. By this I do not mean fear for one’s country or electorate or people; I mean fear for one’s position. Politicians from countries that retain the formalities of democracy can actually be turned out of office by popular displeasure, but they are not the only ones. An army or a bureaucracy or a party politburo can also put a quite drastic end to the career of a leader who proved incapable of dealing with grave political issues. The politicians of the world have to worry about their futures, their families, their present and coming work and incomes – the very same things, could they but see it, that John Q and Jane W Public are concerned with. These are quite rational concerns for any social group; and what we have seen in Washington DC a few weeks ago was a meeting of the world leaders’ trades union, with the inevitable concern for members’ interests and continued employment.
Now leaders big and small are in the position that politicians generally never wish to be: they have to make serious decisions and put the future of their constituents at risk. The consensus of the world makes a comforting piece of support for one’s position, whether elected or not, and places opponents in a more difficult position – as the British Tory leaders have found when they made a number of commonplace objections to the government plans to further increase national debt to support an economy already choked by debt. It is better, they say, to be wrong in company, than to be right on your own.
This is government by groupthink. We have long been moving in that direction. The absence in many Western democracies of a single, responsible position such as the USA President’s (supported, in the USA, by the existence of a number of lesser reflections – state governors, executive city mayors and so on) tended to make parliamentary rule degenerate into party or group rule; and tyrants, on their part, have long learned the comfort of belonging to a group and moving in step. (Remember the so-called non-aligned movement of the fifties and sixties?) But at this point in our history, we are threatened, perhaps for the first time, by the untroubled application of groupthink to a serious world problem. Everyone is reminding everyone else not to repeat the errors of 1929; and, thank God, there is not much chance of that. (However much I may detest government by groupthink, it is certainly preferable to a situation where more than half the world’s great powers were in the disguised or undisguised grip of warmongering militaristic or revolutionary cliques, each pursuing national or party greatness at the expense of peace, and none prepared to do anything to improve the common lot; while the few surviving democracies fought to beggar each other and exclude each other from each other’s markets. That, at least, is one situation we are not likely to see again.) However, we risk getting to the same place by a different route: agreement on the wrong things, rather than total international chaos and lack of any cooperation.
The very existence of the office of President of the United States of America can, if the holder has character and insight, serve as a backstop against excesses of groupthink. An ornery Southerner like Andrew Jackson or Harry S Truman might perhaps, just at present, be too much of a good thing; but if a smooth northern aristocrat like Obama is willing to take the role of one responsible person and possible international bogey, I say – well, not really “more power to him”, but at least let him have all the power that pertains to his office. We have all still to see what his economic policies will amount to, but at least his unwillingness to identify without reserve with his peers’ groupthink looks to me like a very good start.
POST SCRIPTUM. What, you may ask, would I do were I in the President-Elect’s shoes, or in those of one of his colleagues? Well, if I were, I would know a lot more than I do. But from my own position, there are three things in Britain and America – whose problems are remarkably similar – that desperately need doing. The first is a downright Churchillian appeal to the people – above, as far as possible, the distorting projection of the media – offering nothing but tears and sweat. We are in a Hell of a mess; there is an enormous black swamp of bad debt to clear; we have got there together, and together we have to work to get out. The way out is to build up more wealth, by the sweat of our brows, to replace the amount that has been and will be burned down by bad debt. Following on that, using public money to purchase all the unpayable debt at fire sale prices. Since much of the bad debt is in property, this will make a great deal of people tenants or lodgers at the charge of the State. And two things must be made clear. First, while we will work to avoid throwing people out of their homes, they must not imagine that the common obligations of a tenant have been abolished. Rent must be paid as far as practicable; and nobody must forget that the ultimate goal must be to sell this property back to the private sector – either to recovered tenants, or to private landlords. The second prong of my policy would be a deliberate encouragement to saving and investment, shifting the burden of taxation away from the formation of capital and towards income and sales taxes. The formation of new small businesses would be encouraged and rewarded; small business in general, the backbone of any strong economy, would be treated as much with kid gloves as possible. Banks would also be rewarded – in ways to be determined – for encouraging saving, capital accumulation, and investment, and discouraging retail debt. The third would be a drastic limitation on purely financial speculation, especially complex derivative and future deals. In general, the principle should be that people should only buy and pay for real assets, not expected ones – for “expected” really means “hoped for”. This last, I admit, is the field in which I know least, but from all I hear it has made a massive contribution to the crisis.
The common citizen is proving, in this crisis, much wiser than his mob of rulers. The common citizen knows all too well that to keep going on the kind of splurges that have informed and been encouraged by popular culture for the last thirty years at least will not make his or her family accounts any steadier, will not improve his or her job prospects, and will not even do much to cheer anyone up – there are too many reason to fear active and prowling the stage, this grim winter season. Common citizens will not be so stupid as to waste any money that might reach them on Christmas spending sprees or other unnecessary bouts of expense, merely because their betters demand that they should. And so all the “fiscal stimulus packages” being hawked by all these grand gatherums are doomed in advance. All they show is the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the international political class.
I never did like these increasingly frequent social occasions for the mighty of the earth, from Davos to the various Groups – Seven, Eight, Twenty – to the musical-political shindig for Africa three years ago. They all smell to me of paternalism, isolation from the public, and ultimately the denial of democracy. The more politicians and billionaires find occasion to support each other, the less dependent they will be on the public – and the more democracy will become a hollow shell. We are already sufficiently far along that road, thank you very much. But it is also the case that this particular meeting positively did harm, in my view. The policy they adopted was the wrong one. Those who know me know what I think of this country’s governing caste, with no distinction of party; and it should have been enough to warn any reasonable man of danger, that the policy adopted by the Group of Twenty was advocated by none other than the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Where does the crisis come from? It is not a secret: from a gangrenous mass of bad debt accumulated over thirty years of bipartisan malgovernment, especially in the USA and in the UK. The cure – the obvious cure – is to drain the swamp of toxic debt, whatever it costs, and at the same time to encourage the reconstruction of wholesome, genuine capital and cash investment in productive activities. No doubt, such a cure would hurt. Companies whose balance sheets list unrecoverable bad debts as assets would have to write them off; huge amounts of property would have to be sold at fire sale prices, depressing markets and discouraging investment; oceans of taxpayers’ money would have to be distracted from their natural purposes simply to locate and mop up bad debts; and, quite possibly, whole groups of contracts – especially in that area of futures and derivatives which Warren Buffett described six years ago as financial weapons of mass destruction – would have to be declared invalid and cancelled, for it is quite possible that their full application would literally destroy every shred of capital in the world. And this would hurt. Nobody who thinks they own an asset like to be told that that asset is worthless, or illegal, or nonexistent. They have paid good money for it, and now that money is gone. No doubt this kind of cure would meet great resistance – and considering the immense influence of lawyers and accountants in advanced economies, formidable obstacles on the ground.
However, the simple argument for it is that if the swamp of toxic debt is not drained by clear and purposeful government action, then it will be destroyed, razed, fire-levelled by the markets, in a far more destructive manner. Why do they think that the markets have been heading south, across the world, for months now, and in spite of frequent rallies? Because the issue of toxic debt cannot be avoided. In dozens of different ways, it keeps on coming up in the balance sheets of company after company, bank after bank. And the markets are now so twitchy that the slightest breath of distrust sets off a collapse. Already many stock exchanges are down by a third from their historic (and recent) record highs, with no prospect of regaining the lost ground. Once a pathology of fear and suspicion has set in, it will last long after the fear has ceased to be justified. And it will deal unfairly: sound companies will be destroyed by ill-judged rumours, while plague carriers whose accountants are clever at disguising black holes will go on polluting the stock exchange. Anyone who thinks that the world can escape severe punishment for the excesses of the last thirty years is still mired in the same thinking that has led to this pass.
Yet the assembled notabilities’ recipe to get the economy moving is “more of the same”. Tax cuts, stimuli to get people buying things – never mind what and why. The ignorance of popular mood and mind that this shows is one reason why politicians talking only to each other is bad. Nobody seems to understand that the public is simply in no mood to go on the kind of merry shopping sprees that doped and distorted the economy of recent decades. John Q and Jane W Public are rightly concerned about their jobs; and if people are not sure that they will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future, they will not spend money. John Q and Jane W are also scared that their long-term prospects may be undermined by the long collapse of the financial markets that were supposed to finance their retirement packages. And this means that any money they make is going to go into savings, or even – and who can blame them – into their mattresses. In the present atmosphere, distrust of the financial institutions is simply rational, and the public is rational. It has to be, because it is John Q and Jane W’s own futures that are at stake.
That is what makes a bunch of privileged nonentities talking to each other and reinforcing each other’s prejudices such a disastrous way to govern. The whole plan for the resurrection of the corpse of world economy is based on complete ignorance of how John Q and Jane W Public actually think. It is based on a view of the public as this mindless vegetable that can simply be primed to produce fruit in the form of increased spending by pumping a little manure in at the right end. You and you and you and I, my readers and my friends and I, may not see the right way very clearly, but at least every single one of us knows that this is not it.
Barack Obama may be a Chicago machine politician who has got to the top by sagacious manipulation of public emotion and accumulated guilt; he may be a ruthless and extreme champion of abortion; he may have abominable supporters; but if he avoids this particular trap, he will have shown that he fits his post more than some who have got it by less, um, curious means. The President of the United States is the one person in the world (with the possible exception of the Pope of Rome) charged with making real decisions without having a social support network. He is not allowed to blame anyone else; if he effs up, he effs up – which is why three hundred million people spend two years selecting him (or her – soon, ladies, soon). As a distinguished holder of the office said, the buck stops here. (And this man left his office under the burden of immense unpopularity because of the decisions he had taken – until the public and the press began to realize that they had not really been so bad after all. That is another burden for a responsible man, and one reason why people dodge responsibility even if they lust for power.) An indecisive or easily manipulated President is a disaster – the Buchanan kind – because even a bad decision is better than no decision. This article is not about Bush II, but that is exactly one of the major faults I see in him; and it is not surprising that he featured as the figurehead of the Group of 20 summit.
I have therefore been greatly heartened by President-elect Obama’s visible unwillingness to align himself with the Group decisions. I am never going to support him until he changes his mind on the right of babies to life, but if we have to have an enemy at the White House, we might as well have one who makes up his own mind. He has to show that he can think outside the groupthink of his social group – because the heads of state and government and their prospective successors and near colleagues in the world today amount to a social group, a social class, in themselves. It was the never-enough-quoted Chesterton who said that an aristocracy is a group of men small enough to be insolent, but large enough to be irresponsible; and I am afraid that the group of men who gather more and more frequently to set the political direction of the world fits the bill to a nicety.
The Washington summit of the new Group of 20 has served two purposes. The first was to flatter the egos of a number of near-great powers with an old lust to be reckoned as Great (Brazil and India in particular) and middle-level countries and national leaders – Turkey, Indonesia, Italy (alas), Argentina, etc – that could hardly believe that they were counted among the Greats. The second was to develop a common view of the problem, so that the individual policies of each government should have a kind of international blessing behind them.
This is not about developing an effective policy or policies. To develop a policy that the rest of the world had to follow, whether it will or nill, three or four powers would have been enough: the EU – overruling national representations –, the USA, China, and possibly Japan (whose huge economic strength tends to be nullified by political ineffectiveness). The point was rather to develop a group position, a common viewpoint to which individual governments could appeal if their activities were questioned. It has been said that the meeting was ineffective, dealing out a number of generalities and no step by step plans. To which I answer: first, thank God for that – it shows that the convened governments were not altogether suicidal; and second, that was largely the point. However willing to contribute to groupthink each government may be, they do not altogether want to go so far as to tie their own hands. That is possibly one bright spot in the landscape.
At the back of this political operation lies fear. By this I do not mean fear for one’s country or electorate or people; I mean fear for one’s position. Politicians from countries that retain the formalities of democracy can actually be turned out of office by popular displeasure, but they are not the only ones. An army or a bureaucracy or a party politburo can also put a quite drastic end to the career of a leader who proved incapable of dealing with grave political issues. The politicians of the world have to worry about their futures, their families, their present and coming work and incomes – the very same things, could they but see it, that John Q and Jane W Public are concerned with. These are quite rational concerns for any social group; and what we have seen in Washington DC a few weeks ago was a meeting of the world leaders’ trades union, with the inevitable concern for members’ interests and continued employment.
Now leaders big and small are in the position that politicians generally never wish to be: they have to make serious decisions and put the future of their constituents at risk. The consensus of the world makes a comforting piece of support for one’s position, whether elected or not, and places opponents in a more difficult position – as the British Tory leaders have found when they made a number of commonplace objections to the government plans to further increase national debt to support an economy already choked by debt. It is better, they say, to be wrong in company, than to be right on your own.
This is government by groupthink. We have long been moving in that direction. The absence in many Western democracies of a single, responsible position such as the USA President’s (supported, in the USA, by the existence of a number of lesser reflections – state governors, executive city mayors and so on) tended to make parliamentary rule degenerate into party or group rule; and tyrants, on their part, have long learned the comfort of belonging to a group and moving in step. (Remember the so-called non-aligned movement of the fifties and sixties?) But at this point in our history, we are threatened, perhaps for the first time, by the untroubled application of groupthink to a serious world problem. Everyone is reminding everyone else not to repeat the errors of 1929; and, thank God, there is not much chance of that. (However much I may detest government by groupthink, it is certainly preferable to a situation where more than half the world’s great powers were in the disguised or undisguised grip of warmongering militaristic or revolutionary cliques, each pursuing national or party greatness at the expense of peace, and none prepared to do anything to improve the common lot; while the few surviving democracies fought to beggar each other and exclude each other from each other’s markets. That, at least, is one situation we are not likely to see again.) However, we risk getting to the same place by a different route: agreement on the wrong things, rather than total international chaos and lack of any cooperation.
The very existence of the office of President of the United States of America can, if the holder has character and insight, serve as a backstop against excesses of groupthink. An ornery Southerner like Andrew Jackson or Harry S Truman might perhaps, just at present, be too much of a good thing; but if a smooth northern aristocrat like Obama is willing to take the role of one responsible person and possible international bogey, I say – well, not really “more power to him”, but at least let him have all the power that pertains to his office. We have all still to see what his economic policies will amount to, but at least his unwillingness to identify without reserve with his peers’ groupthink looks to me like a very good start.
POST SCRIPTUM. What, you may ask, would I do were I in the President-Elect’s shoes, or in those of one of his colleagues? Well, if I were, I would know a lot more than I do. But from my own position, there are three things in Britain and America – whose problems are remarkably similar – that desperately need doing. The first is a downright Churchillian appeal to the people – above, as far as possible, the distorting projection of the media – offering nothing but tears and sweat. We are in a Hell of a mess; there is an enormous black swamp of bad debt to clear; we have got there together, and together we have to work to get out. The way out is to build up more wealth, by the sweat of our brows, to replace the amount that has been and will be burned down by bad debt. Following on that, using public money to purchase all the unpayable debt at fire sale prices. Since much of the bad debt is in property, this will make a great deal of people tenants or lodgers at the charge of the State. And two things must be made clear. First, while we will work to avoid throwing people out of their homes, they must not imagine that the common obligations of a tenant have been abolished. Rent must be paid as far as practicable; and nobody must forget that the ultimate goal must be to sell this property back to the private sector – either to recovered tenants, or to private landlords. The second prong of my policy would be a deliberate encouragement to saving and investment, shifting the burden of taxation away from the formation of capital and towards income and sales taxes. The formation of new small businesses would be encouraged and rewarded; small business in general, the backbone of any strong economy, would be treated as much with kid gloves as possible. Banks would also be rewarded – in ways to be determined – for encouraging saving, capital accumulation, and investment, and discouraging retail debt. The third would be a drastic limitation on purely financial speculation, especially complex derivative and future deals. In general, the principle should be that people should only buy and pay for real assets, not expected ones – for “expected” really means “hoped for”. This last, I admit, is the field in which I know least, but from all I hear it has made a massive contribution to the crisis.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 11:54 pm (UTC)The third point of your postscript brings to mind the prohibition on gharar in the Islamic banking sector, which has so far remained comparatively untouched by the crisis. For obvious reasons I do not think Islamic banking is something the West would be (or is, since it has become "trendy") wise to participate in, but I'm left with the feeling that there are nonetheless rather important lessons which could be (re)learned from it.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-25 08:16 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iran#Banking_system
So, if we necessarily must have Islamic banking, perhaps the Saudi version would be better?
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=6§ion=0&article=115802&d=26&m=10&y=2008
RIYADH: The US government is currently studying the salient features of Islamic banking to ascertain how far it could be useful in fighting the ongoing world economic crisis, Robert M. Kimmitt, US deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a press conference held at the US Embassy here yesterday.
Kimmitt, who is on an official visit to the Kingdom, also held discussions with Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf. Today, he is scheduled to meet Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) Gov. Hamad Al-Sayari, Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) Gov. Amr Al-Dabbagh, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company, and Saudi investors and bankers. He said that the agenda for the G-20 summit to be held in Washington on Nov. 15, has to be carefully prepared since important topics are to be discussed in just one day. “I am not sure that Islamic banking will also be itemized in the agenda, but it is a subject that is often dwelt in the public and private sectors,” he noted. He said that experts in the US Treasury Department are currently learning the important features of Islamic banking.
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=68637.0
no subject
Date: 2008-11-25 10:56 pm (UTC)(Neither of which the West has any business doing, mind you.)
We need not have Islamic banking at all, but we might do well to emulate its best characteristics (rather than its worst). Usury and speculation are the direct causes of our present financial crisis, and the Islamic world has escaped financial harm to precisely the extent that it has banned or severely restricted both. I think there is a legitimate lesson to be learned there.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-25 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-04 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-25 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-25 02:24 am (UTC)