“Only little people pay taxes.”

The Wheel of History Turns

To understand the present, we must understand the past, and possibly the future direction of historical processes. Well where did it all begin?

Well “it” (i.e., unbounded, rent-seeking, extractive capitalism) had existed for a long period of time dating back to the 19th century and perhaps beyond.

Economic theories have always been little more than a rationale for what was essentially a conflict between classes and vested interests, and, whisper it softly, this is still essentially the case. The rentier regime based upon rent extraction on behalf of the land-owning aristocracy was historically pitted against the rising industrial manufacturing classes, the bourgeoisie in the manufacturing cities and towns.

Additionally, the emerging working class was beginning to flex its economic, and in the fullness of time, its political muscles.

Unexpectedly perhaps, what was to emerge was an (albeit unstable) marriage of convenience between bourgeois and proletariat against the rentier class. In the UK the liberal reformers of the 19th century, David Ricardo, J.S.Mill et al. and during the 20th century J.M.Keynes. [1] carried the struggle against the ruling rentier classes, but both lacked a mass movement and were ultimately superseded though not completely extinguished by radical socialist reformers, principally based around the Independent Labour Party, the Trade Union Congress, and the Fabian Society.

These were to form the Labour Representation Committee, which eventually became the Labour Party in 1906. A similar process was apparent in Germany when the SPD increasingly took on the role of leader of the working class against the Bismarckian political ascendency, anti-socialist laws notwithstanding. The Fabian socialist Weltanschauung was systematically outlined in Fabian Essays in Socialism, first published in 1889, where the general evolutionist theme is clearly discernible.

The essays identify and break down general historical trends into more specific ones: firstly, there was the onward march of democracy; secondly, the increasing organization of the economy and the demise of laissez-faire; thirdly, the gradual socialization and integration of society.

In one of the essays, The Historic Basis of Socialism, Sidney Webb argued that the unstoppable momentum of democratisation would provide the bridge to socialism; democracy being the prerequisite for a socialist society.

The mainstream which has borne European society toward socialism during the past 100 years has been the irresistible progress of democracy. De Tocqueville drove and hammered this truth into the reluctant ears of the old world two generations ago; and we have pretended to carry it about as part of our mental furniture ever since.”[2]

Sentiments of the above sort, common enough at the time and still valid today, seem curiously antique in the modern world. The struggle between productive and extractive capitalism has always swung to and fro between the banking, landowning, financial elites and the industrial, manufacturing class strata, and in addition, with the working class in a struggle against both; although the labour movement often formed alliances against the financiers and rentier elites.

Both Teddy and Franklin D Roosevelt were to become engaged in a struggle against extractive rentierdom and monopoly by mobilising state policies and institutions during different historical epochs – the policies of Trust busting, and the New Deal being the successful outcomes of this struggle, although they stopped well short of socialism. The latest manifestation of this cyclical phase of political/ideological struggle – i.e., neoliberalism – came into existence roughly in the early 1970s and became entrenched from the 1980s onwards. (See more below.)

Point of Arrival

In our own time the dominance of the rentier classes and extractive capitalism seems, in the short term at least, to be complete. The central ideological features of this mode of financial hegemony are: tax avoidance/evasion, corporations and intra-firm trade, deregulation and privatisation – lesser and perhaps more sordid goals included corruption and criminality; and the whole configuration enveloped by an all-encompassing culture which is anti-state, anti-tax, anti-redistributive; a winner-takes-all mindset which erodes social solidarity leading to various types of social crises and malfunctions, both individually and collectively.

Symptomatic of these changes is manifest in today’s world where at any one time a huge ball of speculative hot money circumnavigates the globe in search of a quick buck at somebody else’s expense. Such a practise can only take place in the absence of capital controls (which of course entailed deregulation).

The developing East Asian economies in 1997/98 became a target for such a speculative attack and were brought low by this incursion of hot money – a visitation as welcome as a cloud of locusts – and were then picked clean as their currency, property and exchange rates were destabilised and looted before the exit of these same speculative flows. Not being shackled by a liberalisation of their capital account, China had capital controls and so escaped the 97/98 crisis largely unscathed.

In another contemporary context the author notes:

Developing countries lost $1.2 trillion, in 2008 – losses that have grown at 18% per year. Compare this to the $18 billion in foreign aid that they received during the same period … that means that for every dollar that we (i.e., the West) we have generously been handing across the top of the table we have been taken 10 dollars of illicit money under the table … Remember that the next time some bright young economist wonders why aid to Africa is not working.” [3]

These monies generally emanate from various corrupt regimes in Africa, Latin America and other developing areas but are nullified, by a considerable margin, by the inflows of monies from the developed world. Strange to say that the developing world is in effect subsidising the developed world.

Moreover, in addition to the flow of monies from the developing to the developed world there should be added other clandestine streams which wend their way into licit outlets by way of offshore mechanisms and subterfuges after having been carefully laundered.

…these financial flows break down into three categories. Criminal monies, from drug smuggling, counterfeit goods, racketeering and so on, accounting to about one third of the total. Corrupt money – local bribes remitted abroad, or bribes paid abroad or a small part of the total, or the third total, cross-border commercial transactions. An important fact to note from this is that the drugs smugglers, terrorists and criminals use exactly the same offshore mechanisms and machinations – shell banks, trusts and dummy corporations – that corporations use.” [4]

Moreover, in our own gilded age tax avoidance continues to grow and diversify in the form of an excrescence on the real economy; this situation is tolerated and even encouraged due to the many vested interests that profit (literally) from it. In mafia parlance tax avoidance and money laundering enjoys a ‘made’ (protected) status.

The laws and regulations – the ‘super-ego’ – which once kept the uncontrollable ‘Id’ of finance capital in its Pandora’s Box, unfortunately no longer prevail. The annulment of these legal instruments which forbade any infringement of these rules, e.g., the Glass-Stegall Act of 1934.

Glass-Stegall strictly separated the activities of commercial banks from investment banks preventing speculators from making bets with depositors’ money (which in passing was revoked by the Clinton administration – but of course!) as well as capital controls, or the gold-dollar standard of fixed exchange rates enshrined in the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944; all this ended when the lid of Pandora’s Box was lifted and all the evils and miseries of the world flew out to afflict mankind.

The Financial Ascendency

The pivotal moment in this deregulatory zeitgeist was the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 as it was called. This was explosive enough, but an even bigger bang followed:

Modern histories of London’s growth as a financial centre typically point to the Big Bang of 1986, the sudden deregulation of London’s markets driven by the Thatcher administration … However, one particularly astute journalist – Tim Congdon – wrote in the Spectator magazine, of a much bigger bang which had transformed international finance over the last 25 years …

…An extraordinary situation has arisen, where the euromarket which has no physical embodiment in an exchange building or even a widely a widely recognised set of rules and regulations is now the largest source of capital in the world … According to Gary Burn the eurocurrency/eurodollars emergence … ‘was the first shot in the neo-liberal counter-revolution against the social market and the Keynesian Welfare State.’ This was the banks and financial industries great move offshore.”[5]

There now exists a tax haven archipelago consisting of dozens of offshore locations straddling the globe. For UK this consists of its crown dependencies in the Channel Islands, principally Jersey, Guernsey and in the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man.

More outlying havens would include those Caribbean outlets the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Montserrat as well as several smaller jurisdictions, and finally to a number of pacific atolls.

And of course, the UK is itself a tax haven which is why American banks came to the UK to escape the more stringent restrictions placed upon them in the US. The UK thus became a financial Guantanamo in the sense in which they could do things in the UK that they could not get away with in the US. To get some idea of the magnitude of monies squirreled away in one UK tax haven, Jersey, Trusts, a specific type of asset, are not simply about tax.

Many people would be surprised … to find out how central these havens are to global finance, there are some £400 billions tied up in ‘Trusts’ – basically a tax avoidance racket – and a description of what trusts are, how they work, who they belong to, and who profits from their existence is another book – from the tiny tax have of Jersey alone – and several trillion $s worth worldwide shrouded in secrecy.” [6]

If flight money and tax evasion capital of these proportions are piling up just in Jersey how much more has been moved offshore to the rest of the world? One can only guess at the magnitudes involved.

The Iron Law of Money

Offshore is a world apart; it has a distinct culture and clientele drawn from both ends of the opulent classes. What we have is a merger of the global overworld with the global underworld held together by secrecy and an oath of Omerta. Dukes, Bankers, Oligarchs, Gangsters, corporate CEOs, millionaires and billionaires. After laundering these groups appear eminently respectable and as clean as a whistle.

Offshore general frameworks which distinguished between criminal and the legitimate have been eroded away and replaced by networks of trust that distinguish between the well-established on the one hand, and the unknown and dubious on the other.

Individuals with sums to launder and/or invest with minimal taxation want to know that the people with whom they deal can be trusted not to have any moral qualms. If the bankers don’t know someone, that someone may have to jump through many hoops; if they are long-standing and trusted clients the rules fall away.

These opaque networks who are deferential to the aristocracy of wealth and money and oblivious of formal laws, are the ultimate comfort for the banks wealthy clients and totally amoral. As F Scott Fitzgerald once commented:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.

They are different.”

The iron law of money is not new: in the gilded jazz age of late 19th century America of The Great Gatsby. we can see the echo of our own present decadence. It speaks through the voice of Amory, a central character in one of F Scott Fitzgerald’s lesser novels.

I detest poor people” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor…”

Never before had Amory considered poor people … Amory saw only coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity.[7]

Our present-day doyenne of individualistic nihilism – Ayn Rand – could not have put it better.

Decline and Fall

Of course, the New World Order or “It” started at the culmination of the 1970s or fag end of the Keynesian Welfare State. Neo-liberalism and the New World Order were pushed forward by an Anglo-American financial offensive which for a time carried all before it. Roaring on into the 1990s it seemed unstoppable.

The new orthodoxy became hegemonic in politics, the media, academic and business economics, fashion and culture changed along with popular attitudes and beliefs. The Washington consensus, subsumed, the EU/NATO, IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, Bank of International Settlements, OECD, all of which became imbued with the new orthodoxy.

One of the more salient features of this process was the withering away of the egalitarian programmes of the reformist centre left political organizations which would avoid the commitments of the past. Social-Democracy was always understood to be in favour of a society for all the people, full employment, social inclusion and social welfare and a fair taxation system.

The centre-left, however, decided to jettison its past and get with the post-industrial model and a post-industrial society and economy. Into the limelight strode Tony Blair, ex-Fettes public schoolboy. Leaving Fettes College at the age of eighteen, Blair next spent a year in London attempting to find fame as a rock music promoter.

This didn’t work out, so he became enrolled as a law St.John’s College Oxford. After leaving he was able to con his way into the leadership of the Labour party, travelling light on policies, but with a specific notion of where he wanted the Labour party to go and where he wanted to take it.

He eventually transformed the Party into an institution the City of London would learn to love. Also engaged in this turning of wine into water was Hebert Morrison’s grandson Peter Mandelson who apparently was –“intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”.

Of course, it never occurred to Mandelson that the filthy rich had no intention of paying their taxes and Labour’s ‘light regulatory touch’ enabled them to do just that. Just how far Labour was to go in its infatuation with neoliberal policies was starkly illustrated by the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown.

In 2005, Britain’s then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, introduced his Better Regulation Plan, scorning the ‘heavy hand’ of regulation and exalting ‘a million fewer inspections every year, a risk-based approach to regulation to break down barriers holding enterprises back.’

Financial regulation would have ‘not just a light touch but a limited touch’; this would ‘move us a million miles away from the old assumption … that business unregulated, will invariably act irresponsibly’.

The new model of regulation could be applied, he continued ‘to the administration of tax.’ The light or limited touch now extends to official ‘independent’ commissions for reform, which are led by trusted members City networks, operate under narrow terms of reference, and always end up advocating some tinkering, never more, to the status quo.”[8]

Oh, dear! There are times when words fail one, this is one of those times.

The Road to Nowhere

Globalism, that is to say neoliberalism writ large, presents another dimension complementary to the tsunami of capital flows, both licit and criminal, circulating around the world. During the Trente Glorieuses 1945-1975 of regulated capitalism, unemployment was low, as was inflation, living standards steadily increased, and the social safety net was an indispensable feature of the system.

Finance serviced the manufacturing industrial sector with investment loans at low rates of interest. In historical terms this was a limited interlude before capitalism returned to its more normal predator propensities of earlier times. The deregulation of finance and capital flows carried very dangerous and damaging consequences especially when it was allowed to slosh around the world at will, unchecked by democratic controls.

The East Asian crisis of 1998/89 was one example of this, and the 2008 blow-out was another. If a domestic economy is open to tides of hot money – rootless money not tied to any particular real project or nation – then it is difficult and impossible to pursue desirable vital such as full employment and nation building.

Any attempt at to boost industry by lowering interest rates will see an outflow of capital in search of higher premiums elsewhere. Free flow of capital seeking its own interests has the unfortunate effect of conducting its own monetary and fiscal policies to the detriment of nation states. But this is precisely the object of globalization. Markets must rule.

It was the German social theorist Wolfgang Streeck who put it concisely. ‘Once upon a time markets were fitted into nations, now nations are fitted into markets.’ If governments wanted to act in the interest of their citizens, there was no alternative to curbing these wild speculative flows which could and have wreaked havoc.

Keynes was well aware of the benefits which might accrue from cross border trade but regarded cross-border speculative finance to be far more dangerous.

I sympathise … with those who would minimise rather than maximise economic entanglement between nations. Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel- these are things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible; and, above all let finance be primarily national.”

Unfortunately, the TINA (There Is No Alternative) refrain has insinuated itself deeply into the popular consciousness. Neo-liberalism, financialization, globalization was, according to its proponents, the way to go, the right side of history. The upshot of these polices, however, has been uniformly disappointing.

The roll-out of neoliberal policies represented a one-size fits all set of policy prescriptions. These were listed by the IMF as Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) for application in developing countries but they could also and did apply to developed states. The list ran as follows:

• Removing restrictions in foreign investments and liberalisation of current accounts
• Reducing wages and other in-work benefits, sickness pay, pensions etcetera, to make exports more competitive. Radically reduce government spending on health, education. The few social services which remained were gutted.
• Cutting tariffs, quotas, and other restrictions on imports to grease the way for global integration.
• Devaluing the local currency to make exports more competitive.
• Privatising and Deregulating state industries.

There you have it. Basically, a programme for austerity. Everywhere this policy has been operationalised it has been an abject failure. Please note the word – ‘competitive’ which keeps on recurring throughout and needs some examination.

The cat really ought to have been out of the bag for some time past. Modern extractive capitalism is not about free markets and competition, or too much nanny state. It is about monopoly, cartels, monopoly rents, restriction of competition and massive state subventions including subsidies, grants and tax exemptions for R&D and publicly funded research, not to mention bailouts (see below). Furthermore the ‘competition agenda’ gives rise to the austerity agenda, cutting corporate tax levels means cutting other taxes in different areas of the economy, once more – austerity.

In its turn this austerity gives rise to social and economic inequality. This is characterised by increasing wealth and income inequality as the corporations and the CEOs are inundated with monies through tax cuts – to make their businesses more competitive of course – whilst the mass of ordinary folk sees their incomes become stagnant and/or declining. And this has further ramifications. Monies showered on the well-to-do is increasingly idled whilst debt levels among the population at large continue to rise. This gives rise to low growth and ongoing stagnation in the economy.

The Dutch Disease

The Dutch Disease (or curse) is an economic term for the negative consequences that can arise from a spike in the value of a nation’s currency. It is primarily associated with the new discovery or exploitation of a valuable natural resource (e.g. oil) and the unexpected repercussions that such a discovery can have on the overall economy of a nation.

The negative impact involves an external demand for this asset which will push up the country’s exchange rate leading to a rise in the price of its export goods and an increase in the price of its imports.

Shaxson explains this in what happened in Angola after the discovery of substantial oil reserves:

Such is the fate of single-crop economies, which are invariably lopsided and vulnerable to changes in world prices. Diversified economies will produce better and more lasting outcomes. What is particularly disturbing in this respect is the parallels which can be drawn between Angola and Britain.

The growth of financialization in the UK, partly a political decision and both cause and effect of the finance curse. From the 1970s onward the star of industry and manufacturing waned whilst the star of finance waxed. Manufacturing and industry were, so tiresomely, fuddy-duddy and uncool, and the ‘hip’ trend setters in the media, universities, business colleges, and academia were in the forefront of a New World Order based – an order based upon shuffling paper around.

But for all the trillions of Eurodollars which stream through the Square Mile and the beautiful people who populate fashionable restaurants and theatres, the country is no better of overall than many of its continental peers with only poor to middling GDP growth and underfunded health and education systems. Financialised capital doesn’t fit well with public goods.

Once upon a time banks were in the business of funding productive investment to start up companies out of their from their deposit capital. Depositors were encouraged to lend to banks due to reasonable rates of interest. More recently commercial banks have been lending in the main to property speculators, mortgage lending and stock buybacks.

A century ago 80% of bank lending went to finance business. Now banks are mostly lending to each other and into housing and commercial; little more than 10% of bank lending goes to businesses outside the commercial sector.

Banking and loans which underpinned the economy are now parasitic upon the economy. They are the archetypal rent-extractors, when they were once a source of lending for productive investment by the industrial/manufacturing sector and SMEs.

Thus, the same lopsided and uneven development at the global level was also happening at the national level in the UK. Financialization in the UK has made some people and some areas rich, but only at the expense of making other people and regions poorer by denuding them of the necessary investment capital which would provide the wherewithal for steady growth.

Exactly how this upward redistribution policy from poor to rich is engineered takes up considerable space amounting to almost entire chapter in Shaxson’s second book So I can only give brief resume of what he says.

The finance curse analysis shows that it seems that … all this money swirling around our oversized financial sector seems to be making us collectively poorer. The mainstream narrative is that the City of London, Canary Wharf and Mayfair are the geese that lay the golden eggs.

But the finance curse reveals these are different birds: cuckoos in the nest crowding out other sectors … A lot of evidence and research is emerging to show that once the financial sector grows beyond a certain size it starts to turn away from its critically useful and important functions and towards those more lucrative and destructive.

Further expansion beyond this optimal size tends to make the economy that hosts it grows more slowly and generate a range of other harms. Britain’s financial sector passed its optimal size long ago …” [11]

It would not be stretching credulity too far to suggest that London seems to be undergoing a slow financial, economic and political secession detaching itself from the rest of the UK, having and pursuing its own goals and longer-term interests. Consider that,

…over 55% of the value of shares listed on the FTSE 100 is owned by foreigners, which means that much if not most of the inflow to the London nexus hardly touches the sides, even in central London; it flows straight back out again as interest or dividends. And these financial flows are not benefiting London either; they are enriching a wealthy sub-set of London, at the same time as they extract more from poorer and middle-class parts of the capital … in terms of wealth and ownership London itself is one of the most income and wealth unequal places in the western world. At the last count the richest 10% of its inhabitants possessed 173 times the wealth of the poorest 10%.” {12]

But of course, all of these disturbing developments were lost on the business, financial and political elites, particularly in the Anglo-American world. Asset-price inflation fed by cheap money was referred to as ‘growth’ (sic!) the economy was said to be delivering the goods and everyone was getting richer – except, that is, for the majority who were not and who were sinking deeper into debt. Then the dark brown stuff hit the fan circa 2008

Gotterdammerung

The Shakers and Movers of Wall Street and Canary Wharf were duly shaken and moved by the 2008 events. At the meeting between these gentlemen and Obama they were informed by the President that only he stood between them and the pitchforks. The great bailouts began.

Banks and other financial institutions were either hung out to dry (Lehman’s) or forcibly merged with other companies with public monies. The same scenario was played out in the UK with the rescue of Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland. What this actually meant was that the public authorities took the debts and toxic waste from the private sector and transferred it to the public sector balance sheet.

This meant that the programme of austerity received an additional push. Thus, the very economic factors which brought about financial Armageddon were touted and used to repair the damage!

The cure for debt driven growth was – wait for it – more debt! Growth in the OECD countries has limped along at roughly 2% or less, which is practically depression figures. According to Bloomberg, (January 2019), Global debt is reaching record figures. Overall, global debt has grown to $244 trillion as of the third quarter of 2018

• Total government debts exceeded $65 trillion in 2018, up from $37 trillion a decade ago, and rose faster in mature markets
• Non-financial corporate debt rose to over $72 trillion last year, now near an all-time high of 92% of GDP
• Household debt grew by over 30% to $46 trillion helped by strong growth in emerging markets, notably from China; though Czech Republic, India, Mexico, Korea, Malaysia and Chile all recorded more than 20 percent increases since 2016
• Financial sector indebtedness rose to about $60 trillion, up 10% from a decade earlier

Of course, and referring back to Pandora’s Box (see above) the last thing to come out was – hope! Are we supposed to cheer up at this point? I do hope that this provides us with some solace. In the words in one of the characters in Samuel Becket’s short piece, Imagination Dead Imagine ‘You must go on, I can’t go on’ I’ll go on.’

So, we go on.

Lotta Continua!

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