Brothers, Sisters.. Trilogy 2: The Advance

Five years ago Jonas Cleary asked me to write a foreword for 'Brothers, sisters.. with a focus on the socio-economic aspects of the book. As 'Brothers, sisters.. is now republished as a trilogy, he has asked me for a new, revised foreword to the book or better, an updated one mirroring the prevailing socio-economic environment relative to what he has written. In that original foreword I had not only outlined how the then economic factors determining the world's financial system would inevitably lead to its collapse, but could do so in a frighteningly short space of time. I mentioned that seemingly bedrock behemoths from General Motors to the House of Saud would be swept away in the wake of such a breakdown. That the only beneficiaries of the AAA rated bonds, then flooding the financial markets, were bankers skimming fat fees from peddling them, but otherwise, they were worthless 'paper' puffed up with 'air money'. These years later, the world's financial system has narrowly escaped - yet again - from implosion. Those supposedly secure bonds have indeed been found to be worthless, and General Motors swept into insolvency, as have many financial institutions, whose gluttony for ever higher profits were largely responsible for bringing about this latest financial crisis. However, the prediction I made, and has not - as yet - materialised is fall of the House of Saud (although it too, is now being buffeted by the storms, unleashed by jobless graduates, sweeping through the Middle East). Finance ministers across the world believe that their immediate intervention in, and assistance to, the financial markets staved off this impending breakdown. In this they are deluded. It was money, more than $13 trillion of it - equal to the US's GDP - high-handedly taken from ordinary peoples' tax payments by those ministers' governments, and rushed to the outstretched hands of the then desperate, near as destitute banks, which prevented a worldwide economic collapse.