The 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, published an essay this year entitled “The Price of Inequality – How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future” (The price of inequality, how the division of society threatens our future), which is the snapshot of the exact reality of what many enlightened globalization scholars have been saying for years. Here is just one figure among the many proposed by the Columbia University professor: 1% of the American population receives between 20 and 25% of the wealth the country produces each year, much more than was the case thirty years ago. “So the United States has reached a high level of inequality – so Stiglitz – destroying the myth of the American dream of equal opportunities for all”. Today the real opportunity is to choose the right parents in order to receive the appropriate training at high professional levels. And the trouble is that other countries have tried to emulate this negative result”.
Even Europe has already followed this path and three arenas of the Buch Messe have been dedicated to talking about it with a large audience participation. The most popular meeting was the one with the candidate for the chancellorship of the SPD, Peer Steinbrück, former minister of the economy of the Grosse Koalition from 2005 to 2009. The problem, in fact, is not only establishing who is to blame of the crisis, which Stiglitz attributes to the banks, to the political power that did not stop the banks, to the economists who did not immediately put the negative consequences of these behaviors in the foreground and, lastly, to the uncritical acceptance of substantially false models . Important now, to avoid sinking even further into a great depression, is to find solutions quickly. In fact, for the American economist, 25% youth unemployment in some countries (including Italy) represents the image of a generation with no prospects.
E here comes the beauty. Steinbrück announced – without ifs and buts, as the Germans like to say – that the time has come to tax transactions on financial capital with the aim of encouraging investors to move resources into the real economy. 40% of corporate profits normally go to the financial sector, said the SPD official, while Stiglitz stressed that most of his students eventually specialized in the financial sector and not in industry or of the real economy in general. “Germany – commented Steinbrück – has managed to keep its industrial structure strong and yet the phenomenon has also affected the strongest economy in the European Union”. Yet when he was minister of the economy it was decided at the G20 level to proceed with regulating the flows of speculative capital: "Not doing so means having created a democratic deficit, leaving free rein to enormous financial powers".
It is then a matter of fielding a system of tax conditions that play on the advantages – disadvantages scheme for the large financial centers which must see the convenience of moving capital towards industry. Of course, the Americans too had thought of a law to regulate finance, but – said Stiglitz – what emerged was a sort of “Swiss cheese full of holes, of an infinite quantity of exceptions which ended up leaving a vast area of derivative products that are anything but transparent”. To those who tell him that intervening in capital movements means killing the duck that lays the golden eggs, Stiglitz replies that, on the contrary, that precisely the current situation kills the duck and brings the world economy into the abyss: "You can create a stronger economy if inequalities are eliminated”. What does American public opinion think? "In America, there are 350 million Americans who are in favor and 10 banks who are against."
Source: STAMP Tuscany
