Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-24-Speech-3-244"
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"en.20080924.31.3-244"2
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"Madam President, if the main European leaders wished to illustrate the gulf separating them from European citizens, they need only react as they did to the financial crisis following the meeting of Finance Ministers on 14 September 2008.
However, to achieve that, the mission of the European Central Bank must change. It should refinance banks at very different interest rates depending on whether the loans benefit the sound economy I have just described or, on the contrary, are to be used as the basis of unsavoury financial operations. The conditions of access to loans should be advantageous in the former case and extremely dissuasive in the second. At the same time, rigorous controls are needed with regard to banks and funds and a tax should be introduced on financial capital movements. Finally, work should begin on radically reforming international economic institutions, as called for recently by President Lula in his address to the United Nations.
Thirdly, there needs to be an end to the self-satisfaction and condescension of a small elite explaining to citizens that the only valid choice is its own. If we could at least discuss all this seriously with an open mind and a sense of responsibility, then the crisis would, in one respect, have brought some benefit.
What are the main measures that have been announced, apart from a welcome but insufficient increase of EIB loans to small and medium-sized enterprises?
They can be summarised in three points. Firstly, as regards hopes for a fiscal stimulus, I quote Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘We have ruled out adopting a European revival plan.’ We are going to apply the Stability Pact, the whole Pact and nothing but the Pact.
Next, with regard to the deregulation process under way, I quote Christine Lagarde: ‘We must not allow any slowing-down of the structural reforms’; Jean-Claude Trichet: ‘Anything that can be done to improve the flexibility of the economy is good enough for us’; and Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘We must reform the labour market and the markets in goods and services. Competitiveness needs a bigger playing field.’
Finally, the question on all our minds is who should foot the bill? Again, I quote Jean-Claude Trichet: ‘Banking watchdogs should not have disproportionate requirements regarding credit agencies’, and, on the other hand, according to Jean-Claude Juncker: ‘Everything must be done to prevent salaries from getting out of hand’.
We wish to tell them this: come out of your bubble and try to put yourself in other people’s position. They see, on the one hand, finance ministers moving heaven and earth for the major global speculators – a sum of EUR 110 billion has been released by the ECB alone – and, on the other, the employees who are at risk. In attempting to reassure the markets, you are unsettling companies.
The truth is that, in the name of the free movement of capital and the famous open market economy with its free competition, financial leaders have collectively fuelled devilish mechanisms that they can no longer control. Let me remind you that, five months after the beginning of the subprime crisis, Mr Trichet, representing the 10 main world central banks, was still talking only of simple ‘market corrections’ and announcing ‘robust growth, even if there is a slight slowdown’. Three months later, he was urging Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs to ‘give the private sector a chance to rectify itself’. What insight! If a system can lose its own cronies in this way, it is in the midst of an existential crisis.
This is why, if we wish to avoid further increasingly painful collapses, we must have the courage to make a break. Firstly, we must break with the idea of productivity based on the lowering of salary costs and social expenditure. We must reverse the continuing trend of reducing the share of salaries in added value. That is not the source of inflation; it is the immoral actions of financial operators.
Secondly, we must end the complete reliance on financial markets to fuel the economy, as they are not feeding but poisoning it. The European Central Bank has a decisive role to play in directing money towards a socially effective economy, one that creates jobs, promotes training and develops public services, that ensures sustainable production and useful services, that has a place for research and development, respects public enterprises and the public interest and puts cooperation above economic warfare."@en1
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