SPECIAL FEATURE
This article is about financial infrastructure solutions for the Welsh Economy and Welsh Business. Originally published (in edited form) in agenda the magazine for the Institute of Welsh Affairs ( summer 2010 No.41).
Adolf Hitler rose to power during the Great Depression of the 1930s because of fear and loathing of bankers coupled with racism and economic collapse. We all remember nightmare images of people paying for bara brith with a wheelbarrow load of paper Reichsmarks. It is a vision embedded in the collective unconscious of Europeans such as ourselves, or, to use modern parlance, it’s in our DNA.
Karl Marx clearly recognised how Capitalism is built on the flow of money and this, in turn, puts the ‘levers of power’ in the hands of people who understand this or are in positions to control it: i.e. the banking systems. Communism and its many re-interpretations by the likes of Lenin was built on this understanding.
Two main factors helped the USA emerge from the Great Depression, where a hatred of the depredations wreaked by banks, especially in rural farming communities, was more than equal to that of Europe. These were US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal infrastructure programmes and the huge re-employment provided by an emerging military-industrial complex at the outset of WWII. To a certain extent the New Deal programme saved America from a descent into demagoguery and the equivalent of German National Socialism. For those interested in the history of the implementation of New Deal structures and their political and socio-economic ramifications, Robert.A.Caro’s immense Pulitzer Prize winning biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon. B. Johnson are a ‘must read’. There are lessons here that those in power both in the UK and in Wales, need to learn.
It is clear therefore, that an awareness of the political zeitgeist, history and what has worked before and is working now, is intrinsic to any sustainable regeneration of the Welsh economy. Our current governing class appears to show lamentable ignorance in these matters, is far too parochial in outlook or vision and seems also to be hell-bent on ‘re-inventing the wheel’. But the wheel has already been invented; what is needed now is fuel for the engine and suitable lubrication – which brings us back to … money.
How money is used, and how it flows is the only key to any solution that can unlock our economy and thus enable the realisation of any kind of social or public service agenda to which we may wish to aspire to as a Society.
