Blame central banks for financial crisis

Published on Saturday 27 June 2009 19:44

IN A different way, perhaps, to the way that he meant, Gerald Warner (Comment, June 21) is correct to say that capitalism did not create the current financial crisis.

What is to blame is simply intervention in the money supply, mostly, but not completely, by means of a central bank. Central banks, it bears restating, are a nationalisation of the money supply and a key plank of the Communist Manifesto. Their main function is to expand the currency and fund big government, and that is precisely what they are continuing to do today.

The solution is to cease taxing profits according to ability and rewarding losses according to need and to return to an objective standard that prevents the state from debasing the currency and fleecing its' productive citizens and that standard is gold.

Bruce Crichton, Falkirk

GERALD Warner thinks that by comparing the collapse of the banking system to Eastern Bloc socialism he can somehow spare the blushes of the capitalist dogma he has espoused for so long.

It is just this dogma of deregulation and laissez-faire which led to the present crisis, to the strains of the Thatcherite mantra "you can't buck the market". And I don't remember right-wing thinkers being strident critics of the fat cat culture before everything went haywire.

Like Mr Warner, we may deplore the fact that our banks now resemble Eastern Bloc control economy behemoths. But would he rather that government had stood back and let all our savings disappear?

"Bankers… rigged the system. That is not capitalism, but the most audacious dependency culture yet invented." I never thought I'd hear Gerald Warner sounding like Tommy Sheridan.

Irene Soames, Glasgow