Like a stampede of wild horses on a dirt highway, daily events in the constant chaos of their unfolding kick up a vast obscuring cloud of dust and smoke. It is not until long afterwards when the dust has settled and the smoke has cleared that an account can be given which measures accurately what went on. Historians patiently wait to correct and amplify what journalists first report.
When long from now the history is written of these times it will show that the biggest story in world affairs was not al Qaeda and terrorism, not the Arab Spring, not the rise of China, not global warming or the melting of Arctic ice, not even the spin-offs from the discovery of the Higgs boson (though that will come close) but, instead, the world-wide financial ruin caused by the greed, incompetence and sheer criminality of unsupervised Big Banking.
Scandal has succeeded scandal. Greed and fraud and wild incompetence have led to vast banking collapses bringing in their train economic disaster in country after country, leading to the misery of hundreds of millions. Meanwhile the perpetrators have continued to award themselves huge bonuses and extravagant golden handshakes. Massive bail-outs paid for by ordinary taxpayers have for a while shored up these utterly corrupted institutions, only to have the cycle of fraud and greed and incompetence and cover-up repeat itself. The richest and most undeserving see their wrongdoing rewarded while the poorest and most vulnerable suffer the consequences. The world is headed straight for a major depression caused by those whom the Economist has recently famously described as international Banksters.
The arrogance and effrontery, as well as the incompetence and criminality, of these charlatans, this gang of thieves, is staggering. They get up and announce multi-billion dollar losses, pocketing their
