Money money money

The world's leading bankers have arrived again at Davos in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. They are there to argue the case that what they call heavy handed financial reforms will delay or even hamper the green shoots of global economic recovery.

In 2009 not so many of them made the trip: maybe they felt chastened by the fact that we the public of many different countries round the world had had to bail their business out with public finance that might otherwise have gone on healthcare or education or reducing climate change. (or perhaps it was because their expenses had been capped)

But with governments declaring that "we want our money back" and threatening to do so through curbs on trading, taxing bonuses and in other ways clipping the risky wings of banking, the bankers have turned out in strength to say 'touch us and it all comes down around you', or words to that effect.

I don't claim to understand this all (but they do and look where that has got us). I have enough trouble keeping track of the twenty pounds I got out yesterday from the ATM. But I have two words of caution ringing in my ears as the bankers seem to think that their world should stay they way it is.

The first is from George MacLeod in 1968:

Something needs to be done about the money boys who run our world. It is urgent that the whole issue of international monetary finance be reviewed.
Have you ever queried the bankers? I have. Try the lower echelon of banker, and most of them will say, ‘These things are too high for us, we cannot attain unto them.’ But a small minority will whisper, ‘You’ve got something there boy; isn’t it exceptionally cold weather for so late in the month of May?’

Try the upper echelon of banker. I have. I wrote to the top man of a London bank, a charming man, asking his comments on a similar document to the Haslemere Declaration. He replied that the figures were inaccurate. I immediately asked which figures but had no reply.

They are in training for the job of international bankers. They know what is good for us. Don’t consult us, the paltry crowd. But do they know what is good for us ... Or are they sowing the seeds of the next war?

The others words come from Alice Walker and a poem that in some ways sadly didn't make the final edit of my thoughts on BBC Wales this morning:

We alone can devalue Gold
But not caring
If it falls or rises
In the market place.
Wherever there is golf
There is a chain you know,
And if your chain
Is gold
So much the worse
For you.

Feathers, shells
And sea shaped stones
Are all as rare.
This could be our revolution:
To love what is plentiful
As much as
What’s scarce.