The familiar tragic character traits and flaw were in evidence in BBC2’s dramatization of "The Last days of Lehman’s (perhaps better titled the fall of Lehman’s?). Hubris, blindness (an oft quoted trait of Dick Fuld), uncontrolled anger, regretful nursemaids (Paulson) and existential angst laid blame for much of the financial crisis at the door of the frailty of human morality in the face of irrational animal spirits. As illustrated by the required film based ‘philosophical’ quotes from Fight Club by analysts working through the night to value AAA securities based on essentially fraudulently acquired mortgage debt – i.e. something really does come from nothing – you were left feeling perhaps suitably ‘empty’ feeling about having digested a dramatic exposition of what happened to our money. It reflects our obsession that our motivations and ‘truths’ come from within the self and so we must look no further than the selfish individual to find the root cause of our predicament. This explanation plays well to our popular view of psychology and post-death-of-god view of our essentially human flaws (such as believing a diet coke will alleviate the effects of a donut) and hence why it is easier to say you will rein in such behavior by limiting bonuses and ‘punishing’ bankers. However, this is a convenient ‘truth’ which hides a more politically inconvenient alternative reality where money is no ‘neutral veil’ over our diverse social relations and cultural beliefs and practices. We all share in the creation of what money is (and all its forms) and shape its future through our usage. It is a social and cultural thing – a product of our societies not some neutral medium. No researcher worth their salt would assume that a similar global technology – the mobile phone – would be used and valued in the same way in different cultures; we have gotten used to the idea that such things are adapted by their users to fit their cultural reality not blindly adopted in a cultural vacuum of consumerism. The effect of globalization of money practices (rather than money) has not been, as was believed would be the outcome, to make money more ‘efficient’ and ‘rational’ through its management within the "market", but rather to link up a plural meanings of money across the globe, between East and West, Developed and Developing, Old world and New world – a truly chaotic tower of Babel built on the belief we are all talking the same language and meanings of money. It is the contradictions of values rather than imbalances of value which drive bubbles and crashes. Perched on the top of this tower were the investment banks, busily producing money from a variety of cultural contexts and homogenizing it into rational, liberated and technologized packages which they could sell and create yet more money. However, when the social and economic reality of this production were called into question or simply failed to materialize then the emptiness of the promises which underpinned the value of what they were trading was laid bare. The point was made in the "docu-drama" that no bank before and no bank after ("AIG are in the building," says Paulson, as he calmly pulls the plug on Lehman’s) were allowed to fail by the state. Why? What interest does the state have in preserving this myth of credit money as a tradeable essential commodity? Is it perhaps because states are the biggest credit junkies of all? Surely not! Lehman’s may have been no more than a tragic-comic interlude in the history of money, but the fact is that the state was not prepared to pay the price of allowing money to be seen in all its plural, cultural, contradictory being. Instead we have replaced the abundance of banks with the abundance of the state – just don’t look too closely at the material fundamentals upon which such abundance is based.
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