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5557Le texte ci-dessous d’Alastair Crooke donne une appréciation générale de ce que nous-mêmes nommons la Grande Crise d’Effondrement du Système (GCES). Effectivement, Crooke prend le plus grand angle possible pour embrasser l’extraordinaire événement qui nous frappe : Covid-19 et tout le reste, tout ce qui couvait sous la cendre de 2008 et qui, soudain, a explosé dans une feu d’artifice de crises annexes, latérales, croisées, catastrophiques. C’est dire que lorsqu’il écrit « This crisis has the feel of an End of Era », nous sommes tentés de comprendre et d’offrir comme traduction “Cette crise a la flagrance de la Fin des Temps”.
Il s’agit bien entendu de la poursuite de 2008, – on comprend qu’il y a une longue continuité, de crise en crise, comme une généalogie du désastre, jusqu’à celui de la Fin de Tout, – mais dans des conditions très différentes, comme si nous avions tiré nos dernières cartouches en 2008. Ainsi écrit-il, en ne s’attachant sur ce point que sur l’aspect financier :
« En 2008, il y eut une crise, mais uniquement dans le système financier. Des mesures purement monétaires ont été utilisées pour apaiser l’incendie de la crise bancaire. Aujourd’hui, la situation est très différente : Nous avons d’abord un choc de la chaîne de production et alors le monde entier attend des banques centrales et des autorités qu’elles déblaient le terrain, – qu’elles trouvent une solution et qu’elles présentent leur plan.
» Cette fois-ci, c’est différent. Car il n’y a pas de plan. »
Cette crise est infiniment extraordinaire car la vraie crise n’est pas celle qui a éclaté à l’intérieur du Système, qui est la cause première de l’événement. C’est un objet venu “de l’extérieur” (“de l’extérieur du Système” ?) : « D’autre part, l’image que suggère l’idée d’un “choc externe” frappant [le Système], un peu comme une météorite frappant une planète (elle-même déjà en très forte agitation), a l’avantage à la fois du réalisme et du symbolisme. »
De ce fait, la cause de ce gigantesque épisode crisique ne répond pas aux normes du Système, même pour lutter contre lui, il n’entre pas dans son jeu, moins encore il n’y joue pas ; d’où cette impression d’une paralysie, d’une impasse. Vous ne pouvez éviter de lutter contre Covid-19, bien entendu, mais pour lutter contre lui, à l’heure de la globalisation et de la vitesse extrême de toutes les sortes de communication, il importe de prendre des mesures extrêmement contraignantes qui empêchent de lutter contre les effets destructeurs des autres crises, les crises dites-“annexe” mais qui touchent le cœur du Système et le menacent.
Crooke aborde, au cours de son exploration, plusieurs sujets qui constituent pour nous des énigmes majeures ou des prospectives révolutionnaires. On en retiendra deux
• Les réactions populaires et l’évolution de la situation aux USA, dans une atmosphère déjà extraordinairement tendue d’affrontement sans pitié, en pleine année des présidentielles :
« Cette crise a la flagrance d’une Fin des d’Époque[d’une Fin des Temps] : contre qui et contre quoi la colère populaire sera-t-elle dirigée, lorsque les gens s’ouvriront aux vraies dimensions de la crise et réaliseront que leurs dirigeants n'ont aucun plan ?
» Cela pourrait être particulièrement le cas aux États-Unis. La plupart des retraités américains ont leurs pensions investies sur les marchés. Il est peu probable que les fanfaronnades de Trump regonflent cette bulle pour les retraités américains. Mais plus encore, c’est dans le secteur des soins de santé que la crise devient potentiellement explosive. Oui, les États américains ont des unités de soins intensifs, – mais seulement pour ceux qui paient. De nombreux Américains vivent au jour le jour, et même s'ils ont une assurance, les franchises sont énormes. Beaucoup d'Américains n’ont ni économies, ni assurance maladie. Les victimes du virus seront-elles simplement laissées à leur agonie dans les rues ?
» Alors que l’Amérique progresse inéluctablement sur la courbe exponentielle du virus, l’attrait de l’approche de Bernie Saunders, qui consiste à “offrir des soins de santé à tous”, pourrait devenir inarrêtable. Ce seul fait pourrait bouleverser la politique américaine. »
Enfin, ce blocage entre les deux poussées crisiques, – du Covid-19 d’une part, des crises spécifiques au Système d’autre part, – qui empêchent des tentatives immédiates et actives de “réparation” du Système d’être appliquées (comme ce fut le cas en 2008), laisse le champ libre à des évolutions conséquentes et structurantes, et par conséquent le temps aux psychologies de s’en imprégner. Comme on le voit bien en Europe, la seule puissance capable de lutter contre Covid-19, qui a la légitimité et l’autorité pour le faire, c’est la “puissance publique”, c’est-à-dire l’État, et plus encore et précisé de manière plus complète : l’État à la tête des nations (les États-nations) dont la capacité d’agir contraste absolument avec le dysfonctionnement de l’UE dès que le besoin de son action se fait sentir, – c’est-à-dire son impuissance hurlante en temps de crise.
Crooke met en évidence ce “retour de l'État-nation”, qu’il expérimente lui-même chaque jour, en Italie. Et l’on mesure, à la gravité de la crise-Covid-19, le temps qui est donné à ce sentiment pour s’inscrire dans les structures de l’esprit et dans la couleur du jugement.
« En vivant ici en Italie, verrouillé dans son appartement, on sent l'énorme méfiance que suscitent tous les nouveaux arrivants dans la communauté locale. Tous sont soupçonnés d’être des “porteurs” du virus (même lorsqu’il s’agit d’Italiens d’une autre région). Il est évident que ce virus va renforcer le sentiment en Europe contre l'immigration (déjà perçue comme apportant des maladies en Italie) et contre l'agenda sociétal de la “société ouverte”. Ce qui est clair aussi, c'est la façon dont les Italiens se rabattent sur la communauté, particulièrement la communauté locale. Lorsque l’Italie a lancé un appel à l'aide contre le virus (masques et respirateurs), les États membres n'ont pas répondu (ils les voulaient pour eux-mêmes). Qui a répondu ? Eh bien... la Chine.
» Le Covid-19 ne rend pas l'Italie plus communautaire. C'est plutôt l'inverse. L'Italie n'est probablement pas seule dans ce cas, – comme l'écrit un commentateur britannique, “la réponse mondiale au coronavirus montre que l'État-nation est de retour”. L'UE redevient dysfonctionnelle lorsqu'elle est confrontée à une crise majeure.
» Enfin, le modèle occidental néo-libéral et hyperfinancé survivra-t-il à l'inévitable post mortem du Covid-19 ? Ou assisterons-nous à un retour à quelque chose comme l'économie politique appliquée à l’économie “réelle” ? Le sentiment politique se déplacera-t-il vers la droite, à la recherche d'une gouvernance plus fonctionnelle, ou vers la gauche, à la recherche d'un système moins inégalitaire et moins truqué ? »
Ci-dessous, le texte du 13 mars 2020 d’Alastair Crooke, directeur de Conflicts Forum.
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Dr. Michael Osterholm of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research at University of Minnesota warned this week that the US was unprepared for a Covid-19, and that the health crisis will get much worse in the weeks ahead: "Right now, we're approaching this like it's the Washington, DC, blizzard — for a couple of days, we're shut down," Osterholm said. "This is actually a Coronavirus Winter, and we're in the first week."
Yes, President Trump had indeed opted for laconic stoicism: telling us that the Virus was fake news, and no worse than seasonal ‘flu; it would go away, once the sun came out. Simply, he blamed the Chinese. Now, Americans and skeptical Europeans, are beginning to understand just how different is Covid-19 from ordinary ‘flu.
Europeans have reacted diversely, but with the exception of Italy, largely have prioritised maintaining their GDP – even at the risk of seeing their health services collapse, when acute cases peak at levels beyond European intensive care capacities. The UK says it is in a ‘containment phase’, but in reality it has been doing next to nothing to halt the virus quietly propagating within communities.
Lombardi in Italy has a first-rate health system, which is now underwater (at 200% of capacity), and working to a ‘survival of the fittest’ strategy – leaving others to live, or die, without intensive care attention. Indeed, older victims will not even be viewed by ICU staff. European states which have eschewed de-socialisation measures may come to regret their option. De-socialisation is costly; but ultimately works (i.e. in the slowdown in the Italian ‘red zone’ infection rate).
The term ‘containment’ is a misnomer. The virus is almost impossible fully to contain, as it ‘hangs in the air’ – airborne (see here). It can be spread by carriers who do not even know they have the virus. ‘Containment’ cannot now halt the spread of COVID-19, but social lock-downs can slow transmission, and – more importantly - flatten its peak, thus lifting some of the pressure off scarce Intensive Care Units. Whereas, without de-socialisation, we are likely to see an exponential spike in infection rates in those countries where the government has done little to minimise personal contact.
Make no mistake: there will be political retribution in store for those leaders who bet wrongly -- that the virus effects were exaggerated, and that the crisis would pass – if only one kept ‘a stiff upper lip’ (i.e. clung to heroic stoicism).
Now, just as suddenly – for markets – what had been a pandemic which many investors queried, has coalesced into a much bigger crisis. We find ourselves at the epicentre of a massive and expanding global economic ‘shock’ – well, three interconnected shocks really: A growing ‘Supply Stop’; an oil price shock; and now an incipient financial and liquidity crisis.
Just to be clear: the virus did not cause the economic crisis. It was the Federal Reserve who laid the ticking bomb some time ago (with its debt-led, money-creating policies), and then armed the Fed’s ‘explosive device’ in 2008 through its subsequent financial asset-bubble blowings. In one sense, however, Trump did begin the squeezing the trigger to this crisis with the launch of his Great Power competition with China.
He initiated a Trade and Tech War to try and hold back China's growth. However, in so doing, he inevitably started tearing apart the root rhizome to the global trading and supply-line system. Britain had tried this trick in respect to Germany before WW1. It didn’t end well. It led rather, to economic contraction, at the very moment when an extended Empire was susceptible to trade shock.
Today, the US relies on massive debt-leverage to keep aloft the appearances of it being a continuing world order hegemon. The trade war, however, reduced America’s revenue and trade reach – just at the moment when the US Empire became susceptible to debt ‘shock’, and shows signs of middle-age ‘spread’ and a lack of ‘puff’.
The net effect inevitably has been to weaken global trade, at a time when the economic cycle was at a late stage. Demand destruction was already apparent in the oil markets, as the arteries of trade turned turgid – i.e. well before OPEC fell apart - and the oil-price war erupted - adding a further impulse to the incipient market crisis.
Now we have ‘lock-downs’ and supply shock (thanks to Covid-19), and anyone – corporate or individual - relying on cash income to service debt, is unquestionably going to face crisis, as the cash-flow dries up. We are likely to see cascading consequences, as one missed payment leads to, and aggravates, another’s financially constrained circumstances.
In 2008, there was a crisis, but one purely in the financial system. Purely monetary measures then were used to quieten the flames of a banking crisis. Today is very different: We have a supply shock, and all the world expects the Central Banks and the authorities to sort it out – to find a solution - and to offer a plan.
This time it is different. For there is no plan.
And the reason for this is that all the Central Bank ‘models’ for planning and managing an economy are wholly monetary (with intervention in the real economy seen as free market heresy). And for decades, we have been caught up in the ‘ideology’ that politics somehow is not really ‘political’ at all.
‘That’ which we think of as politics - should really be understood as no more than the tweaking of a machine (the economy). And this is best done by technical experts: bankers, academics and business leaders, and the like. This is not politics at all, they say; It is technological ‘management’.
Jim Rickards, a leading US financial commentator, writes: “Equilibrium models like those the Fed uses, basically say the world runs like a clock and occasionally it gets knocked out of equilibrium. And all you have to do is tweak policy or manipulate some variable to push it back into equilibrium. It’s like resetting a clock … They treat markets [and the economy] like they’re some kind of machine. It’s a 19th-century, mechanistic approach. But traditional approaches that rely on static models bear little relationship to reality. Twenty-first-century markets aren’t machines, and they don’t work in this clockwork fashion.”
At some point, [economic] systems flip from being complicated … to being complex. [And] complexity opens the door to all kinds of unexpected crashes and events. Event behaviour cannot be reduced to its component parts. There is diversity of actors in an economy, and interconnectedness; but the key element to complexity is adaptive behaviour. Something unexpected comes – it seemingly arrives out of ‘nowhere’.
Any number of similar grains of sand can be added to a sand pile – yet one, no different to any other – will cause the pile to landslide, and collapse. The point here is that the more and more complicated the system becomes – the more unstable it becomes (i.e. instability becomes inherent, beyond some undefinable point of complexity) - so that just one undifferentiated grain of sand can trigger the sand-pile avalanche.
Well: here we have had three grains of exogenous events: A supply ‘stop’ in almost all of China; the virus causing lock down in Italy (as well as in Asian economies); and the price of oil falling out of bed.
Central Banks simply do not do complexity approaches. They stay static (Rickards firmly asserts).
So how can a purely monetary equilibrium model come up with a solution for Covid-19? It can’t. You can't fix a viral pandemic with monetary easing.
The political consequences of this expanding conflagration are huge. The ‘Fiscal remedies’ option may prove to be another misnomer: If tinkering with interest rates won’t re-start factories emptied by pandemic, then marginal tax tinkering won’t either. Fiscal measures will likely boil down to the tax-payer bailing out underwater companies (such as the US shale fracking industry). Or, more probably, Central Banks will just ‘create’ the bail-out money, thereby further debasing and corrupting their fiat currencies.
This crisis has the feel of an End of Era: At whom, and at what, will popular anger be directed – as people wake up to the understanding that their leaders have no plan.
This may be particularly so in the US. Most US retirees have their pensions invested in the markets (via their 401k). Trump’s bluster is unlikely to re-inflate that bubble for American pensioners. Where it becomes potentially explosive however is in health care. Yes, US states have ICUs – but only for those who pay. Many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and even if they have insurance, the deductibles are huge. Many Americans have neither savings, nor health insurance. Will virus victims simply be left to die in the street?
As America ineluctably moves up the exponential virus curve, the appeal of the Bernie Saunders approach of ‘healthcare available for all’ may become unstoppable. This alone may upend US politics.
For Europe, which does have public healthcare, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard perceives a different conundrum: How will Italy fund itself – with the economy at standstill (the FT reports that Italy is now working at “10% capacity”) and with social expenditure exploding?
“Italy needs a precautionary rescue of up to $700bn from the US and the major powers to head off the danger of a global crisis, a bail-out veteran from the International Monetary Fund has warned.
“Ashoka Mody, the IMF’s former deputy director in Europe, said economic fall-out from the coronavirus is pushing Italy to the brink of “vicious negative feedback loop”, raising the risk of a financial chain-reaction through the international system.
“A fully credible firewall would require funding of €500bn to €700bn, orders of magnitude greater than any previous package in history. “The Europeans can’t do it themselves. They’re hopelessly divided, and financially much weaker than they were ten years ago. Their instinct will be to punt,” he said.”
The coronavirus may prove to be the crisis that moves Europe to the crux: Another ‘negative feedback loop’ would surely either force Italy out of the Euro altogether, or result in the EU adopting a truly unified fiscal and monetary union. But is full tax and fiscal union viable now – after Brexit - and with France likely to join with Germany in requiring a massive, social bail-out facility too? And who will pay? The other northern member-states will suspect a Trojan Horse concealing troops intent on raiding their tightly-held pocket-books. The IMF can’t, and the US already is in deficit – and about to sink in, deeper yet. This, we suspect will become a major issue ahead.
Living here in Italy under lock-down, one senses the huge suspicion accorded to all incomers into the local community. All are feared as virus ‘carriers’ (even fellow Italians). It is obvious that this virus will further harden sentiment in Europe against immigration (already perceived as bringing disease into Italy) and against the ‘open society’ agenda. What is plain too, is how Italians are falling back onto community – and local community support. When Italy appealed for virus assistance (face-masks and respirators), member states did not respond (they wanted them for themselves). Who responded? Well… China.
Covid-19 is not making Italy more EU communautaire. Rather the reverse. Italy is probably not alone in this – as one British commentator writes, “the global response to coronavirus shows that the nation state is back”. The EU is emerging again as dysfunctional when confronted by a major crisis.
Finally, will the western neo-liberal, hyper-financialised model survive the inevitable Covid-19 post mortem? Or, will we witness a return to something like the political economy of the ‘real’ economy? Will political sentiment ultimately shift Right in search for more functional governance; or to the Left in search a less unequal, less rigged, system?
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