A complete overhaul of banking regulation is needed in the wake of the global financial crisis, and one of the aims should be to insulate the real economy from the effects of future banking crises, according to some of the world’s top economists ... Robert Solow, who won the 1987 Nobel prize for economics, said: “I would like to see a regulatory system aimed at insulating the real economy from financial innovation in so far as that is possible”.There you have it. Some of the world’s top economists, including at least one Nobel prize winner, think that the “real economy” can be insulated from banking and finance, and they are proposing to do just that in order to contain the financial crisis – “so far as that is possible,” of course.
One has to go back to the Middle Ages and the views of the priests about the solar system to find so great a chasm between the reality and its false reflection in human mind. But those priests at least did not attempt to correct the course of the heavenly bodies. The high priests of finance, on the other hand, are adamant in curing a crisis about which they know nothing. Between them and the pragmatic men of the Treasury and the Fed, whatever is left of the U.S. financial system is about to receive a new round of experimental shock treatments.
