“If any other profession caused this kind of mayhem, the profession – whether homeopath, neurosurgeon – would have been banned and its members hunted down and imprisoned”
Interview: Ha-Joon Chang
Louis Degenhardt speaks to leading heterodox economist and Cambridge academic Ha-Joon Chang
Even more worryingly, his concerns about the lack of banking reform appear to be falling on deaf ears.
“If any other profession caused this kind of mayhem, the profession – whether homeopath, neurosurgeon – would have been banned and its members hunted down and imprisoned, hanged drawn and quartered if it was the Middle Ages! But who has taken any of this?”
“Everything is carrying on more or less as before - the world has become so incredibly tolerant of the financial sector, it is quite scandalous given the scale of problem that the industry has created.”
When I ask if we’re destined to repeat the crisis we’ve just experienced, I’m struck by how frank his prognosis is:
“In the US and here, stock markets are higher than ever. For what? There’s something seriously wrong. I cannot predict exactly where it is going to come from, and exactly when it is going to happen, but it is quite possible that some kind of financial crisis hits some part of the world economy and we all get sucked into trouble again.”
As I’m processing that bombshell though, demonstrating an optimism of the will that Gramsci himself would have been proud of, he offers a glimmer of hope:
“It’s been quite disappointing that people haven’t reacted as much as they should have to this financial crisis but you know these social changes are very difficult to predict.
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