By the eve of the great financial crisis, the GOP was actually controlled by the racketeers of the Beltway and the Wall Street gamblers, not the red state voters who had elected it.
In fact, Goldman’s Sach’s plenipotentiary to Washington, Hank Paulson, was in complete command of the elected side of government. At the same time, the Bush White House had populated the central banking branch of the state with proponents of monetary activism, who were more than ready to authorize “heroic” measures to reflate the bubble.
Needless to say, the leader of the pack, Ben Bernanke, had been groomed for the role of chief bailster by none other than Milton Freidman. The latter, in turn, had led Nixon astray at Camp David 37 year earlier when he persuaded Tricky Dick to default on the dollar’s link to gold, thereby opening the door to fiat money, massive credit expansion and the modern era of Bubble Finance.
There is a straight line of linkage from that great historical inflection point to Friday’s Brexit uprising. Namely, Nixon’s abandonment of the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard, as deficient as it had been, was also a profoundly political act.
It resulted in the abdication of economic and financial policy to an unelected elite and their eventual capture by Wall Street and the forces of speculation and financialization unleashed by unanchored central bank money and credit.
Nixon’s destruction of Bretton Woods was the enabling event. It turned central bankers and financial officialdom loose to operate a dictatorship of bailouts, bubbles and financialization of economic life. And to spread this baleful regime to Europe, Japan and the rest of the world, too.
One of the big things being missed in all the Brexit blather is that, as with Trump in the U.S., voters are not so much voting FOR Brexit as they are voting AGAINST the status quo.
People don’t really understand what’s gone wrong (and are increasingly distrustful of policy makers who claim they do understand) – but they know that something has definitely gone wrong and see no reason to continue down the same path.
