Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

-----to understand the need for a different type of banking system. Deputy Higgins earlier said the way to deal with this is to bring the banking system, which is simply the system to control surplus wealth, the savings produced by ordinary working people, under democratic control. Banks simply operate the investment funds and those who own the funds should decide what they are invested in and how our society is developed. Is it not obvious that to avoid the sort of financial crisis we have just witnessed those surplus funds should be under public and democratic ownership so we as a society can democratically decide our priorities for investing and lending? Would that not be fair?

Even in the United States, where they are not socialists and where they are not advocating the views of Deputy Higgins or me, the Federal Reserve has three goals: to prevent inflation, to protect home owners and ensure employment. The European Central Bank has only one concern - inflation, or in other words the protection of price stability and the interests of business. The demands of the EU-IMF and the deal to recapitalise the banks means ten of thousands of people might lose their homes. The banks will not lend into the economy to restart growth and get people back to work because recapitalisation of the banks is the major priority of the ECB, the EU and the IMF and that is because profit maximisation is the bottom line; the balance sheet is all that counts.

To prevent a recurrence of the economic crisis we do not need pathetic, meaningless measures about what will happen after the next crisis, we should put in place measures to ensure there will not be another crisis by reining in the vampires and sharks of the international financial system and putting them and our banks under democratic control so we dictate their lending and investment policies, policies that are concerned with job creation, strategic industry and keeping people in their homes. If we did that we might prevent another crisis. This Bill will do nothing to prevent such a crisis.

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