We are often told that the global financial crisis, now well into its fifth year, is far too complex an issue for any layman to understand. But this is a plain disengenuous lie, a convenient untruth repeated each and every day to exonerate the main culprits – the now too-big-to-fail banks and hedge funds – and allow them to continue to bleed the public coffers dry, all in the name of “financial stability.”
In reality, the actions and events that lay at the root of the financial collapse are disarmingly simple to grasp. They just need packaging in such a way that the majority of people are both able and motivated to understand it. And what better way to do that than by combining clear bite-size insights with a hearty helping of irony and satire?
Which is precisely what veteran British comedians John Bird and John Fortune do in the clip (with Spanish subtitles) below. A sharply witty and brutally accurate portrayal of the investment bankers’ mindset, Bird and Fortune’s sketch, from 2009, is a stark reminder of the chain of events that led up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
I urge you to watch it and savour the humour, but remember: the last thing our financial overlords want is for us laymen – and women, of course – to begin seeing through the multi-layered veils of respectability and complexity shrouding the criminal fraud, greed and manipulation beating at the heart of the global banking sector.
The emperor’s nakedness is growing more and more visible by the day. Perhaps it’s time we begain taking a leaf out of the child-in-the-fable’s book, by pointing out its all-too-apparent inadequacies for all to see.
