Scary times

Living through the death throes of capitalism as we have known it over the last 20 years or so is proving to be quite an emotional experience!

One thing I’ve discovered is that there are only so many noughts I can cope with. As the downturn accelerates (if that’s what downturns do), millions, billions, trillions and gazillions all begin to merge into a fuzzy blur. Graspability is daily defied.

On Monday, for instance, an obscure European body called The Financial Stability Forum blithely announced that global banks would need to raise new capital to recoup their loses to the tune of $350 billion – that’s $350,000,000,000. And that’s on top of the $350 billion (that’s another $350,000,000,000) that has already been raised by the banks over the last 18 months or so. $700 billion in all.

Very hard to grasp that kind of scale, let alone the depth of the pockets which will need to be dug into to find such sums. But I guess all things are relative. The title of Joseph Stiglitz’s latest book about the Iraq war is “The $3 Trillion War”. That’s $3,000,000,000,000, just in case you are wondering, or, to put it differently $106,303 for each and every citizen of Iraq.

This makes the prospective damage of around $18 billion done by Hurricane Ike to communities across Texas and Louisiana look like a raindrop in a downpour.

I divert. Back to those capital-craving banks (now minus Lehman Brothers, of course) in pursuit of all those billions. It’s not so long ago that these very banks were being held up as the miracle-workers of an economic boom that some really did feel would just go on and on. Our politicians (particularly Labour politicians) basked in their reflected glory. Yet all the while, with their toxic mix of derivatives, off balance sheet arrangements, hedge funds, and the manifestly unsustainable mis-selling of credit, they were sowing the seeds of their own – and the entire financial house of cards – destruction.

From a sustainability perspective, it’s difficult to exaggerate the significance of this moment. Depth-driven consumerism, underpinned by a corrupt, self-serving and unaccountable financial system, has been at the heart of 20 years of environmental devastation. It’s over. If we chose, we could now do things very differently once we’ve negotiated our way through the recession.

This is a post from Jonathon Porritt's blog, at www.jonathonporritt.com