“Is it possible that investment banks, credit rating agencies, the head of the Federal Reserve all FAILED to realize what would be the inevitable result of an “easy credit,” lending policy that reversed decades of regulatory principles and rules?”

Is, to me anyway, appalling. It’s conspiracy theory of a kind that would not be unfamiliar to Lyndon Larouche and his ilk. Let’s rephrase the question: “Is is it possible that the various capitalist agencies should have been more concerned with making short-term profits than worrying about the long or medium-term effects of cheap money and deregulation?”. It’s not only possible, given the nature of how capitalism works, it’s inevitable. It’s always jam today, worry about the crisis (and how to make the working class pay for it) tomorrow. To say:

“Unless we want to revel in the nonsensical tale of a blinding surge in human greed, the answer must be a negative one.”

is unconscionable for any anti-capitalist. It’s not “a blinding surge of human greed”, it’s just M-C-M’, the default oprational mode of capitalism for chrissake! The fact that this default mode is pretty stupid and inevitably ends up in mess/crisis that requires new political thinking and scheming to get out of, doesn’t mean that the whole process is one continuous pre-planned conspiracy. I actually think this paranoiac model of capitalist social processes is a tendential weakness of those strands of autonomist thought that go too far in opposition to structuralist conceptions in conflating the political and the social together – from a piece I’m working on at the moment:

“The danger of political Sabellianism, or monadism, is that in the very
act of eliminating the schizoidal effect of having social logic split
into two interacting yet incommensurable logics, we displace the
problem of explanation while at the same time drastically increasing
it. In a sense, if we can characterise a capitalist society as seen on
a “Nicene” model as being schizoid, a Schizo-capitalism, then for a
Sabellian or monadic model, we replace it with a paranoid or
Paranoia-capitalism model. Because we no longer have complexity
emerging from the interaction of two distinct and clashing logics, we
need to impute a much higher level of political planning and scheming
on behalf of a putative capitalist consciousness. Events, even the
most involved and ostensibly contingent or accidental, become,
necessarily, the outcome of elaborate political plots by scheming
capitalists. Nothing is accidental, everything happens for a reason,
whatever the outcome, it must be the result of a plan. The end result
is a perfect paranoia that ends up, ironically given that the monadic
turn of the operaisti and autonomists of the 60’s and 70’s was an
attempt to regain the initiative for the proletariat as active
historical subject, is a tendency to disempower the working class. A
tendency that can only be overcome by an increasingly forced
hyper-optimism based on teleology or a dogmatic insistence that
proletarian action is primarily constitutive, whether it’s actual
processes can be made visible or not.”

[Plus, inter alia, the notion that US workers using their credit cards is the resistance to the capitalist order that has triggered the crisis is laughable.]

Which leads on to the second point, which is the way this piece connects the current shit-storm to the global restructuring of the 1980s. In the UK, the massive extension of credit over the last 10–15 years is a powerful disciplining mechanism, just as debt was used to hook the global South into wider circuits of capital. There’s no difference here between the macro- and micro-levels: governments across the world were forced to implement structural adjustment programmes, just as individual workers are forced to dismantle their own social outlooks and open themselves up to intensified domination by capital.

And I stumbled across this interesting site while hanging out at Nate’s.