Harvey Taylor Art and Performance

Strapped for cash? Just print some more money. That’s what banks do. In fact they don’t even bother to print it, they just make it up in cyber space and then lend it to people like you and me but demand that we pay it back with labour and goods. They know they can always borrow it from another bank that has also made it up, but they won’t be responsible. It will be the other bank that is responsible. That’s what all banks believe.

Every now and then, someone panics and points out that nearly all of the money in the system has been made up by banks who are borrowing it from other banks which have also made it up. Then all the banks panic at once and starting bleating and squealing until the governments step in.

The governments now make up loads more imaginary money and give it to the banks who give it to their favourite employees who are ‘special’. But we are ‘all’ in it together.

The governments have to get the money from somewhere but the banks will not lend them the money that the banks received from the government because they are special too. So the governments tell everyone (apart from the bankers and the banks) that they will have to work longer hours for less money and provide extra goods and services with fewer rewards so that the banks can be saved so that ‘everyone’ will be alright.

Eventually things get a little bit better although most people find they have a lot less money, their pensions have disappeared and their savings, if they ever had any, have gone missing too. They also find that they have to work a lot harder but a few people do pretty well out of it. Mostly bankers. But only the special bankers. Not the ones who work in branches.

Then the banks find something they call ‘confidence’ which is also made up and they start making up more money and so the cycle goes on.

With each turn of the cycle the wealth gap between the ‘special people’ and everyone else gets bigger, but that is because of something called the free market which allows all the least scrupulous, superficially intelligent people (these are people called ‘bankers’) to obtain a monopoly on wealth. The market is totally free providing you have the vast sums of money required to take advantage of the market. The rest of us just have to go sit on spike and whistle.

A lot of well meaning, industrious and committed human beings go on working really hard and just occasionally they make enough money to do something useful in the world besides exist. Some of them do useful things and some of them become ‘bankers’. As Paul McKenna says, people who become rich do not really change positively or negatively simply as a consequence of having money. Their ‘wealth’ simply exaggerates what was already there. If someone is a ‘total banker’, when they get rich they just become a bigger ‘total banker’.

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You’re f*cked.