Today in my first class on Victorian Britain we talked about the preconditions that led to the Industrial Revolution, which was already in full swing when Victoria came to the throne. Among them was the strong banking system of Britain.
What does that have to do with the current legislation before Congress and the financial crisis in America and elsewhere, you're probably wondering. Bear with me.
Because Britain had strong banks and a safe and secure financial system, there was money available to finance the entrepreneurs whose ideas and devices powered the Industrial Revolution.
See where this is going?
A lot of people think it was, at best, a waste of money to bail out the banking system, and at worst, an immoral reward to cheats and crooks. And perhaps it is both, at least in some instances. But without a strong financial system we're not going to pull ourselves out of the deep recession we've found ourselves in. Banks without money to lend are not going to finance the advances in technology that will put Americans back to work. Banks with no credit to extend won't finance the green revolution that, we can only hope, will one day be written in capital letters and will rival the Industrial Revolution. (And correct its mistakes, when it comes to the destruction of our environment that the Industrial Revolution was responsible for.)
So Congress should agree to give the new Obama administration the rest of the TARP funds and then banks should get to work loaning money to engineers and entrepreneurs, which, incidentally, we also talked about today.
There. That's my contribution today in the "nothing new" department.
