How to avoid the peregrination in the catacombs

Arthur Miller wrote only one musical, as far as I am aware, and it was about the Wall Street Crash in 1929.  The American Clock was staged at the National Theatre in London shortly after the Black Monday share price collapse in 1987 and I saw it then.

I never forgot it.

One idea he plays with is that the collapse was caused by a man who kept his money in his shoes. “My God, you don’t believe in anything,” says a man who sees him extracting some cash from under his socks, and the unbelief spreads, with catastrophic consequences.

The idea of financial collapse as catastrophic loss of believe, rather like the loss of belief in fairies does for Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, is a powerful one. But there comes a point when the revival of belief has to be in something different.

We can’t any more believe in the bull market. Or the confidence of Goldman Sachs. Or the size of the bonus of the chief executive of Barclays. None of those carry any conviction any more as indicators of economic success. We have to believe in something else.

I suspect that what we need to believe in now is ourselves – our ability to create the institutions we need (local banks which are fit for the economy’s purpose would be a starter). 

Our ability if necessary to create the money we need. 

Our ability locally to rebuild sustainable economies, not hopelessly dependent on the largesse of the masters of the universe.

How do we rebuild that belief?  All we can do is get on and make it happen – and we all have a role to play. Sitting back and demanding that the government acts, but taking no action ourselves – about where we keep our money for example – is not an option. Certainly, I’m going to be shifting mine.

If we do that, we will have entered a new era – perhaps even a new civilisation. And that was the other message of The American Clock.

“There’s never been a country that hasn’t had a clock running on it,” he wrote. “So I keep asking myself – how long?”

Because, make no mistake, we are in the endtime of the current economic dispensation. The longer we cling to the institutions of the past, the worse it is going to be.

Already we are heading into a mirror of image of the Great Depression. Then as now, the main cause of economic unravelling was the way that banks were urged to hoard cash – encouraged by terrified central banks – for fear that that this loss of belief might bring them down.

That is itself the great threat that lies before us, the fear of fear itself. Or as Keynes put it – we are heading, if we are not very careful, towards a “perigrination in the catacombs, with a guttering candle”.

There are things that can be done – but it will involve breaking all the rules and reasserting our own belief in ourselves to do it. When that happens, we will have given birth to a new world. And the clock will start running again.