Michael Roberts' blog on Financial Times articles
"What’s wrong with capitalism is not the capitalist mode of production for profit, says Plender, but the particular form it has taken with the dominance of the banking sector. The bankers have become pirates or profiteers stealing from the decent capitalists. Thus we hear the usual argument of the Keynesians that it is the finance sector that is the problem, not capitalism. This idea of robber barons has been taken up opportunistically by the Republican rivals to Mitt Romney, the favourite for the US presidential nomination. Romney is accused by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry of being such a ‘profiteer’ because he ran one of the largest private equity companies in America. Bain Capital was engaged in buying out companies, stripping their assets, sacking much of the workforce and then selling them on. Apparently 22 out of the 77 companies that Romney bought were put out of business. And yet what Bain Capital did is nothing more than capitalism at work: the strong win and the weak fail. It is an illusion perpetuated by Keynes, echoed by Plender, that there is a capitalism that can operate without speculation and without ‘profiteering’ and thus deliver economic growth, jobs and incomes without inequality or slumps."