Jeffrey Epstein, Neoliberal Icon

Being what it is the media tends to be averse to helping the public understand what one calls "the big picture" in regard to, well, anything it takes up. Naturally where the economy--an area where the media's aversion to big picture thinking is particularly strong--is concerned one does not hear the media use words like "neoliberal," or that word which so much describes "Actually existing neoliberalism," "financialization," in spite of its indispensability to any such understanding. For no intelligent person can deny that the neoliberal era has seen the financial sector (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) not only wax much larger relative to the economy as a whole (as, by contrast, manufacturing stagnated and shrank), as measurable in precise, empirical ways, as shown by a comprehensive examination of investment, the makeup of value added, exports and Gross Domestic Product, the growth and distribution of assets and profits.

Moreover this quantitative change has gone along with a qualitative change in which finance not only accounts for much more of economic life than before, but is positioned far more centrally within the economy, its priorities determining the private conduct of business--and the policy of government. Thus, among much, much else, the intensity of mergers and acquisitions activity, which has led to the increasing financial ownership of non-financial firms--epitomized by the positions of State Street, Vanguard and Black Rock relative to the Standard & Poor's 500. Thus the running of industrial firms not on industrial principles but, in line with "shareholder value" and its short-termism the imperatives of the financial firms owning them, which has in so many cases seen industrial giants unmake themselves as they became financial houses themselves. Thus the extreme fixation of the business world on the stock market, the capitalization of which is so consistently remote from anything warranted by "fundamentals" when one goes by the conventional yardsticks (e.g. the "Buffett Indicator"). Thus the loose monetary policy we have, which if enacted in the name of Keynesian (or rather, bastard Keynesian) excuses ("We must sustain job creation!") have as their real motive keeping speculators in cheap cash for the sake of keeping the asset buying and selling going as, in John Maynard Keynes' image from his General Theory, the development of the economy is a matter of bubbles on a whirlpool of speculation rather than speculation being bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise.

As one might guess, such fundamental transformation of the economy has its consequences--social and even cultural. There is the decimation of industrial employment, and the inflation of asset values, which, along with the transformation of everything into a good rendered for private profit individually purchased on the market, has so consistently raised the cost of living relate to income. There is the mass delusion that everyone can somehow get through the play of paper values, as if this was not a matter of claims on stagnant or even declining "real" values--the stock market's surging having nothing to do with the actual availability of food, shelter, and other utilities, with the delusion that it is endlessly promoted by those telling the public to think of a house as an investment rather than the consumption that it really is for those who need a roof over their heads. And of course there is the conduct of those who come out ahead in the ludicrous and profoundly unfair game (there are those who can reasonably expect bailout, those who will be paying for the bailout), all of it famously dramatized by such figures as Honore de Balzac in the novels of the Human Comedy as his masterpieces Cousin Bette and The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. So it all goes in this age in which working people can't afford houses, or health care, where the fever dream that is crypto just goes on and on, how Jeffrey Epstein played Pimp to the Superclass is equally characteristic of it. Indeed, if human civilization somehow manages to get through this loathsome period in its history to have any history afterward, it will leave its legacy of images for later people to remember it by, and Epstein's smug face next to the faces of the presidents, princes and oligarchs exalted by idiot admirers as the great and the good will be one of them.