Snippet from an Al Jazeera editorial
China puts people before banks
China is the one leading economy where the divide - the disconnect between its financial sector and the world normal Chinese people and their businesses inhabit - doesn't exist.
Both worlds are booming again and this is due to the way the government handled its banks.
China hasn't allowed its banking sector to become so powerful, so influential, and so big that it can call the shots or highjack the bailout.
In simple terms, the government preferred to answer to its people and put their interests first before that of any vested interest or group.
And that is why Chinese banks are lending to the people and their businesses in record numbers. Why don't we hear more about that in the media?
In the UK and US, the financial sector is booming, while the world of normal people seems to be going from bad to worse, unemployment is high, businesses are folding and house foreclosures are still taking place.
Wall Street and Main Street might as well be existing on different planets.
And this is in large part because banks are still not lending money to the people.
In the UK and US, banks have captured all the money from the taxpayers and the cheap money from quantitative easing from central banks.
They are using it to shore up, and clean up their balance sheets rather than lend it to the people.
The money has been hijacked by the banks, and our governments are doing absolutely nothing about that. In fact, they have been complicit in allowing this to happen.
I asked Costas Lapavitas from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) whether governments had put the interests of banks before the interests of their wider populations.
"Yes I think you can say that. I think governments will probably come out and say that we helped rescue the banks, and we prevented generalised collapse. And to a certain extent that is true of course," he said.
"However there were so many ways in which banks could have been rescued and this particular way has been done in such a way that the banks have no incentive to change the ways they operate ... It is as if the banks have written the policies that the state adopted."
Interests of shareholders
The US and British governments have allowed banks to solve their own crises in the interests of their own mangers, and shareholders – they are after all private business.
Governments should have made it conditional for banks to lend to us, before they are given access to so much of our money and the Federal Reserve's cheap credit.
So the Western hemisphere is suffering the consequences of government failure, while the Asian Giant is celebrating government getting it right.
Funny, how our seemingly democratic governments have been taken over by vested interests.
So, lay off China. It is the one country that is putting the interests of its people above that of the banks.
And in these pressing times I say Hallelujah to that.
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