Le Kiosque signale le livre suivant d’un journaliste britannique à cause de ses remarques pertinentes sur le Canada et les banques dans le contexte de la crise. Pour une fois, on peut être fier des libéraux.

I.O.U.
Why everyone owes everyone and No One Can Pay
John Lanchester
Emblem

Canada p.212

“This leads us to (…) the final thing hat was different about Canada. This was that its political leaders chose a different course from the Anglo-Saxon world: as a conscious choice, they didn’t give the financial sector what it wanted, and as a direct result helped to save it from itself. This is all the more striking given that in general, the relevant Liberal government pursued policies which were broadly speaking deregulatory, pro free-trade, and neo-liberal. The men on whose watch these choices was made were Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, at the time Prime Minister and Finance Minister, and the crucial moment came in the 1990’s when the Royal Bank of Canada wante to merge with the Bank of Montreal, and Toronto-Dominion wanted to merge with the Canadian Imperail Bank of Commerce. The banks, and their political supporters, argued that they needed to be allowed to turn into these huge superbanks in order to compete in the increasingly size-obsessed, globalized capital markets. Chrétien’s government said no, the bankers sulked (…)

Whatever the reasons, the Canadian example has important lessons for the rest of the world: it shows that sometimes what politicians need to do is to hear bankers explain what they want, and then say No. “