My Take | How pan-dems failed to put out the FIRE

It’s hard to argue with some pan-democrats and their supporters when all they ever do is shout about democracy and universal suffrage. I have nothing against those lofty aspirations. I just want to know how they plan on getting there besides throwing other people’s children, rather than their own, at the barricades.

In my last column, I cited the insidious influence of the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) industries over the government. I described this phenomenon with the well-known phrase, “regulatory capture”.

So far, so uncontroversial. But then, some pan-dem readers countered that you couldn’t reform FIRE without full democracy. That just got me into a fit.

First of all, did we learn nothing from the global financial crisis more than a decade ago? It was the “financialisation” of the mortgage and housing industries in the United States – the world’s “greatest” democracy – that triggered the subprime mortgage market collapse whose contagion spread through the global economy.

It may be worth some people’s time to read a good finance book on the crisis.