Call it a harbinger of doom or a necessary wake-up call, but Carmen Lossman’s ingeniously disturbing journey into the dark heart of economic and monetary illusion is a must-see for anyone grappling with the sheer madness of life today.
Economic growth has become the Holy Cow of late post-industrial capitalism, where – to mix metaphors – the elephant in the room is the way money is created literally out of thin air by a few computer strokes of double-entry book-keeping when a bank advances a loan to a customer on which it expects to make a profit.
Madness
Lossman’s genius in Oeconomia is to pin down in simplified, relatively easily understood statements, the sheer madness of system built on the notion of infinite exponential economic growth in a world of finite natural resources.
It’s a challenging subject to bring to life visually, but Lossman manages to build an impelling argument built around computerised diagrams and interviews with masters of the financial universe that include the chief economist at the European Central Bank, Peter Praet, and leading financial executives at, among others, a German luxury car firm and a bond trading company that manages …
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