Since that he writes columns for Les echos i

CAPITALISM without CAPITAL by Paul Fabra

Edited by Les Echos Editions - Eyrolles, 380 pages, EUR 25.

Today, it has almost become a fashion. Stigmatize the excesses of financial capitalism, like a George Soros that is so rich with some of them; renounce the belief in the efficiency and the omniscience of the markets, as it is resolved to the repentant, Alan Greenspan their self-serving confessor during three terms as President of the Federal Reserve; call on States to widen their deficits and the central banks to walk for full boarding tickets for growth on the rails, against all the lessons of neoliberal orthodoxy professed since the 1980s: on all sides the most authoritative voices calling for a "refounding" a system has become almost out of control. Since that he writes columns for "Les echos", i.e. more than fifteen years, Paul Fabra to is address consistently and with ferocity. The author of "The Anticapitalism" love both true capitalism that he punished without retaining his pen everything that this unlikely alliance between the greed and the desire to undertake, source of admirable progress for humanity, could rise further as deception, theft, and curses. Sensing the danger, he was thus one of the first to denounce what he named excellently, before the expression to be tarnished, "capitalism without capital."

At the time of the triumphant markets, this could seem a posture to Don Quixote, brilliant but vain, until, under the cruel light of the crisis, the windmills are revealed, as our columnist had long warned, of weapons of mass destruction. The events succeeded since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, give an incredible news "papers" written in the precipitation of the weekly rhythm, sometimes a decade ago. As of January 2001, in the columns of the "Echos", Paul Fabra was surprised that it made bankers the "impossible of their own risk judges" and pointing the finger "complacent portages of banks", two years later, he was already "the great paradox of accounting reform", at the same time it fun arrogant optimism of Wall Street, satisfied to have found the philosopher's stone of the continuous increase in profits, on an air of Ray Ventura: "So good Madam Merrill Lynch."

Respect of "rules of the game."

But it would damage the quartering in the role of the Cassandras of markets and finance. His curiosity and taste of the debate of ideas train it sometimes on roads where would it not expected. German industry victim of the LBO, the fight against inequality, the price war, the time of payment, sales, Europe, labels and the anger of farmers, the work of senior citizens, his palette is broad. Under his scalpel, tired subjects often take new colour and angle. However, it is with his favourite theme, the footprint of the United States on the world economy, the dollar and machinery financial Wall Street - unique position that allows the economic world power of escape "rules of the game" capitalists - curious journalist turns into exciting thinker. His reading of the chain which led us on depression begins in the fall of 1979, when the President of the Fed at the time, Paul Volker, faced the most serious crisis that has seen the dollar since the end of the second world war. To escape, the man who still advises Barack Obama took measures respecting the "rules of the game" which is so attached Paul Fabra. He remonta rates to almost unbearable levels, causing an impressive number of bankruptcies in the banking and financial world. These painful remediation measures, view our columnist, have helped America to know the longest "bull market" of the long history of Wall Street. Doing the opposite, his successors have been flouting the "rule of the game" and have thus paved the way for a global leverage effect which the current crisis would be the culmination.

Seen, the originality of Paul Fabra analyses results well often for its unwavering commitment to the more orthodox theories of economic science. He has never expressed any tenderness for budget deficits; When asked about employment policy he answers policy of supply; behind the tax policy, he early made to flush out the "State paternalism". Finally, it does to lasse not to denounce the approximations of the national accounts that distorts our vision for growth. They are not so many economic commentators who may, in his example, now reread the writings of the day before yesterday and yesterday without feeling the ridiculous red mount their cheeks.