In truth, “Dexia was not a bank but a hedge fund” and was hugely over-leveraged on dicey loans and garbage bonds to countries like Greece. Naturally, the middle class will be given the opportunity to pay for the greed of the 1%. This of course will be after the vultures have bought anything of value for pennies on the dollar, leaving the the populace of the EU to clean the remaining offal.
Andy Carling reports from Belgium. Andy is an EU certified freelance journalist and photographer and was a co-founder of the seminal Blair Watch.
Dexia’s midnight runners
The financial crisis reached my bank this week. This means that, after an initial panic, I became one of the most reassured people on Earth. Well, we’re going to need some more words as we’re now in a situation where language hasn’t evolved fast enough to cope with the increasingly bizarre world we have created for ourselves.
The first reassuring message came through pretty quickly, just after I had failed to make a withdrawal at a Dexia cashpoint, where it was refusing to pay out, rather like a dodgy casino. Then the news arrived, the Belgian government was supporting the bank deposits.
Naturally, my first thought was, “We’ve got a government?” [The Belgian government has been shut down for over a year]
My second was to wonder who on Earth would actually be reassured by knowing the full weight and majesty of the Belgian state was behind them. On Sunday, Flanders Today had a story with a telling headline, ‘The king is not considering abdicating the throne.’ One could almost hear the word ‘yet’ being added.