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page 191 chapter VII
Aciéries Réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange, or
Arbed for short. In 2001, it turned into the international
Acelor group, in which the state of Luxembourg still
held 30 percent of the shares. “And then a buyer from
India came along in 2007, bought himself in with
loans and is now seriously in debt,” said Jean Asselborn.
“350,000 jobs are now at risk around the world.”
This example also clearly reveals the impotence of politics.
“In 2007, the state tried to stop the company being
sold, but we didn’t have a majority, and several
tens of thousands of jobs were at stake in Luxembourg,
Belgium and France. As a politician, you're often just a
helpless spectator when the markets become increasingly
dynamic, and increasingly anonymous as a result.
Politicians, also at the European level, must be
given more means of stopping such uncontrollable
market dynamics. But that’s not possible in the system
we call the ‘free market economy’.”
Eric G. Sarasin described what successful cooperation
between politics and the economy could look like. For
him, the “Glass-Steagall Act” is an example of economic
development through appropriate state regulation.
The US law of 1932/33 was, like Roosevelt’s “New Deal”,
a reaction to the crisis of 1929. The Glass-Steagall Act
demanded the separation of investment banks and
commercial banks, in order to give the banks greater
security and protect them against risky speculation.
“The system worked,” said Eric G. Sarasin, "but it was
abolished by Bill Clinton in 1999. That was one of his
last official acts. If that separation had been retained,
the disaster today would perhaps have been only a
third the size.”