D’UN RETOURNEMENT L’AUTRE

At the end of August 2008, just weeks before the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers on 15 September, which was the most acute moment of the crisis, provoking real fears that the entire global banking system was on the brink of collapse, the philosopher and economist Frédéric Lordon was finishing the manuscript of Jusqu’à quand? Pour en finir avec les crises financieres (‘For How Much Longer? Let's Finish With Financial Crises’). This text should be read alongside his satirical play about the crisis, D’un retournement l’autre: Comedie serieuse sur la crise financiere. En quatre actes, et en alexandrins (‘From One Turnaround to Another: Serious Comedy about the Financial Crisis’, 2011). Explaining the financial turmoil, Lordon refers to autumn 2007 as ‘le grand retournement’ (‘the great reversal’). Referring to the closure of investment funds at Bear Stearns on 22 June 2007 as a key point in the brewing crisis, but also events in France, such as the closure of funds by the management company Oddo on 26 July 2007, Lordon remarks with typical wit: ‘On y voit, comme a l’endoscopie, l’intérieur de la machine en train de convulser’ (‘Here we see, as in an endoscopy, the convulsions inside the machine’). However, more serious alarm was sounded on 9 August 2007, when funds were frozen at France's biggest bank, and the second biggest bank in the eurozone, BNP Paribas. For Marc Roche, a former journalist at Le Monde, this should be taken as the real start date of the crisis. At 7 a.m. the bank published a laconic communiqué announcing the freeze: