“2010 - L’année fracturée. Recueil de chroniques”

Publisher: Anthemis
ISBN: 978-2-87455-279-3
Language: French
Free copy can be downloaded here.

Professor Bruno Colmant, who teaches at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, has written a new book on the financial crisis. The book has a foreword by former Prime Minister Mark Eyskens.

Summary

There will be no surprises, no freak occurrences in the unfolding story of the economy over the coming months. Since the start of the crisis, governments have been shoving to one side what amounts to a problem of indebtedness, the root causes of which lie in a social model that has run out of steam. Certain countries now find themselves in a complex situation, because the end of an economic growth cycle coupled with the systemic banking cataclysm has undermined their appearance of solvency.

Inevitably, the equation that needs to be solved in the years ahead is a fiscal one, with the underlying question: which generations will be hit by impoverishment? After all, fiscal equity is firstly a question of timing on a generational scale. The known debt of the Belgian state, which is already being carried forward for subsequent generations, will be compounded by another debt, as yet only vaguely defined, incurred as a result of population ageing.

This sovereign debt, which erupted in the 1970s, is akin to the Faustian pact described by Goethe, in which man is granted power for a short while in exchange for giving up his soul for eternity.

Thus the financial crisis will have had the effect of exposing the truth. The economic shock reflects fundamental imbalances, and heralds the end of the welfare state.

2010 marks the end of the glorious unearned incomes. It deals a severe blow to our economic narcissism. Worse still, it represents the death of an economic model based on credit.

About Bruno Colmant

Bruno Colmant is a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. He has a doctorate in management and a master’s degree in business engineering from Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (ULB), an MBA from Purdue University, USA, and a master’s degree in fiscal science. He is the author or co-author of some thirty books and numerous economic publications, and teaches at various higher education institutions in Belgium (Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School, UCL, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) as well as at the University of Geneva. In Belgium, he is a member of the Central Economic Council, the High Council of Finance and the Accounting Standards Commission.