« Le budget doit être équilibré, les déficits publics doivent être réduits, l’arrogance de l’administration devrait être tempérée et contrôlée. L’aide aux gouvernements étrangers devrait être diminuée de peur que la nation ne tombe en faillite. Les gens doivent encore apprendre à travailler, au lieu de vivre de l’aide publique. »
Citation attribuée à Marcus Tullius Cicéron, et circulant sur le Net depuis quelques années.
Or...
1) Grâce à la Société Internationale des Amis de Cicéron (la SIAC) nous savons désormais que celle-ci a été crée de toutes pièces par la romancière Taylor Caldwell pour son roman « a pilar of Iron».
2) Cependant, à travers ce que l’on sait de ce centriste et grâce à l’article suivant, paru en 2008 dans The Guardian, on peut dire que notre orateur romain ne se serait sans doute pas senti étranger à de tels propos.
SILcéron
"First credit crunch traced back to Roman republic" The Guardian
Politicians searching for historical precedents for the current financial turmoil should start looking a bit further back after an Oxford University historian discovered what he believes is the world’s first credit crunch in 88BC.
The good news is that Philip Kay knows how the Romans got themselves into financial bother. The bad news is no one knows how they got themselves out of it.
« The essential similarity between what happened 21 centuries ago and what is happening in today’s UK economy is that a massive increase in monetary liquidity culminated with problems in another country causing a credit crisis at home. In both cases distance and over-optimism obscured the risk, » said Kay, a supernumerary fellow at Wolfson College.
The monetary historian is giving a lecture today in which he will reveal how Cicero, the Roman orator, gave a speech in 66BC in which he alluded to the credit crunch. Cicero was arguing that Pompey the Great should be given military command against Mithridates VI, king of Pontus on the Black sea coast of what is now Turkey. He reminded his audience of events in 88BC, when the same Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia, on the western coast of Turkey. Cicero claimed the invasion caused the loss of so much Roman money that credit was destroyed in Rome itself.
The orator told his audience: « Defend the republic from this danger and believe me when I tell you – what you see for yourselves – that this system of monies, which operates at Rome in the Forum, is bound up in, and is linked with, those Asian monies; the loss of one inevitably undermines the other and causes its collapse. »
Kay said the words were « remarkable » for their contemporary tone. « Substitute US sub-prime for ‘the Asian monies’ and the UK banking system for ‘the system of monies which operates in the Roman Forum’ and it could have been written about the current credit crisis, » said Kay. (Pour en savoir plus...)
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