Archive for the ‘Financial crisis’ Category
Posted by seumasach on November 4, 2010
A good article by Pilger, but he is certainly wrong about one thing: Britain is utterly bankrupt. The comparison with 1945 is facile: Britain then still had a substantial industrial base and had a powerful position internationally allied with the USA. Now both have eroded almost completely. Britain is bankrupt at every level, personal, local, corporate and national, a dire situation which it makes worse through its aggressive stand off against the rest of the world. Standing defiantly alone will get us nowhere. Thirty years of Thatcherism have wrecked the place and it will take thirty years to rebuild it, a task that can only be accomplished in collaboration with Europe, China and other creditors. This involves a major strategic shift away from imperialism which in the form of the pound/dollar reserve currency racket has been the basis of our prosperity in the last 20 years. The cuts will precipitate the collapse of Britain’s parasitic “consumer economy”; not making the cuts will start a run on the pound and hyperinflationary burn out. Pilger and the left are deluding themselves about the depth of the crisis so they can go on as ever making mindless, mock-heroic exhortations. Trying to link national reconstruction with multipolarity I have outlined a programme for the end of empire.
John Pilger
ICH
3rd November, 2010
These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don’t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.
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Posted in Financial crisis, Multipolar world, UK economy | 7 Comments »
Posted by seumasach on November 3, 2010
Hossein Askari and Noureddine Krichene
Asia Times
4th November, 2010
KUALA LUMPUR – Over the past decade or so, Malaysia has quietly become the leading international player in Islamic finance and its gateway. The government of Malaysia, through its two principal agencies, Bank Negara (the central bank) and the Security Commission, has actively promoted Islamic finance. More specifically, Islamic finance has been given formal prominence in the Financial Sector Master Plan (FSMP) and the Capital Market Master Plan (CMP), which were initiated in Malaysia in 2001.
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Posted by smeddum on November 3, 2010
November 03, 2010
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The prospect of more liquidity flooding into the emerging markets due to the further relaxation of monetary policy in developed economies is causing concern in China, which is already under pressure of expectation of long term inflation.
The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, warned in its report on Nov. 2 that enormous capital may flood into fast-growing emerging economies from developed economies, which are apparently poised to launch more stimulus actions to battle stagnation. As a result, emerging economies are facing mounting pressure of inflation and capital influx. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: quantitative easing | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on November 2, 2010
Michael Hudson
Global Research
2nd November, 2010
Moreover, it may well be asked whether we can take it for granted that a return to freedom of exchanges is really a question of time. Even if the reply were in the affirmative, it is safe to assume that after a period of freedom the regime of control will be restored as a result of the next economic crisis. (Paul Einzig, Exchange Control (1934)).[1]
Great structural changes in world trade and finance occur quickly – by quantum leaps, not by slow marginal accretions. The 1945-2010 era of relatively open trade, capital movements and foreign exchange markets is being destroyed by a predatory financial opportunism that is breaking the world economy into two spheres: a dollar sphere in which central banks in Europe, Japan and many OPEC and Third World countries hold their reserves the form of U.S. Treasury debt of declining foreign-exchange value; and a BRIC-centered sphere, led by China, India, Brazil and Russia, reaching out to include Turkey and Iran, most of Asia, and major raw materials exporters that are running trade surpluses.
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Posted in Financial crisis, Multipolar world | Tagged: Currency Wars | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on November 2, 2010
“It is becoming harder to mop up the liquidity flowing into these countries,” said Neil Mellor, of the Bank of New York Mellon. “We fully expect more central banks to impose capital controls over the next couple of months. That is the world we live in,” he said. Globalisation is unravelling before our eyes.
Globalisation Anglo-Saxon style, that is: a benign counter-globalisation, multipolar, is coming more and more to the fore. That said, this is an excellent article by Evans-Pritchard: it seems that, in Britain, some on the right are much closer to reality than those on the left, who are simply nowhere.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph
2nd November
The Fed’s “QE2” risks accelerating the demise of the dollar-based currency system, perhaps leading to an unstable tripod with the euro and yuan, or a hybrid gold standard, or a multi-metal “bancor” along lines proposed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s.
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Posted in Financial crisis, Multipolar world | Tagged: Currency Wars, dollar collapse, End of empire | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on October 28, 2010
Thursday 28 October 2010
by: Peter White, t r u t h o u t | Report
(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Steve Hoang, Kevin Anderson, E Dina)
Scandal is spreading across Wall St. like a very bad case of poison ivy. A rash of fraudulent home foreclosures has exposed some of the nation’s biggest banks to an even worse condition … bankruptcy. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: foreclosuregate | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 25, 2010
Mogambu Guru
Asia Times
26th October, 2010
I thought I had seen and heard it all after the ludicrous Ben Bernanke, asinine chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced that the official (and thus a lie!) 2% inflation in prices was too, too low, and he wanted higher inflation because, somehow, in some weird little fantasy world that only he and other neo-Keynesian econometric cyber-nerds can see, higher inflation is “consistent with the mandate of the Fed” to achieve stable prices (zero inflation)! Hahahaha!
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Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: End of empire, financial collapse | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 24, 2010
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said that the G-20 made “no particular conclusion” after some members expressed concern about proposals for further quantitative easing in the U.S.
I think the conclusion is that the US plan has been quietly but firmly rejected. What will their next step be? Nice to see a bit of straight speaking from the Germans – they’re becoming increasingly uppety.
Bloomberg
23rd October, 2010
The Federal Reserve’s push toward easier monetary policy is the “wrong way” to stimulate growth and may amount to a manipulation of the dollar, German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said.
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Posted in Battle for Europe, Financial crisis | Tagged: G20, quantitative easing | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 24, 2010
Guardian
24th October, 2010
Ministers were accused last night of deliberately driving poor people out of wealthy inner cities as London councils revealed they were preparing a mass exodus of low-income families from the capital because of coalition benefit cuts.
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Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: no reposessions no evictions! | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 24, 2010
STV
21st October, 2010
Demonstrators in Glasgow have occupied a branch of the Lloyds TSB bank in a protest against spending cuts
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Posted by smeddum on October 23, 2010
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In These New Times 