The financial system established in England after 1688, based on usurious lending to the state by private bankers, is reaching its final blowout in the form of a series of devastating bubbles and a massive bailout of the financiers with public money. But the issuance of money doesn’t have to be in the hands of a private consortium: another credit system is possible.
Posted by seumasach on January 23, 2009
January 21, 2009 (LPAC)–Yesterday, American statesman Lyndon LaRouche denounced the City of London’s continuing insistence on cooking up desperate bail-out schemes for the bankrupt international financial system, which they are trying to impose on the United States as well, such as the absurd idea of creating a “bad bank” loaded down with toxic assets. “This is a bunch of hyperinflationary nonsense,” LaRouche said. “We should put these things through bankruptcy reorganization.”
Posted in Financial crisis | 1 Comment »
Posted by seumasach on January 23, 2009
John Hoefle
Jan. 16—The sudden bailout of Bank of America today, and the renewed talk of the need to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of bad assets from the banks, shows that the bailout process is entering a desperate and dangerous new phase. All the official verbiage aside, the bailout shows that not just Bank of America, but the banking system itself, is bankrupt, despite the trillions of dollars our government has thrown down the bailout rathole.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: stop the bailout | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on January 23, 2009
22nd January, 2009
Iceland’s embattled prime minister resigned on Friday citing medical reasons and called an early election for May, a move that could prompt a dramatic shift to the left after a 20-year experiment in free market economics.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: bankrupt iceland | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on January 23, 2009
Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part analysis of the specter of deflation. Part I can be seen here.
In Part I of this series, I explained why a protracted “deflationary spiral” was an unlikely outcome based on the government’s desperation to prevent deflation from taking hold combined with its ability to create a limitless amount of money from nothing. Below, I address the various arguments that are often made by those who think a deflationary spiral is inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on January 23, 2009
January 22, 2009 Seeking Alpha
From Wiki: The phrase “crossing the Rubicon” has survived to refer to any people committing themselves irrevocably to a risky and revolutionary course of action
. In the annals of circular finance, nothing compares to the spectacle of a government’s central bank printing large amounts of host currency and then loaning it to the host government’s treasury so that that government can pay its bills. Yet that is the path, according to several recent media reports, that the US Federal Reserve Bank is about to embark upon. The Fed has already announced its intention of directly buying GSE debt. Since the GSEs were effectively nationalized this is the same as buying Treasuries; GSE debt and Treasuries are both now direct obligations of the US Government. But this announcement either was not widely recognized by the markets for what it was, or it was ineffective for other reasons. Ben had to come to market with the next step in his program. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: hyperinflation | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on January 22, 2009
F. William Engdahl
22nd January, 2009
During the end of the 1970’s into the 1980’s British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the City of London financial interests who backed her, introduced wholesale measures of privatization, state budget cuts, moves against labor and deregulation of the financial markets. She did so in parallel with similar moves in the USA initiated by advisers around President Ronald Reagan. The claim was that hard medicine was needed to curb inflation and that the bloated state bureaucracy was a central problem. For almost three decades, Anglo-American university economic faculties have turned to Thatcherite deregulation of financial markets as ‘the efficient way,’ in the process, undoing many of the hard-fought gains secured for personal social security, public health care and pension security of the population. Now the ‘poster child’ economy of the Thatcher Revolution, Great Britain, is sinking like the proverbial Titanic, a testimony to the incompetence of what is generally called Neo-liberalism or free market ideology.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: bankrupt Britain, death agony of thatcherism | 1 Comment »
Posted by seumasach on January 22, 2009
22nd January, 2009
Two police officers are seriously injured after being hit with flagstones during a struggle with protestors on Austurvöllur parliament square in Reykjavík last night. Police resorted to the use of tear gas bombs—the first time such a tactic has been used since the protests in 1949.
From the protests on Tuesday. Photo by Páll Stefánsson.
Protestors fled the scene and one protestor was taken to the emergency room because of the gas. After the smoke cleared, people returned to the square, some stoning police, who again resorted to tear gas, Morgunbladid reports.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: Iceland, iceland protests | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on January 22, 2009
They don’t know what they’re doing, do they? With every step taken by the Government as it tries frantically to prop up the British banking system, this central truth becomes ever more obvious. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: bankrupt Britain | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on January 21, 2009
20th January, 2009
Late last night I returned from a four-day visit to Iceland with Professor Anne Sibert, co-author of a reportanticipating the collapse of the Icelandic banking system and joint carer for our cats and children.
Posted in Financial crisis | 1 Comment »
Posted by smeddum on January 21, 2009
Thousands of people protested outside the Althingi parliament yesterday on the occasion of parliament reconvening. Protestors demanded that the government step down and early elections be held. The demonstration began at noon and lasted until after midnight. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: bankrupt iceland, iceland protests | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on January 21, 2009
TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2009
First Iceland, Greece and Spain lost their AAA sovereign credit rating.
Now, Bloomberg notes:
“The U.K. government may lose its top AAA credit rating after taking a 70 percent stake in Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, credit-default swaps show.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
In These New Times 
