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Uber-Nomenklatura (International Pirates of Opportunity):
For "Ultimate Play On Volatility" (to consolidate rule of Uber-Nomenklatura), see http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/bidens_generated_crisis.html.
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How and why have we come to elect Gobalist-Sell-Outs to entrust so much of our national security in respect of soundness of defense secrets, currency, economy, business, and infrastructure to international brokers of wealth and power, who play on volatility, mass distortion, differentiation frenzy, debt-enslavement, and terror-control of everyday people?
Why is no politician addressing HOW WE SHOULD REGAIN NATIONAL CONTROL over the internationalists who do business within our borders?
Why have we turned a blind eye to the financial enslaving of Western Civilization to Eastern Communitarianism?
Why does not America impose more export taxes against corporations that export vital and limited American resources?
Why have we empowered high rollers at highest levels to engross us so deeply in gaming mass distortion, differentiation frenzy, and social volatility?
Why have we failed by tax policy to discourage short term speculation and to encourage long term investment?
Why have we allowed Democrats to buffalo us, to toss measured loan making judgments to the winds, merely to avoid the falsely derisive, race-baiting complaints of Ponzi-Artists regarding redlining of loan applications?
Why have we allowed energy to be sucked out of inclinations for planning ahead?
Why have made so little effort to spare the hoi polloi from harsh corrections and hangovers that inevitably assault us after cumulative insults to environment, posterity, and our own civilizing decency?
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HERD-MINDED POLITICAL CORRECTNESS:
How our Saudi “friends” use a cousin of political correctness against us in order to leverage political control through terrorism ---
See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/opinion/15mon4.html?th&emc=th “Libel Tourism’ “Libel Tourism’:
When Freedom of Speech Takes a Holiday
By ADAM COHEN
Published: September 14, 2008
When Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote “Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It,” she assumed she would be protected by the First Amendment. She was, in the United States. But a wealthy Saudi businessman she accused in the book of being a funder of terrorism, Khalid bin Mahfouz, sued in Britain, where the libel laws are heavily weighted against journalists, and won a sizable amount of money.
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The upshot is a First Amendment loophole. In the Internet age, almost every American book can be bought in Britain. That means American authors are subject to being sued under British libel law, which in some cases puts the initial burden on the defendant to prove the truth of what she has written. British libel law is so tilted against writers that the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticized it last month for discouraging discussion of important matters of public interest.
Mr. bin Mahfouz, who has denied financing terrorism, said Ms. Ehrenfeld’s book contained inaccuracies and demanded a retraction. He also demanded a significant contribution to a charity of his choice — a charity Ms. Ehrenfeld said she feared would be one with ties to terrorism.
Ms. Ehrenfeld, who describes herself as being “in the business of stopping people who fund terrorism,” refused to back down. “I said,” she later recalled, “he’s found the wrong victim.” Ms. Ehrenfeld rallied prominent champions of free speech to her cause, including the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers and the PEN American Center. She also set to work trying to change American law. The New York State Legislature passed a bill that some are calling “Rachel’s law,” which blocks enforcement of libel judgments from countries that provide less free-speech protection than the United States. Gov. David Paterson signed it on May 1.
A similar, bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress. The federal bill would extend protection to the entire country. It would also allow American authors and publishers to countersue, and if a jury found that the foreign suit was an attempt to suppress protected speech, it could award treble damages. There is little opposition to it — and Congress should pass it before it adjourns later this month.
"Libel tourism” is a threat to America’s robust free-speech traditions, which protect authors here. If foreign libel judgments can be enforced in American courts, there will be a “race to the bottom”; writers will only have as much protection as the least pro-free-speech nations allow.
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The result is what lawyers call a “chilling effect” — authors and publishers may avoid taking on some subjects, or challenging powerful interests. That has already been happening in Britain. Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties” was a best seller in the United States. But its British publisher canceled plans to publish the book, reportedly out of fear of being sued. (A smaller publisher later released it.)
Britain should rethink its libel laws, as the U.N. committee urged, for the sake of its citizens. But until it does, the United States should ensure that other countries’ pro-plaintiff libel laws do not infect this country and diminish our proud tradition of freedom of expression.
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GLOBAL WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/opinion/15cohen.html?th&emc=th: Premiumize or Perish
By ROGER COHEN
Published: September 14, 2008
Wealth is not so much diminishing, although it certainly looks that way right now on Wall Street, as it is shifting to emergent recession-resilient elites in places like Russia, China, India, Dubai and Brazil. They want the same status symbols and brands the world over.
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SLAVES TO GREED:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/opinion/15krugman.html?ref=opinion:
Financial Russian Roulette
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 14, 2008
Will the U.S. financial system collapse today, or maybe over the next few days? I don’t think so — but I’m nowhere near certain.
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To understand the problem, you need to know that the old world of banking, in which institutions housed in big marble buildings accepted deposits and lent the money out to long-term clients, has largely vanished, replaced by what is widely called the “shadow banking system.”
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The new system was supposed to do a better job of spreading and reducing risk. But in the aftermath of the housing bust and the resulting mortgage crisis, it seems apparent that risk wasn’t so much reduced as hidden: all too many investors had no idea how exposed they were.
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But the consequences of those rescues are making officials nervous. For one thing, they’re taking big risks with taxpayer money. For example, today much of the Fed’s portfolio is tied up in loans backed by dubious collateral. Also, officials are worried that their rescue efforts will encourage even more risky behavior in the future. After all, it’s starting to look as if the rule is heads you win, tails the taxpayers lose.
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The real answer to the current problem would, of course, have been to take preventive action before we reached this point. Even leaving aside the obvious need to regulate the shadow banking system — if institutions need to be rescued like banks, they should be regulated like banks — why were we so unprepared for this latest shock?
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RETURN OF FEAR:
See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/business/15street.html?em:
Nation’s Financial Industry Gripped by Fear
By BEN WHITE and JENNY ANDERSON
Published: September 14, 2008
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See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9P15YZrnv0; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g1UtFDytfk; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNIgkaqh-oM;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z1-Gx9hWcY;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G1fNjK9SXg.
14 comments:
Derelicts In Government:
All branches of U.S. government, having been content to rely on the slogan of “free global markets” as a substitute for intelligent foresight, have been asleep at the wheel and now, without luck and new blood, are without skill for navigating us through exposure to financial ruin on account of over dependence on foreign sources of energy.
Why, then, should we accord any credence or confidence that the U.S. government has in place rational or national means for accounting for, monitoring, or motivating actual or proportionate monetary amounts, such as regarding:
Printed money in circulation;
Loans made by institutions licensed to make loans within the U.S.;
Loans made in compliance with regulations for imposing reasonably proportionate reserves;
Purchases of land or infrastructure within the U.S. made by foreign nationals or governments;
Debts owed by governmental entities;
Debts owed by governmental entities to foreign governmental entities;
Stock shares owned by foreign nationals or foreign governments in corporations for mining or manufacturing from resources within America; or
Stock shares owned by foreign nationals or foreign governments in corporations for contracting to mine or manufacture resources for the U.S.
THE MONEY CHANGERS:
Snippets from http://www.themoneymasters.com/ and http://centre.telemanage.ca/links.nsf/articles/E565B5C857585F8385256DF1001A8A77:
James Madison: “History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”
Napoleon: "The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain."
….
By 1803, Jefferson and Napoleon had struck a deal. The US would give Napoleon $3,000,000 in gold, in exchange for a huge chunk of territory west of the Mississippi River: the Louisiana Purchase. With that three million dollars in gold, Napoleon quickly forged an army and set off across Europe, conquering everything in his path. But England and the Bank of England quickly rose to oppose him. They financed every nation in his path, reaping the enormous profits of war. Prussia, Austria and finally Russia all went heavily into debt in a futile attempt to stop Napoleon.
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Why would a central bank finance opposing sides in a war? Because war is the biggest debt-generator of them all. A nation will borrow any amount for victory. The ultimate loser is lent just enough to hold out the vain hope of victory, and the ultimate winner is given enough to win. Besides, such loans are usually conditional upon the guarantee that the victor will honour the debts of the vanquished. Only the bankers cannot lose.
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The site of the Waterloo battlefield is about 200 miles north-east of Paris, in what today is Belgium. There, Napoleon suffered his final defeat, but not before thousands of Frenchmen and Englishmen gave their lives on a steamy summer day in June 1815.
On that day, 18 June, 74,000 French troops met 67,000 troops from Britain and other European nations. The outcome was certainly in doubt. In fact, had Napoleon attacked a few hours earlier, he would probably have won the battle.
But no matter who won or lost, back in London Nathan Rothschild planned to use the opportunity to try to seize control over the British stock-and-bond market. The Rothschilds hotly dispute the following account.
Rothschild stationed a trustee agent, a man named Rothworth, on the north side of the battlefield, closer to the English Channel. Once the battle had been decided, Rothwortt took off for the Channel. He delivered the news to Nathan Rothschild full 24 hours before Wellington's own courier.
Rothschild hurried to the stock market and took up his usual position in front of an ancient pillar. All eyes were on him. The Rothschilds had a legendary communication network.
If Wellington had been defeated and Napoleon were loose on the Continent again, Britain's financial situation would become grave indeed. Rothschild looked saddened. He stood there motionless, eyes downcast. Then, suddenly, he began selling.
Other nervous investors saw that Rothschild was selling. It could only mean one thing: Napoleon must have won; Wellington must have been defeated.
The market plummeted. Soon, everyone was selling their consols-their British government bonds and other stocks-and prices dropped. Then Rothschild and his financial allies started secretly buying through agents.
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In fact, the rest of the 19th century was known as the "Age of Rothschild". One author, Ignatius Balla, estimated their personal wealth in 1913 at over two billion dollars. Keep in mind, the purchasing power of the dollar was over 1,000 per cent greater then than now. Despite this overwhelming wealth, the family has generally cultivated an aura of invisibility. Although the family controls scores of banking, industrial, commercial, mining and tourist corporations, only a handful bear the Rothschild name. By the end of the 19th century, one expert estimated that the Rothschild family controlled half the wealth of the world.
Whatever the extent of their vast wealth, it is reasonable to assume that their percentage of the world's wealth has increased dramatically since then, as power begets power and the appetite therefor. But since the turn of the century, the Rothschilds have carefully cultivated the notion that their power has somehow waned, even as their wealth and that of their financial allies increases and hence their control of banks, debt-captive corporations, the media, politicians and nations, all through surrogates, agents, nominees and interlocking directorates, obscuring their role.
Bread and Circuses:
The current U.S. election is a circus sideshow to the main action. Regardless of who wins, the push to global enslavement will continue, leading us to trade liberty for security.
In fact, stirring up emotional investment and raging volatility is part of the game, because it incites everyone to go into debt to money changers, no matter how high the cost.
In the shadow of volatility, all participants (excepting global money changers) will be reduced to debt slaves.
The money changers will win in all events, simply by requiring victors of the passions of volatility to ensure payment of debts of losers --- sort of like a higher level Marshall Plan for the security of global money lenders.
I'm not quite sure how the fight against them can be maintained.
Real Reform:
Whether McCain or Obama is elected matters, but not as much as we like to believe.
If McCain is elected, we may, perhaps, hope slightly more:
(Borders:) that borders will be enforced; (Defense:) that rogue states will not be availed nukes to lend to terrorists; (Decency:) that society may less quickly be led to whoredom; (Solvency:) that government may less slavishly engage new debt; (Foresight:) (Bush Doctrine?) that the U.S. will facilitate preemptive piercing of terrorist conspiracies in the bud before they boil.
Regardless, neither McCain nor Obama will stanch our lurch to bankrupting indebtedness, as we vainly try to ensure, with only OUR OWN MONEY, against all manner of social and natural volatility. Rather, our moral weakness against such volatility will continue to be fired by a cloven of double-dealing money changers, whose contrivances and bets are rendered loss-proof merely by requiring borrowers, WITH BORROWERS’ MONEY, to ensure every side, regardless of outcome.
Regardless of whether McCain or Obama is elected, the U.S. will continue to lurch towards an enslaving abyss. Moneys will continue to be loaned to persons and entities not able to repay --- in order to finance adventures, businesses, houses, cars, and educations. Everyone will continue to volunteer to become debt slaves to those heading and contorting the system for money changing.
Ask: Who really holds most of the debts --- and power? Such debt holders, in their present state of conditioning, do not necessarily see themselves as wicked. After all, they simply finance the passions for volatility that we already have.
So, Real Reform necessitates effective confrontation with those running the highest levels for the system of money changing. Both their rules and their ethics must be confronted and changed.
Re: Real Reform
If McCain is elected, we may also hope slightly more:
(Supreme Court:) that justices will be appointed to the Supreme Court who will treat the Constitution as something to be followed, not contorted.
SOLUTIONS:
For Moderates, solutions to many of humanity’s problems are obvious:
CATHOLICS: This is not a good time to breed our planet into environmental catastrophe. We need responsible family planning. So, grow up!
REPUBLICANS: Given the importance of the Middle Class for producing the wealth you so love to leverage, understand that it is not good for the economy when the factory workers are not paid enough to be able to purchase the cars they make. Given the spread indicated by the Gini index, now is not a good time to fail to induce some fairly proportionate redistribution to the Middle Class, as by a progressive tax on cumulative consumption. Grow up!
DEMOCRATS: Bums have no "rights," social or natural, to the fruits of my labor. Grow up!
PROFESSORS AND JOURNALISTS: Hello! Marxism does not work! Didn’t you get the memo? Grow up!
MEXICANS: If you envy what Americans have, then learn how to make your own version of America. Don’t just proliferate and export more of what has failed in your own society. Grow up!
EUROPEANS: You do not appease inassimilable fascists by going to extremes to try to assimilate them. Grow up!
MONEY CHANGERS: You may increase control over gullible dependents by proportionately reducing our accounted wealth. But, in doing so, you reduce the production that otherwise would increase for all, even as you betray your own moral connection to humanity. Grow up!
REPRESENTATIVES: You represent the people of the U.S., not some House of Rothschild or private owners of the Federal Reserve. Get some foresight. And grow some spines!
Snippets from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2bab091a-83f8-11dd-bf00-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1:
In particular, in the 1930s, monetary policymaking was paralysed. Out of that story came a simple lesson that all policymakers have absorbed from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s monumental Monetary History of the United States, and from its central chapter on the Great Contraction. The policy recommendation is simple: central banks have a responsibility to not allow a bank collapse to be followed by a deflationary monetary contraction.
The US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England are currently doing much more than working out this lesson. They are providing massive amounts of liquidity and lending against an increasingly wide range of assets (now including equities). The central banks believe that they need to stop a chain reaction of financial sector collapses leading to a position when banks will no longer lend to anyone.
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If you swill enough liquidity around in your mouth, you might get rid of the bad taste of insolvency.
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Today there are real risks, on the one hand of inadequate action and on the other of actions that have damaging long-term side effects. Weighing those risks is a judgment call on which history does not provide any firm lessons.
The weakness of AIG, the threats to other institutions – all have no real historical precedent.
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Snippets from http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/no_more_lipstick_with_financia.html:
On the merits, Obama certainly can claim to have been addressing instability in the housing and financial markets long before McCain — on Sept. 17, 2007, in fact, when he spoke to Nasdaq and began calling for a modernized regulatory regime.
With some prescience, Obama declared that “markets can’t thrive without the trust of investors and the public. At the most basic level, capital markets work by steering capital to the place where it is most productive.”
“Without transparency, this can’t happen. If the information is flawed, if there is fraud, or if the risks facing financial institutions are not fully disclosed, people stop investing because they fear they are being had. When public trust is badly abused, it can bring financial markets to their knees.”
Obama’s argument was — and is — that the 1999 deregulation of financial markets, allowing investment banks, insurance companies and hedge funds to get into businesses formerly done by commercial banks, was not accompanied by a new government oversight regime, leading to excesses that brought on the subprime mortgage crisis and a worldwide drying-up of lending.
At that time, McCain was still declaring himself a “deregulator.” He only caught up on March 25 of this year, after the U.S. government brokered the takeover of Bear Stearns, and then his recommendations were general, at best.
Obama was far more detailed two days later in a speech at Cooper Union in New York, expanding at length on the regulatory principles he’d outlined six months before, especially government supervision of firms that require government rescue and enhanced transparency of complicated financial instruments.
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Retail sales already are down, indicating that consumers have reached the limit of their borrowing capacity. A dry-up of credit will prevent small businesses from opening or investing, increasing unemployment. And smaller banks may fail if businesses and other borrowers go into default.
All this ought to benefit Obama, as the nominee of the party not in power. If it doesn’t, it will mean that there’s something fundamentally wrong with his candidacy — a failure to connect with average, “Main Street” voters who certainly are suffering from the mistakes of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Snippets from http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/mccain_and_the_meltdown.html:
McCain's former economic adviser is ex-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. On Dec. 15, 2000, hours before Congress was to leave for Christmas recess, Gramm had a 262-page amendment slipped into the appropriations bill. It forbade federal agencies to regulate the financial derivatives that greased the skids for passing along risky mortgage-backed securities to investors.
And that, my friends, is why everything's falling apart.
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Another Gramm contribution was the "Enron loophole," which prevented federal oversight of Enron's electronic energy trading. Such favors proved very expensive to consumers but profitable to the Gramms. Enron CEO Ken Lay chaired Gramm's 1992 re-election campaign, and wife Wendy Gramm spent years on the Enron board, earning as much as $1.8 million, according to Public Citizen, a consumer advocate.
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The Bush economy was built on baloney. It was built on keeping interest rates low so that people could borrow lots of money to spend on real estate and at the mall. The resulting housing bubble left middle-class people feeling prosperous, even as their earnings stagnated or fell.
The Democrats weren't exactly tigers on containing the housing bubble, but they did try to put the brakes on some of the lending outrages that are the root of the current crisis. For example, Barack Obama sponsored a bill that would have prevented lenders from pressing abusive loan terms onto unsophisticated, subprime borrowers. That went nowhere.
"I certainly don't fault Sen. McCain for these problems," Obama said early in the crisis, "but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to."
Government should encourage long term investment rather than short term speculation:
From http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDcxYzU2ZTljZGFiZDE3ZWIwNWMxOTczMDY4N2ViYTQ=:
... IRS rules should be changed such that the taxation of short-term trading profits reaches prohibitive levels. We already have one such rule: Trading under one-year shifts capital-gains income to ordinary income. However, this graduated tax rate is not prohibitive. Rather, a 90 percent tax rate on trades under one month and a 75 percent tax rate on trading profits acquired within three months, while disallowing deductions for losses on such trades, would truncate a lot of the day trading that distorts normal market volatility.
Fixing market meltdown:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178603685354943.html
BAG OF TRICKS FOR MARKET MANIPULATORS:
(Money Changers — Heads I win, tails you lose; I make money, and you’re out of a job; and you pay the insurance.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/business/19backlash.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1221853957-48nDmRIygcFf1dU3K30btA:
Short selling — a bet that a stock price will decline — is the practice of selling stock without owning it, hoping to buy it later at a lower price, and thus make a profit. It has often been blamed for forcing prices down in times of market stress, but the level of anger has intensified as the American government has been forced to bail out major financial institutions and the leaders of some investment banks have asked for action to protect their shares.
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While short sellers are supposed to borrow shares before selling them, naked shorts do not borrow. That saves the cost of borrowing, though the trader is still vulnerable to losses if the share price rises.
Opponents of short selling believe that it can force share prices down and destroy confidence in a company that might otherwise survive.
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The latest moves against short sellers began Wednesday. In the morning, Mr. Cox announced new rules to prevent brokerage firms from selling a stock short if they previously had sold the stock short without having borrowed it. That night, he said that he would propose more rules, to force large short sellers to disclose their positions.
The rules were needed, he said, “to ensure that hidden manipulation, illegal naked short selling or illegitimate trading tactics do not drive market behavior and undermine confidence.”
Symbolism used by Obama: Consider the Berlin Victory Column, where he chose to give his speech to 200,000 and to the world.
Global chutzpah in action: See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/business/22global.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin.
http://moneynews.newsmax.com/headlines/forbes_economy_crisis/2008/09/29/135732.html?s=al&promo_code=6BE0-1:
“The government had a big role in this,” Forbes said. “Yes, there was bad behavior on Wall Street. But by golly it couldn’t have reached the disastrous proportion it has without the crazy policies of Washington, the Federal Reserve, Congress, and I must say the White House.”
COMMENT: B.S.!!! Who believes Congress does anything to conflict with what its topmost tiers of Big Swinging D***’s and business and money puppeteers requires! The puppeteers actively promoted all this volatility and divisiveness, greased it, took advantage of it, and now complains that the government it greases gave it what it asked for! Chutzpah!
DISTORTION AND DE-GLOBALIZATION --- “the teachers now have some problems”
Snippets from http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12373696:
THE WORLD ECONOMY
When fortune frowned
Oct 9th 2008
From The Economist
What will be the long-term effect of this mess on the global economy? Predicting the consequences of an unfinished crisis is perilous. But it is already clear that, even in the absence of a calamity, the direction of globalisation will change. For the past two decades the growing integration of the world economy has coincided with the intellectual ascent of the Anglo-Saxon brand of free-market capitalism, with America as its cheerleader. The freeing of trade and capital flows and the deregulation of domestic industry and finance have both spurred globalisation and come to symbolise it. Global integration, in large part, has been about the triumph of markets over governments. That process is now being reversed in three important ways.
…
Western finance will be re-regulated. At a minimum, the most freewheeling areas of modern finance, such as the $55 trillion market for credit derivatives, will be brought into the regulatory orbit. Rules on capital will be overhauled to reduce leverage and enhance the system’s resilience.
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… governments across the emerging world extended their reach, increasing subsidies, fixing prices, banning exports of key commodities and, in India’s case, restricting futures trading.
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America is losing economic clout and intellectual authority. Just as emerging economies are shaping the direction of global trade, so they will increasingly shape the future of finance. That is particularly true of capital-rich creditor countries such as China. Deleveraging in Western economies will be less painful if savings-rich Asian countries and oil-exporters inject more capital. Influence will increase along with economic heft. China’s vice-premier, Wang Qishan, reportedly told his American counterparts at a recent Sino-American summit that “the teachers now have some problems.”
….
… rebalancing is needed, particularly in financial regulation, where innovation outpaced a sclerotic supervisory regime ….
Misguided subsidies, on everything from biofuels to mortgage interest, have distorted markets. Loose monetary policy helped to inflate a global credit bubble.
Provocative as it may sound in today’s febrile and dangerous climate, freer and more flexible markets will still do more for the world economy than the heavy hand of government.
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