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Syndicate
Calling Neo-Wat Tyler!
Capital flight begins out of Greece as the government has the temerity (and the desperation) to make rich people pay their taxes
Ireland set to go bust, claims economic historian "We have the fiscal policy of a world war without a war."
Descent into Barbarism: The US and NATO Wage War on the World
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17517
"Similar historic junctures have been witnessed before when capitalism floundered from its inexorable tendancy to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Disturbingly, the release valve for the system and its bankruptcy has always been war...In our time, war, it seems, has already begun. The US oligarchy and its NATO allies are waging a veritable war on the world.."
The Nordics in the global crisis
Most importantly, the Nordic model itself contributes to resilience. The comprehensive safety net, one of the attributes of the Nordic model, has proved to be robust also in times of crisis. The entitlements are not tied to the fate of individual companies or particular markets, and risks are widely shared in the society. While forest plants are shutting down in Finland and car manufacturing is sharply contracting in Sweden, the governments are firmly rejecting requests for support of ailing industries. Still, there are no crowds protesting in the streets, largely because flexible work arrangements, based both on general and company-specific agreements between businesses and labour, alleviate a rise in unemployment. Structural change is enhanced by the employment protection legislation, which is more liberal than in most other EU countries. A well-educated labour force, another of the attributes of the Nordic model, facilitates adjustment by making it easier to upgrade skills through additional training.
Here's a good recent summary of the views of J.B. Foster et al over at Monthly Review: The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital.
Samir Amin, whose views Foster makes reference to, has a related article that can be found over here: The Battlefields Chosen by Contemporary Imperialism: Conditions for an Effective Response from the South . Amin clearly focuses on what the Global South needs to do, how the genuine left in the Global North can help, and so on.
Amin, taken together with Foster's piece, gives a very solid strategic view of the current impasse and what can be expected in the future.
Some global remedies, in the context of a discussion of US-China relations, can be found at The U.S. Economy and China: Capitalism, Class, and Crisis
Here is a relevant quote if you would rather not read the whole article:
I particularly like that this author, in looking at some ways to address the current capitalist crisis and its strategy of placing the burdens of the crisis on ordinary working people, also addresses in his remarks the capitalist scourge of racism and its remedy - solidarity and internationalism.
It Is Too Late to Prevent the Collapse of the G7
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24675.htm
"Greece is irrelevent. We are all now insolvent.."
You Think Greece Has Problems? Latvia's Road to Serfdom
Neoliberalorama in Eastern Europe: How to wreck entire economies without a sledgehammer
Chinese real estate bubble about to pop?
Jack Rodman, who has made a career of selling soured property loans from Los Angeles to Tokyo, sees a crash looming in China. He keeps a slide show on his computer of empty office buildings in Beijing, his home since 2002. The tally: 55, with another dozen candidates.
“I took these pictures to try to impress upon these people the massive amount of oversupply,” said Rodman, 63, president of Global Distressed Solutions LLC, which advises private equity and hedge funds on Chinese property and banking. Rodman figures about half of the city’s commercial space is vacant, more than was leased in Germany’s five biggest office markets in 2009.
"Economic Terrorism": The Consequences are Poverty and Mass Unemployment
"60% of Americans living paycheque to paycheque - over 50 million people need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. 50 million Americans sans health care. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. Real US unemployment at 20%"(economic Depression level)
Foreclose this! Man bulldozes home before bank can take it.
Ottawa defies call for bank tax Harpers promise to continue stooging for banksters
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,678026,00.html
Quote: On the international stage, China's monetary policy officials are givers, not takers. They are starting to issue government debt abroad, even though the country doesn't need to borrow any money. But many states, for example Brazil, India and Russia, are happy to have an alternative to the US bond market. They buy Chinese bonds, and the Chinese in turn use this money to buy Russian, Indian and Brazilian bonds. This has created a second monetary circuit alongside the dollar.
This won't replace the dollar as a global currency in the foreseeable future, but it will help to prepare the ground for its replacement. Xiao Gang, the chairman of the board of directors of the Bank of China, said last summer: "The time has come to internationalize the yuan."
..a change is gonna come.
Debt Dynamite Dominoes: The Coming Financial Collapse
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17736
"Assessing the Illusion of Recovery.."
It's gut check time for the left and progressive people everywhere. The time is coming.
Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will conspire and plot and plan for the inevitable day of capitalism's downfall - the day when it finally and self-destructively turns its weapons against its own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under ideological rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland out of which I will lead my people from their captivity! And we will build our own cities in which there will be no place for war pigs except to serve our ends! And we shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own dynasty! And that day is upon you... now! - Caesar, Planet of the Proles
An interesting contrast between two different business cultures -
Royal Bank of Scotland and Commerzbank both reported poor financial results this week. Commerzbank accordingly did not offer its investment bankers bonuses. RBoS, however, paid well over a billion pounds out in bonus despite now being a state-owned company.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/02/rbs-pays-billions-while-commerzbank-bankers-get-nothing.html
Bernanke: "The US Could Soon Face A Debt Crisis Like The One In Greece"
Bankers discuss paying themselves less over dinner, decide they'd rather not
America's top bankers quashed attempts by their British counterparts to persuade the industry to bring down salaries in response to public outrage after the world's governments spent billions rescuing the system.
Chief executives from the world's banks discussed the plans at a secret dinner held at Claridge's, the London hotel, last October, at which several leading British bankers are said to have suggested that the sector should take greater responsibility for its part in the crash, and do more to reduce the vast bonuses paid to staff.
An interesting, if unsurprising, economic metric - employment agencies are having more trouble than usual placing people in work.
“IN 2008 10m people came to us, and we placed 4m in jobs. In 2009 it was 11m, and we only placed around 3m. It’s been a tough year.” So says Jeff Joerres, the boss of Manpower, an employment-services firm best known for its army of temporary workers.
IMF and oligarchs pushing for perestroika in America ex-nay on the glasnost though
The Financial Coup d'Etat: Consolidation of America's Economic Elite
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17742
"It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the financial system have been addressed to date...we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car. Now that the 'Too big to Fail' Wall St. elite know that the government will come in to bail them out, they are engaging in even riskier behaviour then before. Corporation cunning has developed faster than the law of nations or state. It is hard to face the fact that we have been so taken advantage of and abandoned by the very people we supported and had put our hope and faith into...."
The death of the mall?
Shopping malls were particularly hard hit by the economic crisis that bean in 2008, as consumers reined in their legendary spending and national chains such as Circuit City, Sharper Image, and Lillian Vernon went bust, leaving gaping vacancies at many shopping centers. Suddenly, the mall -- the temple of American consumerism -- was in trouble. Today, consumer spending is still down and commercial property values have fallen 40 percent from their peak. The landscape is littered with struggling or dead malls.
9 March 2010
Saturday’s referendum in Iceland on whether to accept a deal to pay back nearly €4 billion to Britain and the Netherlands resulted in a massive “no” vote. More than 90 percent of the electorate voted the proposal down, with only 1.5 percent in favour. There were more blank ballots cast in the referendum than votes in favour of the proposal.
The referendum concerned demands by Britain and the Netherlands for the full repayment, with interest, of the monies the two countries paid out to depositors in the Icesave online bank which collapsed in 2008.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/ices-m09.shtml
Portugal applies the austerity brakes
Portugal's Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said he intended to introduce a new 45% rate of income tax for people earning more than 150,000 euros ($205,000; £139,000) per year.
In addition, the Socialist government is to cut spending on military equipment over the next four years by 40%, and postpone plans to build a new high-speed rail link to Spain.
The country also aims to raise six billion euros through a number of privatisations.
A good set of talks from the Roosevelt Institute's Make Markets be Markets conference on financial reform:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/03/make-markets-be...
Who currently has the right to access the actual trading records of Canadian banks?
Can some Canadian banks choose to delay reports of losses, caused perhaps their own unreported trading in derivatives markets, and cover those losses by expanding into commodities, and further financial trading?
Lehman Bankruptcy Report Exposes Wall Street Criminality
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/pers-m15.shtml
"The 2,200 page document details accounting fraud on a massive scale, involving secret transactions that enabled the bank to falsify its level of debt and conceal the scale of its laosses from toxic mortgate linked assets.."
The leaked Citigroup memo of 2006 mentioned in Michael Moore's, Capitalism A Love Story.
The USA is now a plutonomy according to the leaked Citigroup memo. It's a glorious time for the richest one percent of Americans who own more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent of Americans combined!
The only hope in the USA is for the middle class to rise up but will they? I doubt it.