EU – Is it a Disaster Yet? … European gov'ts, ECB must team up on crisis: Geithner … Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told European governments on Saturday to eliminate the threat of a catastrophic financial crisis by working more closely with the European Central Bank to boost the continent's bailout capacity. Geithner said fiscal authorities should team up with the ECB to ensure that euro-area governments with sound policies have access to affordable financing and to ensure that European banks have adequate capital and liquidity. – Reuters
EU Leaders Need to Step Up … If leadership fails, prepare for recession … Washington locals can't help but notice when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank hold one of their twice yearly meetings. In Washington, ministers from each country took their turn to attack the eurozone members sitting round the table … For Europe's battered leaders there has been no escape. They are being held responsible for the looming double-dip and are being chided by everyone. – UK Telegraph
Al Jazeera's Phony Four-Part Series? … The men who crashed the world … The first of a four-part series … In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne. The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street turned back the clock to 1929. But how did it all go so wrong? – Al Jazeera
EU – Is it a Disaster Yet?
European gov'ts, ECB must team up on crisis: Geithner … Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told European governments on Saturday to eliminate the threat of a catastrophic financial crisis by working more closely with the European Central Bank to boost the continent's bailout capacity. Geithner said fiscal authorities should team up with the ECB to ensure that euro-area governments with sound policies have access to affordable financing and to ensure that European banks have adequate capital and liquidity. – Reuters
Dominant Social Theme: I, Timmy Geithner, know what is best for the EU and its long-suffering citizens.
Free-Market Analysis: So US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Eurocrats on Saturday how to run the continent. He was quite clear, according to the Reuters article, above. "The threat of cascading default, bank runs, and catastrophic risk must be taken off the table, as otherwise it will undermine all other efforts, both within Europe and globally."
Geithner also said that the Eurozone was in danger in cracking up and that solutions must be implemented immediately. This is a dominant social theme two-fer. The first theme is that the Eurozone must do what it needs to do, regardless of constitutionality. The crisis simply won't wait.
The second theme is that changes must occur immediately. This is classic elite fear-mongering. Identify a problem that will cause life as we know it to end – a massive Eurozone Depression with banks going out of business left and right. Then offer a solution and, finally, indicate that such a solution must be implemented IMMEDIATELY. Time is running out!
We saw this last year when UN honchos tried to stampede various global-warming conventions through the world body by proclaiming that only weeks remained before climate change made various sorts of disasters inevitable.
We know that Geithner was offering dominant social themes because there was not a peep of protest to his suggestions, not this time anyway. There never is when someone at his level is voicing an elite promotion. Instead, the Group of 20 has come up with a comprehensive US$3 trillion plan that includes much of what Geithner suggested.
We know if someone from the Eurozone came to the US and told Congress to throw away the US Constitution there would be significant pushback – to put it mildly. But Geithner told those in the EU to throw out their founding agreements because the crisis needed solving.
The idea seems to be that the EU will do what it must, and the citizens be damned. The agreements signed between the various countries of the Eurozone are just so manyworthless pieces of paper. This kind of arrogance may be ill advised. Citizens both North and South are getting increasingly irritated over the financial crisis and its lack of resolution. But chances are they seek LESS integration, not more. Watch as the Eurozone compounds its mistakes … and then perhaps implodes.
EU Leaders Need to Step Up
If leadership fails, prepare for recession … Washington locals can't help but notice when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank hold one of their twice yearly meetings. In Washington, ministers from each country took their turn to attack the eurozone members sitting round the table … For Europe's battered leaders there has been no escape. They are being held responsible for the looming double-dip and are being chided by everyone. – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: There is nothing in this world that cannot be cured by better leadership.
Free-Market Analysis: The leadership meme raises its hoary head once more. We can see from this article, excerpted above, that the reason for the world's financial crisis has to do with a lack of leadership. The Eurozone bosses have simply not been assertive enough.
This dominant social theme is a pervasive one. When the damage to American capitalism was evident in 2008, we learned it was because the regulators had failed. If the US or Britain suffers from unemployment it is because political leaders have not acted fast enough or with enough resolve.
Nothing in the world cannot be cured with proper leadership. Never mind that it is SYSTEMS that cause problems, specifically the world's central banks and fiat money. How can "leadership" cure implosions caused by printing money-from-nothing? Especially when the leadership endorses the very solutions that caused the problems in the first place?
In fact, the solution is always the same – throw money at the problem and hope over time it goes away. This is not working for the Eurozone. The distortion of the economy means there is chronic unemployment because insolvent companies and solvent ones are hard to tell apart. The government has propped up too many failing businesses.
Because of the unemployment, Eurozone economies are not recovering. Neither is America's. This means the longer the sovereign debt crisis goes on, the worse it gets. Leadership won't help this problem, only a thorough reexamination of economic system itself. That would take real leadership, though.
Al Jazeera's Phony Four-Part Series?
The men who crashed the world … The first of a four-part series … In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne. The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street turned back the clock to 1929. But how did it all go so wrong? – Al Jazeera
Dominant Social Theme: We are a world-spanning news organization out of Qatar. Now we will identify the REAL culprits of the world financial crash. It is very complicated and you won't understand it; that's why we need four parts. What else would you expect?
Free-Market Analysis: So a phony news service is producing a phony four-part series on a real economic crisis. Why do we call Al Jazeera phony? Well, it's supposed to be the "voice of the Middle East," but when you look at its history and funding it quickly becomes clear that Al Jazeera is anything but a legitimate Middle Eastern news service.
As we've pointed out before, the funding for Al Jazeera comes from the government of Qatar. That's the same Qatar that hosts a huge American military base, one of the main ones for the invasion of Iraq. The US helped the current Qatar regime take power, in fact. Qatar is beholden to the US in manifold ways.
Then there's the staffing of Al Jazeera. When the news network went up, there was a lack of qualified personnel. Fortunately, almost the entire staff of the Saudi Arabia BBC went on strike as luck would have it, and many defected to Al Jazeera.
Thus we have the back story. A puppet US regime begins a "Middle Eastern" news service staffed by striking journos from the BBC … Home grown, Al Jazeera isn't. But you kind of know that when you watch the station and notice how its news choices parallel CNN and the BBC. They don't even bother to hide it.
Which brings us to this four-part special that Al Jazeera is presenting. It's surely a dominant social theme in our view, yet another explanation of the economic crisis that will focus on anything but the central banks that are fundamentally responsible for what went wrong. Print too much money from nothing and you distort the economy and eventually blow it up. Print more money and you sustain and support the damage (making it impossible for a recovery to take place).
Does Al Jazeera deliver such a verdict? Here's how the network describes its "investigation" into the gathering depression of the 2000s. "Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place. Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced 'light touch regulation' – giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace. All this, and with key players making the wrong financial decisions, saw the world's biggest financial collapse. Meltdown is a four-part investigation that takes a closer look at the people who brought down the financial world …"
Wow, it sure sounds complicated. Nothing to do with easy money, right? Low interest rates and enthusiastic money-printing are a kind of price fixing, and too much price fixing makes economies crash. Not according to Al Jazeera. They'll blame Wall Street, the City, mortgage brokers, even Gordon Brown.
Of course, we haven't seen the series. Maybe it does get into central banking malfeasance. Maybe it does take a hard look at the BIS and the powerful, shadowy families behind the institution of central banking. Maybe we're jumping the proverbial gun …
Editor's Note: Funny, as we were scanning the Internet, we came across this New York Times article from Sept. 20. Here's how it begins: "Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network financed by Qatar, named a member of the Qatari royal family on Tuesday to replace its top news director after disclosures from the group WikiLeaks indicating that the news director had modified the network's coverage of the Iraq war in response to pressure from the United States. Al Jazeera is under intense scrutiny in the Middle East over its varying coverage of the Arab Spring revolts. Although the network is nominally independent — and its degree of autonomy was itself a revolution in the context of the region's state-controlled news media when it began in 1996 — many people contend that its coverage of the region still reflects the views of its Qatari owners …"
