IMF fears 'social explosion' from world jobs crisis … America and Europe face the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and risk "an explosion of social unrest" unless they tread carefully, the International Monetary Fund has warned. … "The labour market is in dire straits. The Great Recession has left behind a waste land of unemployment," said Dominique Strauss-Kahn (left), the IMF's chief, at an Oslo jobs summit with the International Labour Federation (ILO). He said a double-dip recession remains unlikely but stressed that the world has not yet escaped a deeper social crisis. He called it a grave error to think the West was safe again after teetering so close to the abyss last year. "We are not safe," he said. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: We need to deal with this problem realistically and well.

Free-Market Analysis: We return to the West's sputtering economy and horrific unemployment because it shows two things. One, elite-structured capitalism doesn't work and, two, the Anglo-American power elite is most nervous about social explosions as a result of the crashing monetary system. An additional dominant social theme could be: "You have no idea how much we care and we are doing everything we can to help."

Of course, from our point of view, the current capitalist system is structured to create these crises. The problem the power elite is having currently is that its Deus ex machina has been thoroughly exposed via the Internet and the downturn in both Europe and America has been likely even worse than expected. There is something to be said for a manageable crisis but little to be said for an unmanageable one.

We use the term capitalism to describe the current economic system in the West as opposed to a "free market" one. The capitalism that the West has installed features the price fixing of money via central banks, a boom/bust economy and resultant war-based recovery mechanism. Every part of the current system emphasizes state power rather than individual entrepreneurship.

The result is a system woefully divorced from underlying realities. Over time – decades not years – the boom-bust capitalist system tempts people into fantastical jobs that have no possibility of lasting. Whole industries spring up and are repeatedly saved by government and central banking manipulation, thus becoming evermore distorted. The banking sector itself is a good example of this. As the central bank's main distribution mechanism, no large bank is ever allowed to fail. The result is that the West is not merely over-banked, it staggers under a massive banking sector that literally employs tens of millions – with the paper-shuffling and speculative impetus that entails.

The combination of an unrealistic economic system that relies on paper-money over-printing, ever-more distorted industrial sectors and a banking system that resembles a malignant tumor poisoning the body politic, gives rise to an ever-larger amount of unemployment. During every boom, people grasp at improvident employment; during every bust more and more of them are thrown out of work. Add the predilection to take on debt, which a fiat-money system encourages, and the end result is a population that is both unemployed, and indebted.

It may be that this is exactly the result that the Western power elite seeks in its quest for global governance. When one is set on authoritarian rule, a vibrant middle class – even a vibrant economy – can be something of an impediment. But as we point out regularly, the elite has tended especially in the past century to act on its plans in a cautious and generational way. It uses dominant social themes – fear-based promotions – to lay the groundwork for ever-more massive consolidations of wealth and power. But the truth-telling of the Internet has had a deleterious effect on elite promotions even as the elite seems to have become less cautious about realizing its goals.

Perhaps it is arrogance? Perhaps merely impatience? We are not sure. But it seems to us that even as the elite's fear-based promotions continue to fade and fail, the elite has stepped up its activity and is striving more strongly than ever for increasingly centralized, worldwide governance. At the same time, as the IMF comment excerpted at the beginning of this article shows, those within elite circles are well aware of the possibilities of social upheaval. It is one thing to set in motion a worldwide depression, even a modest-sized one, but another to handle the ramifications.

We have long pointed out that the power elite has likely been guilty of a series of misjudgments and misperceptions in the 21st century. Too many people understand the economic mechanisms that the power elite has put into play and the frustration and anger in both the US and Europe from our point of view are palpable. In fact, we disagree with the IMF's perception that if economies recover that the potential for social unrest will subside. Whether social unrest expresses itself in violence or in mass protest, we do not know. But we tend to believe it is different this time.