EU says survival at risk as Irish bailout looms … The European Union issued a stark assessment of the Irish debt crisis Tuesday, warning that the future of the 27-nation bloc was at risk as ministers headed for talks on an increasingly probable rescue. With pressure threatening Portugal but Spain insisting it is safe from contagion, Ireland signalled it might accept help and an Irish newspaper said this would focus on a rescue for its stricken banks. Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan is prepared to accept targeted EU support to prop up lenders, the Irish Independent newspaper reported amid pressure from the European Central Bank and certain political partners. "We have to discuss these matters with partners as to how best we can underpin financial and banking stability within the euro area," Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen added. "There are monetary policy situations arising now because of the turbulence on markets." – Sidney Morning Herald
Dominant Social Theme: The world is entering a dangerous new phase. Competitive devaluations continue despite all efforts to organize a ceasefire. The only hope now is a one-world currency run by the IMF. Enter that Keynesian brainstorm … the bancor.
Free-Market Analysis: Are all the world's currencies unraveling? Is it possible that the Western elites that desire one-world government above all else are deliberately undoing the euro and the dollar, the world's two most important currencies? That would leave the Chinese yuan of course, but as we have pointed out in numerous articles, Chinese inflation is beginning to run out of control and the yuan itself may not be long for this world if the Chinese economy collapses and its communist party is caught in the backlash.
This article will examine a somewhat sotto voce speculation present within the blogosphere that the ultimate aim of the Anglo-American elite is to reduce the value of both the euro and the dollar so radically that the only alternative will be an IMF-related currency. The IMF in particular presents itself as the appropriate candidate because it deals intimately with monetary policy around the world with numerous nation states and has relationships in place with them as well.
Ultimately, the IMF is an instrument of the Anglosphere, an Anglo-American invention created in the heady days after World War II. It is part of numerous exigencies (in our opinion), including the UN itself, and the World Bank, put in place as part of what was expected to mature into some kind of New World Order. The Anglo-American elite has every reason to put forward the IMF (and its hypothetical bancor) as a kind of stalking horse for a renewed push for global governance.
The IMF, then, is to be the vehicle for an elite, fear-based promotion. But what of the promotion itself? Fear is the operative element of such memes, and, in fact, we can identify one such campaign. The argument we want to present here is indeed fear driven. It is the idea that Federal Reserve policies are effectively inflating the world's paper money to the point where an alternative economic system must be introduced. Does the Fed have the clout to debase the world's economy? We could argue (and for the purposes of this article we will) that it does.
The dollar – as the globe's reserve currency – has extraordinary liquidity and power. When there are excess dollars to be had, they will circulate as the lingua franca of the international economy. The more dollars that circulate, the less the individual dollar is worth, thus setting off other currency devaluations to keep pace. As the US pushes forward with its latest money-printing program, one expects continued devaluations from other countries to keep up, hypothetically anyway. Since the G20 agreed in principal not to make competitive devaluations, they will not be called what they are. But they will occur anyway.
While the Fed inflates, the Eurozone deflates, politically and economically anyway. The union lurches from one crisis to the next, its credibility eroding and durability in increasing doubt. It began with the unraveling of Greece but has now spread to the rest of the PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Add France for good measure. Interestingly there are some who have claimed (especially within the cynical 'Net blogosphere) that the crisis is being manipulated, given that some countries that have even more severe problems than Greece's have not come under such severe financial attack. The suspicion is that the EU is using the smaller, more easily controllable countries, to establish precedents for a closer union.
Of course in the past, we have also presented different perspectives. Recently we theorized that the inability of the Anglo-American power axis to forge a compromise within the G20 meant that the Western power elites were losing clout – and that it was not in any sense intentional. But to fulfill our brief, we must not be wedded to any one perspective. Our paradigm includes (most importantly) the idea that Western elites are locked into a struggle with the truth-telling of the Internet for control over 21st century promotional messaging, and that this is an unpredictable contest with a variety of potential strategies and outcomes.
Elite promotions, as we have pointed out, are in a sense similar to the living dead. Zombie-like they tend to trudge along, even if they have lost a hand here and an arm there to critical pruning. The same could be said of the IMF, which, throughout the world has had a terrible reputation – but of late has enjoyed a considerable resurgence. One can certainly observe the clever auspices of the power elite behind this reemergence. The IMF has been purposefully injected into the affairs of the G20 and has emerged with additional consensual responsibilities.
None of this will necessarily erase its past. In its some 60 years of existence, the IMF has received a well-deserved reputation for economic brutality and international rapine. Its braintrust's insistence, especially, on raising taxes and cutting government services during country crises has had a tendency to reduce if not eliminate middle classes in places where its services have been called upon. It is in fact seen as an instrument of the Western power elite, cracking open injured countries and exposing the most profitable contents for firesales.
Nonetheless IMF leaders persist … and dream. Back on October 6th, in an article entitled "IMF Article Predicts New World Order," we quoted the following from an IMF profile that appeared in Der Spiegel magazine: "Three years ago, the International Monetary Fund was irrelevant, an object of derision for all opponents of globalization. Under director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (pictured above left), and as a result of the global economic crisis, the IMF has since become more influential – governing like a global financial authority. It is also putting Europe under pressure to reform."
Since we wrote that article, the IMF has continually wielded its weight on the world scene – though the going has perhaps been tougher than anticipated. We observe this only because we sense a generalized impatience. Events are apparently not moving quickly enough, and certainly they are not moving (obviously anyway) in the direction of the Anglosphere. The BRIC countries, especially China, have been fairly antagonistic to the idea of an IMF-run world from what we can tell, at least publicly. The US did not come away from the most recent G20 meeting with many of the assurances it wanted.
We have recently characterized these rebuffs as "defeats" for the Anglo-American axis. But what if the situation is being manipulated? What if the idea is to make things worse rather than better? Does this hypothesis seem so far-fetched? Perhaps so, if we were to hang it merely on the rhetoric of the IMF itself – and reports of its global banking ambitions which could be seen as aberrant rather than power-elite proven. But then there is this, a report that was filed at WorldNetDaily over a month go, as follows:
420 banks demand 1-world currency … International finance group seeks remedy to looming exchange wars … The Institute of International Finance, a group that represents 420 of the world's largest banks and finance houses, has issued yet another call for a one-world global currency, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports. "A core group of the world's leading economies need to come together and hammer out an understanding," Charles Dallara, the Institute of International Finance's managing director, told the Financial Times.
An IIF policy letter authored by Dallara and dated Oct. 4 made clear that global currency coordination was needed, in the group's view, to prevent a looming currency war. "The narrowly focused unilateral and bilateral policy actions seen in recent months – including many proposed and actual measures on trade, currency intervention and monetary policy – have contributed to worsening underlying macroeconomic imbalances," Dallara wrote. "They have also led to growing protectionist pressures as countries scramble for export markets as a source of growth."
Dallard encouraged a return to the G-20 commitment to utilize International Monetary Fund special drawing rights to create an international one-world currency alternative to the U.S. dollar as a new standard of foreign-exchange reserves. Likewise, a July United Nations report called for the replacement of the dollar as the standard for holding foreign-exchange reserves in international trade with a new one-world currency issued by the International Monetary Fund.
We had not been fully aware of this report, (our elves cannot be everywhere) but we find it astonishing. The IMF's ambitions are enshrined in massively supported doctrine supported by nearly 500 of the globe's largest institutions. This has the hallmarks of an elite promotional gambit in our view: A "think tank" report is suddenly released to combat a crisis that some of the more paranoid 'Net alternative media believe is at least partially being manufactured; meanwhile the IMF comes out with its own elaborate statements in the mainstream media that further buttress what is being promoted.
Just the other day we examined the strength of the US dollar as the world's currency and speculated that getting rid of a reserve currency was harder than it looked given that it was put in place via military power and was at least partially the fruit of empire. But what if the Anglo-American elite is determined to sink the dollar? What if the Eurocrats intend to unravel the euro as well? Wouldn't it be possible in such circumstances to turn to the IMF as an emergency facility with the ability to provide the resources and organization necessary to overcome whatever crisis was being manufactured? Didn't this just happen in regard to the initial sovereign banking crisis? In spite of an aversion to outside interference, the IMF has emerged as a partner in the EU's attempts to salvage its cohesiveness and its currency.
In a series of articles now we have examined and re-examined both the EU "sovereign crisis" and the emergent "currency crisis" as well. We have continually postulated that the current global weakness on numerous fronts is a manifestation of elite weakness not elite strength. This is in keeping with our theorizing that the Internet itself is evidently and obviously undermining much of the elite's fear-based messaging. But our paradigm, truly, is not wedded to any one side – only to observations about the ongoing competition for "share of mind." Thus we have presented a further perspective in this article.
Of course we have our prejudices. We believe in free-markets and in freedom, as that is better for civil society and gives the most people the chance to live successful, prosperous lives. However, as meme watchers, we want to try to analyze every potential angle of power-elite promotions as it occurs to us. There is no doubt that a promotion has been launched to present the IMF as a potential central bank to the world, complete with a world currency such as the bancor. We are trying to examine the ramifications logically.
What we have analyzed (above) then, is the fear-based promotion necessary to furnish the logic for an emergent and ever-more powerful IMF. If this supposition is correct, then the Western elites will continue to make "desperate" efforts to "salvage" the world's economy that inevitably bear little or no fruit. At the same time, the IMF will begin to go from triumph to triumph, showing clearly that it has what it takes to run the world from an economic standpoint. (It doesn't of course, but we are speaking in promotional terms.) Perhaps the IMF will even preside (along with the EU) over a shrinkage of the Eurozone. In any event, the final element of the promotion we are hypothetically proposing could be realized with a real-estate crash in China; this would doubtless provide a tipping point for a frank, world-wide depression.
And the result? People will panic. Dominique Strauss-Kahn (France's new president elect) will step forward to make a soothing and erudite presentation at a hastily called UN convocation that will be dubbed the "speech of his life." He and the IMF will suddenly be seen by the Anglosphere's mainstream media as the logical saviors of the world's deteriorating monetary situation. SDRs should be converted into bancors, backed perhaps by a basket of currencies and commodities (even gold), it will be suggested. Many important world-thinkers, including Nobel prize winners, will concur. The bandwagon will start to roll. A one-world currency will suddenly be seen as feasible and even necessary. Too far out? Hey, it's just a thought.
