01-27-2008, 05:18 PM
OUT OF THE ASHES: A NEW WORLD ORDER
Daniel Taylor
Old Thinker News
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/jan..._ashes.htm
As the United States faces an economic crisis that is being compared by experts to the 1929 Great Depression, the global elite are proclaiming the fall of the U.S and the rise of a new global order.
The IOL reports that the recent meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which focused in part on the global economic meltdown, pointed to "global" solutions and the need for a strengthened United Nations in the face of world crises.
Sovereignty, according to many who attended, must be weakened. The IOL reports,
For Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and now president of the International Crisis Group, even those countries with a deep resistance to intervention were starting to recognise that egregious crimes against humanity could not go unchallenged.
"There is now the beginning of a global consensus that sovereignty doesn't mean a license to kill, doesn't mean a license to stand back and allow killing of that order to take place," Evans said.
"This is a very real phenomenon, that sovereignty is not what it was and can't be what it was," he added.
Writing in the evening standard, Anthony Hilton states regarding the Davos meeting,
"World leaders have a similar problem in Davos as they try to think through the turmoil in world markets to focus on what is really happening to the global economy.
Henry Kissinger picked up on the political implications. The challenge to the world, he said, was handling the structural changes taking place - the transfer of economic power from America to the Pacific, the shortages of water and energy and the threat of climate change, which require global not national solutions."
A strengthened United Nations, also discussed at Davos, was promoted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown earlier this week after secret talks with world leaders. Brown called for a "new world order" and a "global society". As the New Zealand Hearld reported,
"British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has begun secret talks with other world leaders on far-reaching reform of the United Nations Security Council as part of a drive to create a "new world order" and "global society"."
The economic crises that the world is plunging into is being and will be used as the pretext to forge the new global order long sought after by the global elite. More centralized control will emerge. "New" solutions will be presented in slick packages to a despairing population begging for order.
New York University honoured Alan Greenspan in 2005, but others blame him for the debt bubble.
ECONOMIC WINTER LOOMING?
Carlito Pablo
http://www.straight.com/article-129380/e...er-looming
An American credit bubble that was propped up by former U.S. Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan has burst. This, according to Vancouver-based investment adviser Ian Gordon, is the underlying cause behind the turmoil that has sent global stock markets—including Canada’s—on a wild ride this month.
Gordon, a student of the wave theory developed by early 20th-century Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff, also believes that the market turmoil is capitalism’s method of purging itself of debts.
“We’re really seeing a mirror image of what happened following the [19]29 peak in equity prices in the United States, and the subsequent crash in equities,” Gordon told the Georgia Straight. “We’re seeing really the mirror of…the huge debt bubble that was built into the economy in the ’20s in the United States. We’re now seeing the collapse of the debt bubble that was built into the world economies, but principally in the United States.”
Kondratieff held that capitalist systems move through stages in a seasonlike pattern of spring, summer, fall, and winter. It’s a grow-boom-bust cycle that plays itself out in periods lasting 50 to 60 years.
Gordon argues that the realistic peak of the American stock market occurred in 2000. But when U.S. indices started to fall, he claimed, Greenspan simply delayed the onset of the inevitable Kondratieff winter.
“Greenspan panicked, injected a tremendous amount of money into the economy through the banks [and] dropped the loan rate to one percent,” Gordon said. “That effectively reignited the stock market and also caused, more importantly…a tremendous bubble in real estate in the United States.”
October 29, 1929: Black Tuesday stock-market crash
> Canadian stocks lost an estimated total value of $5 billion on paper in 1929.
> By mid 1930, stocks for the top 50 Canadian companies had fallen by more than 50 percent in value from their peaks in 1929.
> Despite the collapse, banks, mines, manufacturers, and construction firms in Canada reported profits at the end of 1929.
> Canada had no central bank or monetary policy, so there was little government intervention at the time of crash.
> In the U.S., the government was blamed for not controlling speculation.
> The crash began a chain of events that plunged Canada and the West into the decade-long Great Depression.
> The Depression ended only with the outbreak of the Second World War.
Source: www.canadianeconomy.gc.ca
Greenspan, who will speak in Vancouver on Thursday (January 24), wrote in his 2007 memoir The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Penguin Press) that economists have been worried about the high ratio of U.S. household debt to income, which is such that the average American family was on the brink of default.
However, Greenspan dismissed such concerns. “Such fears ignore a fundamental fact of modern life: in a market economy, rising debt goes hand in hand with progress,” he wrote. “To put it more formally, debt will always rise relative to incomes so long as we have an ever-increasing division of labor and specialization of tasks, increasing productivity, and a consequent rise in both assets and liabilities as a percentage of income.”
The U.S. central bank may still have been drawing inspiration from its former chair when it announced a three-quarters-of-a-percentage-point slash to interest rates on January 22 to calm the markets. Still, American stocks continued to plummet on that day.
According to Gordon, the federal- funds rate cut will not necessarily translate into banks giving out more loans. “Neither [banks nor consumers] wants to engage,” he said. “The consumer because he can’t borrow any more…and the banks because they’re having real problems with the debt they’ve already loaned out.”
Gordon suggested that because Kondratieff seasons, or waves, last 15 years, the economic winter that set in during the early 2000s could last another seven or eight years. “As this whole collapse in paper assets begins to unfold, causing tremendous strain on the banking system, we will see a tremendous rush to gold, to own gold,” he said. “But I think the worst is definitely in front of us, and not behind us.”
Helmut Pastrick, chief economist at Credit Union Central of British Columbia, doesn’t subscribe to the Kondratieff wave theory, but he concedes that economies go through cycles.
“I do know that, yes, there are movements in markets and the economy, cycles, if you will,” Pastrick told the Straight. “Obviously, we’re in a down move now, and equity markets have been down. But I’d go back to say that what goes down will come back up.”
According to Pastrick, more negative financial news will likely come out in the near term, but he claimed that markets will begin to show signs of stabilization in three to six months.
The Bank of Canada also cut interest rates on January 22 in a bid to stimulate the economy. According to Stephen MacInnes, chief investment officer at Vancouver-based Inhance Investment Management Inc., Canadians will definitely see slow growth for this quarter and possibly the next. However, he suggested that the situation won’t deteriorate.
“The rampant pessimism is going to change, and people will probably say, ‘Yeah, the economy isn’t as bad as we thought,’ ” MacInnes told the Straight. “That’s what we look forward to.”
Daniel Taylor
Old Thinker News
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/jan..._ashes.htm
As the United States faces an economic crisis that is being compared by experts to the 1929 Great Depression, the global elite are proclaiming the fall of the U.S and the rise of a new global order.
The IOL reports that the recent meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which focused in part on the global economic meltdown, pointed to "global" solutions and the need for a strengthened United Nations in the face of world crises.
Sovereignty, according to many who attended, must be weakened. The IOL reports,
For Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and now president of the International Crisis Group, even those countries with a deep resistance to intervention were starting to recognise that egregious crimes against humanity could not go unchallenged.
"There is now the beginning of a global consensus that sovereignty doesn't mean a license to kill, doesn't mean a license to stand back and allow killing of that order to take place," Evans said.
"This is a very real phenomenon, that sovereignty is not what it was and can't be what it was," he added.
Writing in the evening standard, Anthony Hilton states regarding the Davos meeting,
"World leaders have a similar problem in Davos as they try to think through the turmoil in world markets to focus on what is really happening to the global economy.
Henry Kissinger picked up on the political implications. The challenge to the world, he said, was handling the structural changes taking place - the transfer of economic power from America to the Pacific, the shortages of water and energy and the threat of climate change, which require global not national solutions."
A strengthened United Nations, also discussed at Davos, was promoted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown earlier this week after secret talks with world leaders. Brown called for a "new world order" and a "global society". As the New Zealand Hearld reported,
"British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has begun secret talks with other world leaders on far-reaching reform of the United Nations Security Council as part of a drive to create a "new world order" and "global society"."
The economic crises that the world is plunging into is being and will be used as the pretext to forge the new global order long sought after by the global elite. More centralized control will emerge. "New" solutions will be presented in slick packages to a despairing population begging for order.
New York University honoured Alan Greenspan in 2005, but others blame him for the debt bubble.
ECONOMIC WINTER LOOMING?
Carlito Pablo
http://www.straight.com/article-129380/e...er-looming
An American credit bubble that was propped up by former U.S. Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan has burst. This, according to Vancouver-based investment adviser Ian Gordon, is the underlying cause behind the turmoil that has sent global stock markets—including Canada’s—on a wild ride this month.
Gordon, a student of the wave theory developed by early 20th-century Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff, also believes that the market turmoil is capitalism’s method of purging itself of debts.
“We’re really seeing a mirror image of what happened following the [19]29 peak in equity prices in the United States, and the subsequent crash in equities,” Gordon told the Georgia Straight. “We’re seeing really the mirror of…the huge debt bubble that was built into the economy in the ’20s in the United States. We’re now seeing the collapse of the debt bubble that was built into the world economies, but principally in the United States.”
Kondratieff held that capitalist systems move through stages in a seasonlike pattern of spring, summer, fall, and winter. It’s a grow-boom-bust cycle that plays itself out in periods lasting 50 to 60 years.
Gordon argues that the realistic peak of the American stock market occurred in 2000. But when U.S. indices started to fall, he claimed, Greenspan simply delayed the onset of the inevitable Kondratieff winter.
“Greenspan panicked, injected a tremendous amount of money into the economy through the banks [and] dropped the loan rate to one percent,” Gordon said. “That effectively reignited the stock market and also caused, more importantly…a tremendous bubble in real estate in the United States.”
October 29, 1929: Black Tuesday stock-market crash
> Canadian stocks lost an estimated total value of $5 billion on paper in 1929.
> By mid 1930, stocks for the top 50 Canadian companies had fallen by more than 50 percent in value from their peaks in 1929.
> Despite the collapse, banks, mines, manufacturers, and construction firms in Canada reported profits at the end of 1929.
> Canada had no central bank or monetary policy, so there was little government intervention at the time of crash.
> In the U.S., the government was blamed for not controlling speculation.
> The crash began a chain of events that plunged Canada and the West into the decade-long Great Depression.
> The Depression ended only with the outbreak of the Second World War.
Source: www.canadianeconomy.gc.ca
Greenspan, who will speak in Vancouver on Thursday (January 24), wrote in his 2007 memoir The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Penguin Press) that economists have been worried about the high ratio of U.S. household debt to income, which is such that the average American family was on the brink of default.
However, Greenspan dismissed such concerns. “Such fears ignore a fundamental fact of modern life: in a market economy, rising debt goes hand in hand with progress,” he wrote. “To put it more formally, debt will always rise relative to incomes so long as we have an ever-increasing division of labor and specialization of tasks, increasing productivity, and a consequent rise in both assets and liabilities as a percentage of income.”
The U.S. central bank may still have been drawing inspiration from its former chair when it announced a three-quarters-of-a-percentage-point slash to interest rates on January 22 to calm the markets. Still, American stocks continued to plummet on that day.
According to Gordon, the federal- funds rate cut will not necessarily translate into banks giving out more loans. “Neither [banks nor consumers] wants to engage,” he said. “The consumer because he can’t borrow any more…and the banks because they’re having real problems with the debt they’ve already loaned out.”
Gordon suggested that because Kondratieff seasons, or waves, last 15 years, the economic winter that set in during the early 2000s could last another seven or eight years. “As this whole collapse in paper assets begins to unfold, causing tremendous strain on the banking system, we will see a tremendous rush to gold, to own gold,” he said. “But I think the worst is definitely in front of us, and not behind us.”
Helmut Pastrick, chief economist at Credit Union Central of British Columbia, doesn’t subscribe to the Kondratieff wave theory, but he concedes that economies go through cycles.
“I do know that, yes, there are movements in markets and the economy, cycles, if you will,” Pastrick told the Straight. “Obviously, we’re in a down move now, and equity markets have been down. But I’d go back to say that what goes down will come back up.”
According to Pastrick, more negative financial news will likely come out in the near term, but he claimed that markets will begin to show signs of stabilization in three to six months.
The Bank of Canada also cut interest rates on January 22 in a bid to stimulate the economy. According to Stephen MacInnes, chief investment officer at Vancouver-based Inhance Investment Management Inc., Canadians will definitely see slow growth for this quarter and possibly the next. However, he suggested that the situation won’t deteriorate.
“The rampant pessimism is going to change, and people will probably say, ‘Yeah, the economy isn’t as bad as we thought,’ ” MacInnes told the Straight. “That’s what we look forward to.”