The financial industry brought the economy to its knees, but how did they get away with it? With the nation wondering how to hold the bankers accountable, Bill Moyers sits down with Bill Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Black offers his analysis of what went wrong and his critique of the bailout. This show aired April 3, 2009. Bill Moyers Journal airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings)

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Andrew G. Marshall - April 6, 2009

Introduction

Following the 2009 G20 summit, plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the US dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. Point 19 of the communiqué released by the G20 at the end of the Summit stated, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity.” SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are “a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund.” As the Telegraph reported, “the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global “quantitative easing”. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”[1]

The article continued in stating that, “There is now a world currency in waiting. In time, SDRs are likely to evolve into a parking place for the foreign holdings of central banks, led by the People’s Bank of China.” Further, “The creation of a Financial Stability Board looks like the first step towards a global financial regulator,” or, in other words, a global central bank.

It is important to take a closer look at these “solutions” being proposed and implemented in the midst of the current global financial crisis. These are not new suggestions, as they have been in the plans of the global elite for a long time. However, in the midst of the current crisis, the elite have fast-tracked their agenda of forging a New World Order in finance. It is important to address the background to these proposed and imposed “solutions” and what effects they will have on the International Monetary System (IMS) and the global political economy as a whole.

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Engdahl: Obama must confront the oligarchical power of Wall Street to solve crisis

When the Solution to the Financial Crisis becomes the Cause

F. William Engdahl - March 30, 2009

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has unveiled his long-awaited plan to put the US banking system back in order. In doing so, he has refused to tell the ‘dirty little secret’ of the present financial crisis. By refusing to do so, he is trying to save de facto bankrupt US banks that threaten to bring the entire global system down in a new more devastating phase of wealth destruction.

The Geithner Plan, his so-called Public-Private Partnership Investment Program or PPPIP, as we have noted previously is designed not to restore a healthy lending system which would funnel credit to business and consumers. Rather it is yet another intricate scheme to pour even more hundreds of billions directly to the leading banks and Wall Street firms responsible for the current mess in world credit markets without demanding they change their business model. Yet, one might say, won’t this eventually help the problem by getting the banks back to health?

Not the way the Obama Administration is proceeding. In defending his plan on US TV recently, Geithner, a protégé of Henry Kissinger who previously was CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, argued that his intent was ‘not to sustain weak banks at the expense of strong.’ Yet this is precisely what the PPPIP does. The weak banks are the five largest banks in the system.

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NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–The head of a United Nations expert panel discussing solutions to the financial crisis on Thursday welcomed the debate over a new global reserve currency and said it would be best managed by a brand new institution.

Just days ahead of the Group of 20 heads of state meeting in London, several key players have weighed in with solutions to resolve the current financial crisis and to prevent future recurrences. One of the most sensitive subjects is the creation of a new de facto global reserve currency to replace the U.S. dollar.

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The Report: Recommendations by the Commission of Experts of the President of the General Assembly on reforms of the international monetary and financial system

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

by Simon Johnson

One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 15, 2009

t was a moment of brazen honesty. On February 20, the don of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and former chair of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, told a conference at Columbia University’s Center for Capitalism and Society that, in essence, we’re screwed. Volcker said the crash of 2008 might be “the mother of all financial crises… I don’t remember any time, maybe even the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world.”

In other words, it is all going as planned, this “mother of all financial crises.”

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Daniel Taylor - Nov. 18, 2008

In light of the current global financial meltdown, an examination of recent history in the United States may help us to get a better handle on our present day economic issues.

The United States was successfully seized by international bankers with the passing of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Then, with the crash of 1929, further control was gained and great profits were reaped by its engineers. Now, these same interests have their sights set on the globe in an unprecedented power grab. Daily calls for a “New World financial Order” and global governance are now a common occurrence. Discussion of dropping the dollar as the world reserve currency and the creation of a world currency is now taking place.

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Surfing the Tao - November 15th, 2008

The Phoenix returned to its ashes recently, both literally and symbolically. A new son is rising, and the world is prepared for change.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote a noted article on October 13 announcing the need and plans for a global financial authority. Italy’s finance minister, among others, echoed the call, saying it was “not the end of the world, but the end of a world.” The first of what will likely be a series of meetings took place today in Washington, D.C. Invited were the G-20 countries, which include 19 nations and the European Union.

F. William Engdahl wrote in his recent article entitled Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare over Future of Global Bank Power: “…the dramatic stories of financial meltdown and panic are deliberately being used by certain influential factions in and outside the EU to shape the future face of global banking…”

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Jacqueline Thorpe - November 13, 2008

The Group of 20 summit in Washington this weekend has nostalgically been dubbed Bretton Woods II in a nod to the historic 1944 gathering in New Hampshire that laid the groundwork for the postwar economic order.

While the G20 is keen on hammering out a new financial order for the 21st-century global economy, one of the key elements of the original Bretton Woods Agreement is unlikely to get more than a passing glance — currencies.

The cornerstone of Bretton Woods was a fixed exchange rate system designed to prevent the “beggar-thy-neighbour” currency devaluations that wreaked havoc on the global economy in the 1930s. The system broke down in the 1970s, and currencies have been the Achilles heel of the global economy ever since.

Today is no exception. While presidents and prime ministers get set to tinker with new global regulations and promise to pour more stimulus into a beaten-down global economy, the 10,000-pound dragon in the summit room will surely be China’s insistence on maintaining a weak currency to boost export growth, and the bulging war chest of foreign exchange reserves around the world.

China, its BRIC brothers — Brazil, Russia, India — and other emerging powers may have won a seat at the summit table but the global economy has still not figured how to absorb their growing might without major disruption.

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Patrice Rassou - 16 October 2008

A NEW world banking order is taking shape. Many proud, independent financial institutions with century-old legacies are being bought out. With a crisis made in the US and with its roots in Wall Street, the standalone investment banking model seems dead. Only Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are likely to survive, but not before engineering some form of tie-up with a commercial bank.

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Jim Willie CB - Oct 16, 2008

The tag team of JPMorgan as the monster and Goldman Sachs as its harlot represent a powerful pair that is more responsible for destroying the entire US financial system than 95% of the American public has any awareness. The colossus of JPMorgan is a monster, a predator, nurtured by pond scum. It has gobbled up Chase Manhattan, Manufacturers Hanover, Chemical Bank, Bank One, and more over the past two decades. Their profound presence in keeping the USTreasury Bond yields down can never be understated. They do so by managing 85% of the credit derivatives on the planet. They distorted usury prices, as in price of borrowed money, thus aggravating the LIBOR (London InterBank Offered Rate) market in a very visible manner.

The oblong usury prices have contributed mightily to the destruction of the US Economy itself, created bubbles, killed jobs, and wrecked savings. The ugliest hidden activity for the JPMorgan monster is to manage the Bank of Baghdad, where they manipulate the crude oil price, where drug trafficking money is funneled from Afghan sales, under management by the US Military aegis (guys with no uniform stripes or markings). Maybe such illicit money offsets Credit Default Swap losses, making America strong for freedom and liberty. Goldman Sachs is clearly the investment banking agent for the USGovt, given the privilege of insider trading in unspeakable proportions.

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The market is worth more than $516 trillion, (£303 trillion), roughly 10 times the value of the entire world’s output: it’s been called the “ticking time-bomb”.

Margareta Pagano and Simon Evan - 12 October 2008

It’s a market in which the lead protagonists – typically aggressive, highly educated, and now wealthy young men – have flourished in the derivatives boom. But it’s a market that is set to come to a crashing halt – the Great Unwind has begun.

Last week the beginning of the end started for many hedge funds with the combination of diving market values and worried investors pulling out their cash for safer climes.

Some of the world’s biggest hedge funds – SAC Capital, Lone Pine and Tiger Global – all revealed they were sitting on double-digit losses this year. September’s falls wiped out any profits made in the rest of the year. Polygon, once a darling of the London hedge fund circuit, last week said it was capping the basic salaries of its managers to £100,000 each. Not bad for the average punter but some way off the tens of millions plundered by these hotshots during the good times. But few will be shedding any tears.
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Paul Joseph Watson - September 17, 2008

Billionaire investor George Soros has slammed US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for behaving in the same manner as bankers in the 1930’s and mishandling a financial crisis that threatens a repeat of the Great Depression.

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Richard C. Cook - September 11, 2008

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the twin giants of the home mortgage industry, own or guarantee assets of $5.3 trillion, almost half of the $12 trillion housing market in the U.S. These assets have been disappearing in value due to the collapse of the housing bubble.

Fannie and Freddie are government-chartered corporations. They are shareholder-owned companies required by their charters to provide low-cost capital to the mortgage industry, supposedly to further the American dream of home ownership. In recent years, as the housing bubble inflated and the mortgage industry extended more and more credit to marginal purchasers through the use of “exotic” lending instruments, Fannie and Freddie followed suit.

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