The Daily Bell - Oct. 6, 2010

Dominant Social Theme: The world needs a central bank and the IMF is ready to be one.

Free-Market Analysis: As we have written plenty of times before, it’s startling to see how fast the Anglo-American power elite is willing to move now toward a more specific and comprehensive global governance. When we read this article, even just the beginning, it was obvious to us what was going on. And then we came to this sentence: “It means a de facto obligation to provide unlimited liquidity in euros…but the IMF is not a central bank for the world.” Exactly. Is there a sub dominant social theme in the article. Perhaps so: “Pushback will continue but the IMF’s expanded role is inevitable.

Indeed, the IMF is being cast in some places as an inevitable precursor to a world central bank. It need only graduate from SDRs to bancors and then expand its monetary authority. Of course we’ve covered this evolution in the past, but we didn’t take it very seriously. The world moves slowly and is a complex place. But as we’ve seen (and commented on) over the past year, the Anglo-American elite seems to have shed any inhibitions about moving slowly or deliberately toward global governance goals.

It is in a race of some sort, though who or what it is running from or towards is not clear. But in picking up the pace in a kind of mad dash toward some unseen finish line, it is abandoning at least a century of deliberate, promotional construction designed to bring Western citizens in line with its goals. We’ve written we have no explanation. Let’s say for argument’s sake there are 6,000 in the ranks of the Anglo American familial elite. That still leaves six billion people that one needs to “bring along” presumably. But convincing people seems about the last thing on the mind of elite these days so far as we can tell. In aggregate, it gallops madly forward, careening out of control, oblivious to obstacles, increasingly leaving a trail of ruin behind.

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David DeGraw - Sept 28, 2010

When we analyze our current crisis, focusing on the past few years of economic activity blinds us to the history and context that are vital to understanding the root cause. What we have been experiencing is not the result of an unforeseen economic crash that appeared out of the blue with the collapse of the housing market. It was certainly not brought on by people who bought homes they couldn’t afford. To frame this crisis around a debate on economic theory misses the point entirely. To even blame it on greedy bankers, while essentially accurate, also misses the most vital point.

This crisis is the direct result of a strategic economic attack on the existence of a middle class and democracy worldwide. The stock market and economy have become weapons of mass oppression manipulated by an imperial banking cartel to impose order and exploit the masses. This crisis boldly represents the manifest evolution of the fascist spirit reasserting itself as the dominant ideology.

Any fairytale notions of the United States being a democratic republic built on the rule of law have been utterly dispelled. As a nation we have been bred and conditioned to be dangerously naïve to the darker forces which operate beyond the spotlight of the mainstream media. We have been blinded to what has been developing throughout the world.

The economic imperialism that has now blown-back to the United States and Europe has been evolving for decades and can be directly traced back to the end of World War II, to the birth of the CIA, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

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Klaus Brinkbäumer and Ullrich Fichtner - 10/04/2010

Three years ago, the International Monetary Fund was irrelevant, an object of derision for all opponents of globalization. Under director Dominique Strauss-Kahn 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.

The building that houses the headquarters of the global economy is a heavily guarded, 12-story beige structure in downtown Washington with a large glass atrium and water bubbling in fountains. The flags of the 187 member states are lined up in tight formation.

Visitors walking into the office building find the cafeteria on the right, where many meetings are held. There, experts in their shirtsleeves, their jackets draped over the backs of chairs, drink lattes out of paper cups and talk countries into crises or upturns. A little farther down the hallway is the Terrace, the IMF building’s upscale restaurant where the director receives official guests.

On a Tuesday afternoon in late September, as the first leaves are falling from trees outside, the director, wearing a blue suit and a blue tie, is sitting on a blue couch high up in his office at the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), outlining his idea of a new world. Some of it already exists, in the form of a new world order established in September 2008 to replace the one that was collapsing at the time. The result wasn’t half bad — but it is robust?

‘The Money Is The Medicine’

These are important times for humanity. The crisis has forced everyone to see many things from a new perspective. Now the IMF is preparing for its annual meeting on Oct. 8. Can it live up to expectations, and can it police the new global economic order and keep global banks in check?

“You have to imagine the IMF as a doctor,” says Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the 61-year-old director of the International Monetary Fund. “The money is the medicine. But the countries — the patients — have to change their habits if they want to recover. It doesn’t work any other way.” He smiles benevolently as he says these things, his eyes disappearing behind small cushions of wrinkled skin.

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Stephen Foley - 12 November 2008

For the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, it is a “new Bretton Woods”, as important as the 1944 convention that established the modern financial world order. For Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to remake the global financial architecture and usher in an era of “regulated capitalism”. But beware the headlines that these leaders try to manufacture when they assemble for their credit crisis summit in Washington this weekend.

What we have is a summit without an agenda, on a crisis without an agreed cause, in a country without a functioning government. The US – whose outgoing President agreed to hold the meeting under French pressure, and whose President-elect, keen to stress that the US has “only one president at a time”, won’t even be there – has already bristled at European talk of a creating new supra-national regulators and international rules.

So little wonder everyone else is scrambling to downplay expectations for what might emerge, and to lengthen the timetable for achieving results. As one person from the UK delegation put it, “Bretton Woods took two years”.

Bretton Woods created the International Monetary Fund, which endures as the one international body powerful enough to prop up governments and economies that run into trouble. It also created a system of fixed exchange rates that failed to endure into the Seventies. Today, despite a financial crisis that is agreed to be the worst since the Great Depression, little yet under academic discussion rises to the level of ambition on display in the New Hampshire mountains in 1944. Certainly, nothing likely to be on the table on Friday and Saturday rises to that level.

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G-20 Summit In DC On 11-15-8

Webster Tarpley - 11-10-8

This is a confidential strategy paper for the November 15 G-20 summit in Washington DC. This is not a new Bretton Woods in any sense, but rather a British-steered attempt to impose the dictatorship of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the entire planet, wiping out all hope of economic recovery, the modernization of the developing countries, and national sovereignty at the same time.

Under this plan, the IMF would dictate the economic policies of all states. The IMF orthodoxy is austerity, sacrifice, deregulation, privatization, union busting, wage reductions, free trade, the race to the bottom, and prohibitions on advanced technologies. These policies would strangle humanity.

The Brazil-Russia-India-China bloc is reportedly objecting to putting so much power into the hands of the IMF, which is dominated by the US and the British, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Treasury Secretary Paulson of Goldman Sachs laying down the party line.

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Lindsay McIntosh - 09 October 2008

IT WAS a day of desperate global action, unprecedented in both scale and cost, intended to stymie the international devastation being wrought by the financial crisis.

As the London stock market steeled itself to open again following days of vicious battering, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, rose to stake the future of the country and the Cabinet on an audacious £500 billion banking bail-out.

And barely had the City begun to digest the hugely complex and unorthodox scheme when it was sent reeling again by an unscheduled interest rate cut – mirrored across the world – by the Monetary Policy Committee. It was the first such co-ordinated approach since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 – yet another indicator, had one been needed, of the gravity of the situation.

The half percentage point drop was immediately passed on to millions of borrowers, with leading high-street banks cutting their mortgages.

The government’s scheme, a three-part plan which takes in short, medium and long-term measures, was welcomed by business leaders and analysts.

David Kern, adviser to the British Chamber of Commerce, said: “The government has taken a radical step, but it is one we welcome.”

But there was concern a phenomenal amount of taxpayers’ cash was being staked on a last-ditch measure that could fail. The Taxpayers’ Alliance accused ministers of failing to address other options first.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued a fresh warning that Britain was on the brink of recession.

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With war raging across the globe in July 1944, ministers from all 44 Allied nations met at the imposing Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to thrash out a set of rules that would govern world finance once Hitler was defeated.

Gordon Rayner - 08 Oct 2008

Knowing that greater international trade would help to prevent future wars, and determined to avoid another Great Depression, the delegates signed the Bretton Woods Agreements, creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It was a big vision, driven by grand historical figures: Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and the British economist John Maynard Keynes.

But a system that was designed 64 years ago has, not surprisingly, proved ill equipped to deal with the fiendishly complex practices of 21st-century banking that led to the current worldwide crisis.

Neither the IMF, the World Bank nor any other institution has the power to police the global financial system in a way that might have prevented the excessive risk-taking which led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and, in turn, the credit crunch.

A more recent creation, the G8 group of industrialised nations, looks hopelessly out of date without the emerging economic giants of Brazil, India and China among its ranks. And the “beggar-thy-neighbour” policies of guaranteeing savings that have sprung up in Germany, Greece and Ireland in recent days have shown that even in Europe, co-ordinated economic policy is a myth.

“The current system is in crisis and we have an environment where dog eats dog,” said Bob McKee, of the economic consultancy Independent Strategy. “Electorates will expect more regulation, and politicians will push for it.”

The new Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson, argued last week that new global solutions are needed because “the machinery of global economic governance barely exists”, adding: “It is time for a Bretton Woods for this century.”

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