The Road to World War III – The Global Banking Cartel Has One Card Left to Play
by ilene - September 28th, 2010 2:19 am
The Road to World War III – The Global Banking Cartel Has One Card Left to Play
By David DeGraw (h/t ZH)
The following is Part I to David DeGraw’s new book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.” This is the second installment to a new seven-part series that we will be posting throughout the next few weeks. You can read the introduction to the book here. To be notified via email of new postings from this series, subscribe here.
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Editor’s Note: The following is Part I to David DeGraw’s new book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.” This is the second installment to a new seven-part series that we will be posting throughout the next few weeks. You can read the introduction to the book here. To be notified via email of new postings from this series, subscribe here.
I: Economic Imperial Operations
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,…
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The Vanishing American Consumer and the Coming Trade War
by ilene - July 10th, 2010 10:29 pm
The Vanishing American Consumer and the Coming Trade War
Courtesy of Robert Reich
President Obama has vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years. That’s because exports are critical for rebooting the American economy. It’s clear American consumers can’t get the economy going on their own. They can’t restart the jobs machine. They’ve run out of money and credit.
It’s not just that one out of four Americans is unemployed or underemployed (working part-time, overqualified, or at a lower wage than before). More significantly, the Great Recession burst the housing bubble that had let American consumers turn their homes into ATMs. Now the cash machines are closed.
So the Administration figures foreign consumers will have to fill the gap.
Problem is, most other economies also relied on American consumers. Remember the trade gap? Americans used to be the world’s biggest and most reliable customers – sucking in high-tech gadgets assembled in China, car parts from Japan, shirts and shoes from Southeast Asia, and precision instruments from Germany.
With American consumers pulling back, these other economies have also been slowing down. Their unemployment is rising.
Last week I attended a conference with global business executives. When I asked them where they expected to find new customers to replace Americans who are pulling back, they all said China and India and quoted me the same number: 800 million new middle-class consumers from these and other fast-developing countries over the next decade.
Yes, but. As of now China and India are still relying on net exports to fuel their growth. Even if you think their middle classes will eventually become so big and rich they can buy everything these nations will be able to produce, that doesn’t mean they’ll also buy what the rest of the world produces.
Yes, global companies will do wonderfully well. General Motors is well on the way to selling more cars in China than it does in the U.S. But American workers won’t get the jobs, and nor will workers in Europe, Japan, or the rest of the world. GM makes the cars it sells to Chinese consumers in China.
Meanwhile, the productive capacities of China and India will continue to grow: More workers, more factories, more high-tech equipment, more offices. The buying power of their middle classes will have to expand rapidly just to catch up with what these nations will be able…
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PETTIS: TRADE TENSIONS ARE RISING
by ilene - May 25th, 2010 7:50 pm
PETTIS: TRADE TENSIONS ARE RISING
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Great interview here with Michael Pettis of Peking University. Mr. Pettis discusses the increasing
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The mindset will not change; a depressionary relapse may be coming – European version
by ilene - May 17th, 2010 4:16 pm
The mindset will not change; a depressionary relapse may be coming – European version
Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns
In March I wrote an American version of this post which pointed to the bailout culture in America as a major reason I fear a depressionary relapse. American policy makers have shifted private losses onto the government’s books while propping up bankrupt companies in the private sector in order to forestall yet greater economic pain.
The mindset is fixed on re-engineering some semblance of past economic growth. The result has been a return in the US to the status quo ante of low savings, excess consumption, indebted households, and leveraged financial institutions, but with policy options significantly diminished and greater levels of government debt to boot. Clearly, when stimulus is withdrawn, policy makers should expect more severe economic bloodletting.
In Europe, the same bailout mentality is at work. However, the results are likely to be even more disastrous because of the fundamental misunderstanding of economics and financial sector balances amongst the policy elite in Euroland. The public and private sector cannot simultaneously net save unless the Europeans engineer a competitive currency devaluation. Therefore, the Europeans’ newfound fiscal austerity is at odds with the need of the private sector to reduce debt and will likely lead to a collapse in consumer demand and depression or a trade war. What Europe needs is to allow over-indebted nations to default, reducing the political and economic pressure of austerity.
Intra-Eurozone Trade wars
Let me review how I come to that conclusion. This is a trade issue, first and foremost. The reason the Eurozone exists from an economic standpoint has to do with European interdependence from business trade. The eurozone functions as an internal market much the way the United States does, with the majority of trade occurring inside the region as opposed to externally with non-Eurozone countries.
When the Euro was formed, exchange rates were fixed and a common monetary policy came into being – much as we see for states in the US or provinces in Canada. Of course, monetary policy is not run for specific regions within the zone, but for the zone overall. And this invariably means that the European Central Bank’s monetary policy is geared more to the slow-growth core of Europe than the periphery.
During any business cycle then, current…
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Is Google the Omen of a U.S.-China Trade War?
by ilene - March 24th, 2010 3:15 am
Is Google the Omen of a U.S.-China Trade War?
Courtesy of TIME, by Bill Powell / Shanghai
When Google finally ended the suspense, it did so by stating the obvious. "Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search [in China]," wrote David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, on the company’s blog last night, "has been hard." For more than two months, ever since its Jan. 12 announcement that it would soon stop censoring its search results in the country with the largest number of Internet users in the world, the California giant was headed for a direct clash with the authorities in Beijing, who have been repeatedly unambiguous in their stance. Censorship is the law of the land in China, and Google had to abide by it or else "suffer the consequences," as an official put it last week.
Google’s decision is to route all of the traffic on its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, to its Hong Kong based site, Google.com.hk. The company has added simplified Chinese characters to the site (Hong Kong Chinese uses traditional characters for reading and writing) and a color-coded list of features (such as shopping, maps, music) which are still available, all of which make it now look "a bit like an eye test," as Shen Liling, a young Shanghai netizen, says. (See pictures of China mourning the potential loss of Google.)
But the practical result was that, for a few hours at least, search results were no longer censored. On Tuesday morning, March 23, in China, netizens could type in "Falun Gong," the banned religious cult, and what popped up was far different than what had come up just the previous night. (Among other things, the official Falun Gong website showed up in search results.) So after nearly four years of doing business in China, Google has lived up to its campaign promise. It is no longer censoring its search results for Web surfers behind China’s Great Firewall. But it took the Chinese government less than 24 hours to start censoring searches itself: a search for "Falun Gong" from the mainland later in the day prompted only a "Web page not available" response.
For that short span, the Hong Kong route was a relatively elegant solution to the dilemma in which the company had found itself. Xinhua, a…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.