Asia Times: Monetary despotism

[marmar]

Monetary despotism
By Hossein Askari and Noureddine Krichene


The combined recent liquidity injection by Western central banks could exceed US$4 trillion, yet that vast amount has created nothing real, not even one grain of corn.

To summarize, continental Europeans a week ago, on October 13, following the British plan for UK bank recapitalization, unveiled a plan requiring $2.55 trillion to recapitalize their banks, at the same time promising unlimited dollar funding in coordinated action with the US Federal Reserve.

The Fed, meanwhile, has injected $1.3 trillion in liquidity into the banking system and has decided to bypass banks and extend directly lending to borrowers. These sums certainly dwarf the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Plan (TARP) of US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. If recent bailouts and liquidity injection are added together, the price tag could easily amount to 70% of US gross domestic product in 2008.

Certainly, Western central banks have not injected this much in real gross domestic product, that is, in millions of tons of commodities (rice, corn, milk, oil, vegetables, clothing). If they had done so, their action would have been most beneficial. They have only created money out of nothing. Some call it legal robbery, others call legal counterfeiting.

Their action has amounted only to a redistribution of real GDP and real wealth among two groups: the winners (bankers, debtors) and the losers (workers, taxpayers, pensioners, creditors). How will this redistribution take place? The answer is forced inflation. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JJ21Dj08.html

[ixion]

1. and yet right wing pundits have no problem accusing Obama of being Marxist

the mind boggles. :crazy:

[Peace Patriot]

2. As usual, Asia Times puts their finger right on it. What a great news service they are!

You want to know what's really going on here, and in the Asia Pacific, and everywhere else. Go to www.atimes.com.

Thanks for posting this! Paper money to loan sharks and golden parachutes and multi-millionaire speculators and thieves, and not to food, clothing, cars, computers, houses, roads, solar panels, medicines, bottles, cans, movies, bridges, tractors, microscopes, cameras, pipes, motors, and the people who actually make them--the backbone of the economy--the workers. Nor to schools, emergency services, police, elder care, garbage collection, street sweeping, libraries, food banks, shelters, drug rehab, parks, after-school care, decent prisons, social work, public defenders, courts, community centers, city halls, enforcement of environmental laws and protections, alternative energy, replanting forests, restoring streams, clean water, finding out why bee populations are dying and repairing the damage, product safety, and all the systems and services that make up our society and make business and trade possible.

No money for the real economy. A TEN TRILLION dollar debt--and growing--placed on all real business and trade in the future, and all its support systems, unto the 7th generation.

Utter madness.

I think we have met the "October Surprise"--and it is this Financial 9/11. Shock and awe, brought home. Might as well be a rain of bombs, or dramatically (and impossibly) collapsing towers. These guys are nothing if not slick. Madison Avenue ain't in it. They are the all-time champeens of bullshit.

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More from Asia Times...

"Bailouts schemes on such a scale have no precedent. They are the outcome of cheap money policy followed in the past decade and the sophisticated speculation, call it financial engineering or exotic finance, which developed complex derivatives, proliferating fictitious credit to gain abnormal returns.

"The speculative exponentiation of fictitious assets on the top of each other has made most banks over leveraged in ratios of 1 to 40. In a credit system devoid of securitization, the credit multiplier is finite and cannot exceed six or seven. In a system with securitization, the credit multiplier is theoretically infinite and in practice could reach 50. Certainly, these giant bailouts have changed the rules of the game. Speculators, that is asset funds managers, are now secured by central banks....

"The credit to be bailed out, or, if you will, the capital to be recapitalized, is not money that has been channeled to agriculture, industry, commerce, or infrastructure. These sectors rely on long-term capital, financed essentially through equities, or corporate, government or municipal bonds. All productive loans are fully performing and have negligible default.

"All the bailouts by central banks and governments are purely for replacing losses of short-term speculative capital that has caused the present financial trauma. Only speculative capital causes financial instability; such was indeed the cause of the Great Depression, brought about by default on speculative loans in stock markets. The bailouts are primarily intended to write off bad debts, so that borrowers can walk free of their debt obligations and enjoy the wealth they had acquired earlier on."

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JJ21Dj08.html