Oct 07 2008

Worldwide Financial Panic & Global Crisis Of Democracy

“It’s a panic situation, everyone is looking at the international financial situation and coming to the conclusion that the only safe position is cash.” — Brazilian Economist Flavio Serrano

The “rescue” appears to be rescuing the intended few at your expense.

October 07, 2008 – 3 min 10 sec

Worldwide financial fiasco

Markets around the world hammered by credit crunch as governments move to secure bank deposits

Markets were thrashed again on Monday, as the US credit crisis spreads worldwide.

The Dow Jones lost another 370 points and closing at under 10,000 for the first time since October 2004. At one point the Dow was down 800 pts. But managed to recoup half.

The day started with reaction to sharp declines in Asian and European markets. Tokyo’s Nikkei index fell to its lowest level in four and a half years, sinking 4.25 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index lost 4.3 percent.

Markets in China, Australia, South Korea, India, Singapore and Thailand also fell sharply. In Europe the trading was halted twice in Russia with the market closing down 19.1 percent, the DAX in Frankfurt, Germany was down 7.1 percent, while the FTSE 100 index in the UK was down 7.9 percent.

Stocks in Paris took a big hit losing 9 percent. Across the Atlantic Brazil lost 5.5 percent; Argentina was off 5.9 percent, while Mexico’s index fell 5.4 percent, In Canada the TSX was down 5.3 percent.

Faltering confidence in the financial system following a series of bank bailouts forced many European governments to offer deposit guarantees.

Expectations are that the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank will have a coordinated interest rate cut as early as Monday, the first joint action since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.

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    • Edger on October 7, 2008 at 22:53
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    • Edger on October 7, 2008 at 23:42
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    People tend to laugh and take him metaphorically if they take him seriously at all, but he was deadly serious when he said:

    …the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place.

    –George Carlin

    It was no joke then, and it’s no joke now.

    Today, AP is reporting that over the past year and a half…

    Retirement accounts have lost  trillion

    WASHINGTON – Americans’ retirement plans have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months, Congress’ top budget analyst estimated Tuesday. The upheaval that has engulfed the financial industry and sent the stock market plummeting is devastating workers’ savings, forcing people to hold off on major purchases and consider delaying their retirement, said Peter Orszag, the head of the Congressional Budget Office.

    As Congress investigates the causes and effects of the financial meltdown, the House Education and Labor Committee was hearing from retirement savings and budget analysts on how the housing, credit and other financial troubles have battered pensions and other retirement funds, which are among the most common forms of savings in the United States.

    “Unlike Wall Street executives, America’s families don’t have a golden parachute to fall back on,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the panel chairman. “It’s clear that their retirement security may be one of the greatest casualties of this financial crisis.”

    $2 trillion is about equal to the combined amount Congress has authorized for pentagon spending and the Wall Street fraud in the past week.

  3. I just found something interesting…Margaret Atwood wrote a commentary on the current financial mess titled Our romance with debt…we’ll pay for it later.

    What is this “debt” by which we’re so bedeviled? Like air, it’s all around us, but we never think about it unless something goes wrong with the supply. Certainly it’s a thing we’ve come to feel is indispensable to our collective buoyancy.

    In good times we float around on it as if on a helium-filled balloon; we rise higher and higher, and the balloon gets bigger and bigger, until — poof! — some killjoy sticks a pin into it and we sink. But what is the nature of that pin?

    Another friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed — against reason — that they could fly: Without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would instantly plummet to earth. Is “debt” similar? In other words, perhaps debt exists because we imagine it.

    Another part of the human imaginative debt/credit structure has to do with payback time — the time when you have to pay the debt back, or else suffer the consequences.

    All major religions have extended this structure to the afterlife, where, if you haven’t righted the moral balances on earth, you must do so after death.

    There are no clocks in heaven. Nor are there any in hell. In both, everything is always now. Or so goes the rumor.

    In heaven, there are no debts — all have been paid, one way or another — but in hell there’s nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can’t ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly.

  4. Iceland seized its banks….and things are looking grim…but McCain still wants to privatize Social Security…

    Gonna be tough belt-tightening times! You Betcha!

  5. Thousands of Troops Are Deployed on U.S. Streets Ready to Carry Out “Crowd Control”

    By Naomi Wolf, AlterNet. Posted October 8, 2008.

    Members of Congress were told they could face martial law if they didn’t pass the bailout bill. This will not be the last time.

    Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing “unruly individuals,” and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks.

    George Bush struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the U.S. He has also legally established that in the “War on Terror,” the U.S. is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield. Thus the U.S. is also a battlefield.

    He also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined “insurrection” or many other “conditions” he has the power to identify. The Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus — habeas corpus prevents us from being seized by the state and held without trial — in the event of an “insurrection.” With his own army force now, his power to call a group of protesters or angry voters “insurgents” staging an “insurrection” is strengthened.

    U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman of California said to Congress, captured on C-Span and viewable on YouTube, that individual members of the House were threatened with martial law within a week if they did not pass the bailout bill:

    “The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. … Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day and a couple of thousand on the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no.” . . . .

    There were those, however, who were not intimidated and voted “no.”

    I think we are in a very, very precarious way!  Understatement!!!!

  6. And this,

    A Crisis Made in the Oval Office

    A financial panic provoked by President Bush was designed to stampede Congress into passing the bail-out for Wall Street

    By Dean Baker

    07/10/08 “The Guardian” – — This is the first time in the history of the United States that the president has sought to provoke a financial panic to get legislation passed through Congress. While this has proven to be a successful political strategy – after the House of Representatives finally passed the bank bail-out plan today – it marks yet another low point in American politics.

    It was incredibly irresponsible for George Bush to tell the American people on national television that the country could be facing another Great Depression. By contrast, when we actually were in the Great Depression, President Roosevelt said: “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”

    It was even more irresponsible for President Bush to seize on the decline in the stock market five days later as evidence that his bailout was needed for the economy. President Bush must surely understand, as all economists know, that the daily swings in the stock market are driven by mass psychology and have almost nothing to do with the underlying strength in the economy. . . .

    I don’t think this is in the least bit surprising!

    Oh, and to top it off, check out this video:

    Days after bailout, AIG execs spent $443,000 at spa resort  

  7. Dead cat bounce so I can hand over what’s left of my money to the financial wizards like the ones on CNBC who are insisting that the market’s about at the bottom & the big market upturn is just around the corner.  Oh, and if we don’t have our money in the market, we’re going to lose out on all those big profits…

    Come to think of it, though…they’ve been claiming the same thing for over a year now & if you’d listened to them then, you’d be a lot poorer now…  

    I wish they’d just admit that they don’t have a clue when or how things will get better and that we really shouldn’t credit them with any more ability to predict the future of the economy than the writer of the morning horoscope.

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