O REPUBLICAN IN HISTORY HAS WORKED HARDER FOR WALL ST BANKSTERS THAN OBAMA! THEY HAVE FILLED HIS POCKETS WITH THANKS.
OTHER THAN BANKSTERS, ONLY
ILLEGALS GET OBAMA’S ATTENTION MORE! HE IS THE FIRST LA RAZA SUPREMACIST
PRESIDENT!
“In other words, despite the
trillions of dollars handed out to the banks and financial institutions over
the past three years by governments around the world, nothing has been
resolved. The global economy could be plunged into a disaster at any time. This
underscores the fact that the crisis of 2008 was not a conjunctural downturn,
from which there would be a recovery, but the start of an ongoing breakdown in
the world capitalist economy, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of billions
of people.”
World economy set for another major
downturn
By Nick Beams
19 January 2012
19 January 2012
The
World Bank has issued a grim forecast on the outlook for the world economy,
with the potential for a crisis worse than that which followed the collapse of
Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The warning was contained in the Bank’s
Global Economic Prospects report, issued yesterday.
These
predictions were backed by a United Nations report. It said the world economy
was “teetering on the brink of another major downturn,” with output growth
slowing “considerably” in 2011 and only “anaemic growth” expected in 2012 and
2013.
The
World Bank pointed to a significant worsening of economic prospects, beginning
in August 2011 as the euro zone financial crisis started to deepen. This was
having a major impact on so-called emerging markets where rates on credit default
swaps (CDS)—an indication of fears of a debt default—had been rising.
However,
this was by no means the only sign. “For developing countries, the contagion
has been broadly based,” the report stated. “Developing-country markets have
lost 8.5 percent of their value since July-end. This, combined with the 4.2
percent drop in high-income stock-market valuations, has translated into $6.5
trillion, or 9.5 percent of global GDP, in wealth losses.”
Even
more significant was the sharp decline in capital flows to developing countries
as investors withdrew money in the second half of last year. “Overall, gross
capital flows to developing countries plunged to $170 billion in the second
half of 2011, only 55 percent of the $309 billion received during the like period
of 2010.”
According
to the report, “the world economy has entered a dangerous period” as the
financial turmoil in Europe spread to developing and other high-income
countries that had previously been unaffected.
The
World Bank’s forecasts of world economic growth had been “significantly
downgraded” from its previous assessment six months ago. It now expected the
global economy to expand by only 2.5 percent and 3.1 percent in 2012 and 2013,
compared to the previous prediction of 3.6 percent for both years. Any rate
below 3 percent is generally considered to be a recession for the world economy
as a whole. Europe was now in a recession and growth in high-income countries
was expected to be only 1.4 percent.
Even
these weak results may not be achieved. “The downturn in Europe and the slow
growth in developing countries could reinforce one another more than is
anticipated,” resulting in even worse results and “further complicating efforts
to restore market confidence.” At the same time, “the medium-term challenge
represented by high debts and slow trend growth in other high-income countries
has not been resolved and could trigger sudden adverse shocks.”
The
consequences would be even greater than those of the breakdown of the global
financial system after September 2008.
“While
contained for the moment, the risk of a much broader freezing up of capital
markets and a global crisis similar in magnitude to the Lehman crisis remains.
In particular, the willingness of markets to finance the deficits and maturing
debt of high-income countries cannot be assured. Should more countries find
themselves denied such financing, a much wider financial crisis that could
engulf private banks and other financial institutions on both sides of the
Atlantic cannot be ruled out.”
In other words, despite the
trillions of dollars handed out to the banks and financial institutions over
the past three years by governments around the world, nothing has been
resolved. The global economy could be plunged into a disaster at any time. This
underscores the fact that the crisis of 2008 was not a conjunctural downturn,
from which there would be a recovery, but the start of an ongoing breakdown in
the world capitalist economy, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of billions
of people.
The
report stated: “In the event of a major crisis, the downturn may well be longer
than in 2008/09 because high-income countries do not have the fiscal or
monetary resources to bailout the banking system or stimulate demand to the
same extent as in 2008/09. Although developing countries have some
maneuverability on the monetary side, they could be forced to … cut
spending—especially if financing for fiscal deficits dries up.”
The
impact of the financial turmoil in Europe is expressed in world trade—always an
indicator of the state of the global economy. The report noted that trade
volumes had declined at an annualised pace of 8 percent during the three months
ending in October 2011 “mainly reflecting a 17 percent annualised decline in
European imports.”
Exports
from so-called developing countries fell at an annualised rate of 1.7 percent
in the third quarter of last year and continued to fall in November. The
countries of South Asia were among the hardest hit, with sharp contractions,
following rapid export growth in the first half of the year. Exports from East
Asia were falling at double-digit annualised rates. While some of this decline
was due to the impact of the floods in Thailand, it also expressed the
contraction of markets in Europe and other high-income regions.
World
Bank chief economist Justin Lifu Liu said China still remained a bright spot.
Its growth rate, although down to a forecast of 8.4 percent for this year,
compared to 9.1 percent last year, remained relatively high. “If China can
maintain its growth, it’s good for the world, providing support for commodities
markets and growth in other countries.” He warned that while China’s exports
would be adversely affected by the worldwide downturn, the Chinese government
was one of the least indebted in the world and had “relatively large room for
manoeuvre to stimulate the economy.”
In
view of recent reports from Beijing on the state of the Chinese economy and the
mounting problems faced by government and monetary authorities, such comments
can be likened to whistling past the graveyard.
This
week, the Chinese government announced that the growth rate for the last
quarter of 2011 was an annualised 8.9 percent, the lowest for 10 quarters.
Overall growth for 2011 was 9.2 percent, the weakest since 2009 when China experienced
the impact of the Lehman collapse.
A
National Bureau of Statistics spokesman said 2012 would be a year of
“complexity and challenges.” The Financial Times reported that his
remarks were “laced with words such as ‘gloomy’, ‘complicated’ and ‘severe’.”
Huang
Yiping, the chief economist at Barclays Bank, which has just completed a study
of China’s real estate bubble, told the FT that the probability of a big
stimulus package was much lower now because the government was still dealing
with the effects of the last one. “China has very heavily indebted local
governments and has seen an extraordinary credit expansion that contributed to
large asset bubbles, particularly in housing, over the last few years.
Over-investment is also a major concern and these are all problems that have
contributed to collapse in other developing economies in the past,” he said.
A
severe economic crisis in China will have major social and political
consequences, with the government calculating that it needs at least 8 percent
growth to maintain social stability and prevent a challenge to its rule. There
will also be significant consequences for commodity exporting countries such as
Canada, Australia and Brazil that have, to some extent, been insulated from the
full impact of financial turbulence by high prices and volumes for their
commodity exports to China.
*
2009 - NOT A BANKSTER GOES TO PRISON!
Op-Ed Columnist
Disaster and Denial
When I first began
writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest
misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be
moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely
refuted their beliefs.
And to be fair, it does
happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years
(since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman
credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial
markets to police themselves.
But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was
demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when
— with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our
minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in
evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite
modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.
Let’s recall how we got
into our current mess.
America emerged from the
Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations
worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades
after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to
chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the
influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers
what they wanted.
The first big wave of
deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in
the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying
more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to
clean up the mess.
But the proponents of
deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis
politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era
restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable
2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden
shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.
And the bankers —
liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the
hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded
by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a
monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the
Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required
government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to
prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions,
large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.
Given this history, you
might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring
more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But
you would have been wrong.
Talk to conservatives
about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in
which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a
universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis,
even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans.
It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to
unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was
subject to the regulations in question.
Oh, and conservatives
simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the
only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups,
because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit
the narrative.
In part, the prevalence
of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is
difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his
not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the
House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100
financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the
extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt
ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the
U.S. economy.
So it’s up to the
Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up
to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from
the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?
Let’s hope so. For one
thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent
financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.
*
WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE
DIDN’T KNOW?
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
BARACK OBAMA HAS COLLECTED NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS
JOHN McCAIN
BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
July 1st 2008
Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to
Barack Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg
Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.
Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily News analysis of campaign records shows.
For both candidates, Wall Street's investment and banking
sectors have become among their portliest cash cows, contributing $9.5 million
to Obama and $5.3 million to McCain so far.
It's a haul that is already raising concerns that, as the
nation's faltering economy has become issue No. 1, the two candidates may have
a hard time playing tough on issues like market regulation or corporate-tax loopholes.
Wall Street's generosity toward Obama, in particular, would
seem to run counter to its self-interests.
In addition to calling for corporate and capital gains tax
hikes, Obama has proposed raising income taxes on those earning more than
$250,000.
"In general, these are professional
prognosticators," said Ritsch. "And they may be putting their money
on the person they predict will win, not the candidate they hope will
win."
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
Obama's Wall Street haul is not the biggest ever. That
distinction belongs to President Bush, who as an incumbent in 2004 raised
$10,852,696 from Wall Street interests through April that year - about $1
million more than Obama.
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