09/20/2011, 00.00
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Economic Crisis: a controlled demolition

by Maurizio d'Orlando
The Greek crisis, the attack on Italy's debt, the risks to the euro, inflationary proposals for the dollar, and the yuan deliberately undercut are shaking countries and governments throughout the world. Everything seems to be calculated according to a plan: to build a universal economic government "of a tyrannical type". The analysis of a political economist (First of two parts).
Milan (AsiaNews) - Just last night, Standard & Poor's lowered the credit ratings on the Italian sovereign debt, taking it from A+ to A, increasing concern of some gloomy scenarios in the global economic crisis, a crisis – we'll just say this right away – that looks to us like a "controlled demolition", with precise aims.

The contradictions inherent in the world economy and its pattern of growth have always caught the attention of AsiaNews. Since 2003 we have offered our readers an analysis that has gone against the current, one often very critical with respect to the dominant thought. In this, our special attention to Asia and particularly to China's economy has proved a valuable asset.

Thanks to it, in fact, before many others, we were able to observe and then explain some phenomena that have become common and essential elements of every serious, successive economic analysis. Globalization, so widely praised until a few years ago, was based, in fact, on a unique symbiosis: on the one hand, it has fueled Asian, and particularly Chinese, growth, focusing on exports, with annual rates of around 10%, maintained, moreover, nearly constant for about twenty years. On the other hand, the rapid transformation of Western countries and particularly of the U.S., in economies that are no longer based on manufacturing, but on services, finance and consumption (including a large military expenditure), fueled by the issuance of currency.

The duration and the pace of Chinese growth is unprecedented in history, as is the explosion of public (and private) debt, and in particular the American debt, which officially passed from roughly 60% to more than 100% in a few years. Both cases involve a fraudulent mechanism that feeds on itself: on the one hand, the strong Chinese exchange rate, strongly and artificially undervalued compared to the purchasing power parity (from 30% to 45%, an unbeatable subsidy on Chinese exports) and on the other hand, an issue of currency reserve (mainly the dollar) without restraint or limit. To clarify this last point, recall, for instance, what was said last August by the former head of the Federal Reserve [1]: "The U.S. can pay any debt because they can always print the money to do so. So there is zero chance of default." In fact, there is the certainty of insolence and arrogance of those who hold sovereign power to stamp at will exchange currency.

This arrogant affirmation is basically easy to implement, because you do not need gold and silver mines, as before, and it is not just an American monopoly: a few days ago, the Swiss National Bank said it would defend the exchange rate of the Swiss franc by likewise issuing an unlimited amount of national currency. September 16 is the date of the news of a coordinated intervention of five central banks for the provision of liquidity in dollars on the interbank market. In a week, Bernanke is likely to announce a new wave of "quantitative easing", which technically is a loosening of reserve requirements and in practice is nothing more than a form of monetary emission by buying U.S. Treasury bonds. After the QE2 in November of last year, exhausted by July of this year, it will be time for the QE3's turn, to be followed by the QE4 and thereafter until the QEn.

It involves a perverse symbiotic mechanism, and it is analysis that we have made several times, so that it is enough to just update the data to present it again. We've also written the outcome, which is almost guaranteed: a financial, banking, and finally economic collapse that is unprecedented in history. For the analysis we refer to numerous articles published over the years by AsiaNews.

Regarding the outcome, it may be appropriate to speculate on when and how. From the perspective of the time, one could say that it seems very close, because virtually all key factors in the collapse are already in place in the economic system. For example, given a rate of increase of three billion dollars a day, in the next few days, the U.S. public debt will exceed the ceiling established with difficulty in July by a parliamentary agreement between Democrats and Republicans, while in mid-October, the Greek government will have no more euros to pay its civil servants. Also significant is that last Friday, September 16, Moody's announced that it will complete its analysis of whether to reduce its assessment on the Italian public debt placed under observation for a possible downgrade three months ago. Meanwhile, last night Standard & Poor's lowered its rating for Italy from A+ to A, adding that the outlook for the country is "negative". Everything seems to coincide and the deadline seems imminent.

To cause the situation to precipitate, it seems that all that is lacking is a spark, of which there is no shortage, and this brings us to the how. The business newspapers around the world - which seem to be moving in unison, as if there were no other possible hypothesis - in regard to the debt, are talking about the risk of "contagion" between the European crisis and that of America. In reality they are very different situations and therefore in theory are easily isolated, keeping one economic area of the world separate from the other. This therefore allows one to suppose that the word "contagion" actually means that there will be a series of simultaneous or chain-reaction detonations, from the largest to the smallest, as in a controlled demolition, and that this will give the impression of a sudden spread of the fire. For example, the Italian debt has been spoken of often in the last two months, as well as how it could be the detonator of a generalized collapse of public debt throughout the world. This gives some idea of the instrumental nature of the analysis that being is proposed to us.

Given this alleged "contagion", AsiaNews must also look a little more closely at the possible spark of the next probable fire: Italian events. Italy had more or less the current level of public debt at the beginning of the nineties. During the current crisis, the Italian public debt, which has increased by 7% of the GDP, has been the one with had the lowest rate of increase from 2007 to 2011. In comparison, the United Kingdom (47%), the United States (38%) and Japan (37%), have had much greater increases (the record is Ireland, with an increase of 65%)[2]. Italy also approved two operations, a few months apart, to reduce the budget deficit. The first, in July of last year, of 25 billion and the second on September 15 with a further reduction of 55 billion euros: no small thing, in relation to the Italian GDP and the fact that the Western economy is at a stage that is much more contractive than expansive in tendency. Then take into account that Italy has initiated measures to reduce structural deficits of pension and health spending, with long-term effects, while other countries have not only not reduced their spending, but on the contrary have approved laws that in the future will cause a sharp increase. For example, in the United States the value of future spending commitments ("unfunded liabilities") without coverage is about 115 thousand billion dollars, and this means that the U.S. public debt is actually much higher [3], about 840% of the GDP, compared to the one published, of roughly 100%.

From a technical standpoint, therefore, Moody's decision last June to put the Italian public debt under observation for a possible downgrade, makes no sense. If, later this month, after Italy has adopted and implemented a double maneuver of a fast and sharp reduction of the public deficit, operational since 2011, Moody's should confirm, as is likely, a pejorative assessment, the situation would become ridiculous. This pejorative assessment should have been made 10, 20, 30 years ago, when the Italian public debt was growing, not now. Doing it now is very suspicious.

The fact is that whoever is providing these ratings - Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch, the three assessment ("rating") agencies for debt securities - has no credibility in terms of independence and impartiality, because of the enormous conflict of interest due to the controlling shareholders' cross-shareholdings. From the following table, below, Moody's bad faith is also evident. Moody's owes its worldwide monopoly - which it shares with the two other sister agencies - to a private company, very little known outside of very narrow circles, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc., ISDA. It is the consortium of an exclusive group of players in the derivatives market, whose total nominal value of exchange is approximately 10-12 times the world GDP. It is therefore sad, but only logical, that a small company like Moody's is likely doing a small favor, a little illicit trade, at the expense of the common folk.

It will probably be this very agency to provide the spark to trigger the collapse of the global financial and monetary system. It will therefore be a controlled demolition, such as that of the WTC building 7 [4], the third building that collapsed in New York on September 11, 2001, several hours after the two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers. Clearly, before anyone could ever imaging that the Berlusconi government, this mess, would be able to get the safeguarding of Italian public finances approved, someone decided that Italy was to be "pulled down" in the fall. Despite the unexpected inconsistency, it was not possible, it can be inferred, to modify the script in a hurry, since it was carefully prearranged long beforehand, for the benefit of the argumentative logic of the international media. The show must go on according to the original script.

Though without (unfortunately) a copy of this lineup, it is still fairly easy to intuit, and below we give a reading of it. The explosion of the crisis in Greece, as has been said, is expected by mid-October. This, however, does not have sufficient detonating power because Greece is too small a country too ignite a general crisis. The script therefore provides for a further step, and it is the French and German banks' turn, which have a strong amount of Greek government bonds, especially the French Société Générale, BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole. So far so "good", everything is proceeding according to script, with no troubles.

From here on out there is ingrafted, however, the downgrading of Italian public debt, part of the scripted logic made less credible by the two maneuvers of Berlusconi's government. According to the script, being themselves in difficulty, the French banks must reduce their investment in the Italian titles placed under observation or demoted, and of which they are among the largest holders. In October, therefore, some effects should have added up in a dramatic crescendo, extending to all of Europe, like in 1848. It turns out that an eighty billion (25 +55) reduction, 10% of the Italian public spending, is not enough: we need another hundred. The analysis is correct, but putting the country on a diet too quickly can cause failure, in this case riots and insurrections. There will be these, too, but it is not enough. At this point one has to insert a twist, a reversal of fortunes: the Federal Reserve announces that, together with the International Monetary Fund, it will intervene to save the Euro, provided that the European countries do their part. It's a brilliant move, the world stock markets recover, apparently, and the riots cease. Berlusconi, however, must go away, at any rate, because so it is written in the script. He did not fall on the public accounts, he did not fall on Ruby the Heartbreaker, aka Karima El Maghroub, aka Karima Heyek [5]. But something will be found; it's sufficient to apply the Libya schema [6]. Berlusconi is forced to resign by a revolution - "spontaneous", of course - and either a "transitional" government or one for "national unity" is set up.

The new government, lacking the legitimacy of an election, is very weak and internally divided. It therefore fails to carry out the necessary cuts and the reduction of public debt and in a couple of months, despite the American intervention, Italy is forced into insolvency. Being one of the major European Union countries, the effect is the disintegration of the Euro. At this point, the finish line is finally in sight: the Fed has, in fact, issued an avalanche of dollars sufficient to make the situation irreversible. After a few months, at least six, more likely a year, the final act of the drama goes on stage: burdened by the weight of the bank bailouts of 2008, 24 thousand billion dollars, from QE1, QE2, QE3, ..., QEn, from the failed safeguarding of Europe, the dollar crashes, and with it, a hundred years after its establishment, the Federal Reserve.

With the demise of the dollar, derivative contracts are worthless and the ISDA members who had been privy to the script in advance celebrate: they had converted as much as they could into gold and silver. On the ashes of the Fed, there commence negotiations to divide the shares of a new, single world currency, reserved for each macro-region of the world. It doesn't take much imagination. In fact, the money already exists: it is the counting unit of the International Monetary Fund, the Special Drawing Rights (SDR). You simply need to broaden the composition, now made up of dollars, euro, yen and pounds, coins that at this point of the story are now defunct. Having established the new single currency, leaders proceed to formalize the establishment of a central world bank and then of a world government, with the consequences that one might imagine.

Apart from the concrete, elevated and catastrophic risk of a world war stemming from differences of interest, what we don't like about this project is simply everything. But what is more outrageous and disgusting is the falsehood and artificiality with which it is pursued, while what worries most is the risk to the freedom of billions of people. It is, in fact, a plan to establish a Superstate, in which to cage the whole earth in a kind of Soviet Union. It is the premise for this "dangerous universal power of a tyrannical type" of which the Pope wrote in his encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate".

Table: author's elaboration of data derived from: Stephen G. Cecchetti, MS Mohanty, Fabrizio Zampolli, The Future of Public Debt: Implications and prospects, BIS Working Papers No 300, see:
http://www.bis.org/publ/work300.pdf.
  2007 2010 2011


forecast 
 
2007-2011 

Increase

 
Austria 62% 78% 82% 20%
France 70% 92% 85% 29%
Germany 65% 82% 99% 20%
Greece 104% 123% 130% 26%
Ireland 28% 81% 93% 65%
Italy 112% 116% 119% 7%
Japan 167% 197% 204% 37%
The Netherlands 52% 77% 82% 30%
Portugal 71% 91% 97% 26%
Spain 42% 68% 74% 32%
United Kingdom 47% 83%
94% 47%
United States 62% 92% 100% 38%


NOTE

1“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default", see Patrick Allen, CNBC, No Chance of Default, U.S. Can Print Money: Greenspan, Aug. 7 2011, http://www.cnbc.com/id/44051683

2See the table at the bottom of the page.

3See: Laurence Kotlikoff, “A Hidden Financial Crisis,” in Finance & Development, September 2010, Vol. 47, No. 3 : “U.S. government debt is not .5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: 0-trillion - 840 per cent of current GDP. Hence let's get real, The U.S. is bankrupt", Prof. Kotlikoff.

4See:http://rememberbuilding7.org/10/

5The careless girl, on at least one occasion before the events, presented Police officers with a different and contrasting identity document according to which, based on the year of birth, she not was a minor.

6See: http://www.asianews.it/notizie-it/La-guerra-di-Libia,-another-Vietnam-21393.html

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