Growth isn’t working. Why rich countries need a new economic direction. Read more >>>

The impossible Hamster club. Video about crazy consumption and ‘really gross’ domestic product. www.impossible hamster.org

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The Guardian: Goldman Sachs charged with $1bn fraud over toxic sub-prime securities. “The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs, long considered a shrewd winner from the financial crisis, was slapped with potentially devastating fraud charges todayas US regulators accused the firm of fiddling investors out of more than $1bn (£640m) by wilfully mis-marketing toxic sub-prime mortgage-related securities.” April 16, 2010. Read more >>>

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Andrew Maguire, a London-based precious-metals trader has accused JPMorgan Chase of manipulating the gold and silver markets. 13 april 2010.  Read more >>>

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“Wall St. Helped Greece to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis” According to The New York Times “Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.” (…) “One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.” Source: The New York Times, February 13, 2010

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Economists: Another Financial Crisis on the Way. According to a new report from a group of leading economists, financiers, and former federal regulators, “another crisis – one that will be even worse than the current one – is looming.” In this report, “the panel, which includes Rob Johnson of the United Nations Commission of Experts on Finance and bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, warns that financial regulatory reform measures proposed by the Obama administration and Congress must be beefed up to prevent banks from continuing to engage in high-risk investing that precipitated the near-collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008. The report warns that the country is now immersed in a "doomsday cycle" wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management – and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.” (…)  "While manufacturers have developed iPods and flat-screen televisions, the financial industry has perfected the art of offering mortgages, credit cards and check overdrafts laden with hidden terms that obscure price and risk," Warren writes. "Good products are mixed with dangerous products, and consumers are left on their own to try to sort out which is which. The consequences can be disastrous." Frank Partnoy, a panelist from the University of San Diego, claims that "the balance sheets of most Wall Street banks are fiction." Source: abcnews March 2, 2010

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A Values-Based Operating System

‘To get ourselves out of our current mess and create the world we want, we must reboot the economy with a new, values-based operating system designed to support social and environmental balance and the creation of real, living wealth.’

David Korten

‘In the world we want, the organization of economic life mimics healthy ecosystems that are locally rooted, highly adaptive, and self-reliant in food and energy. Information and technology are shared freely, and trade between neighbors is fair and balanced.

In a modern economy, nearly every relationship essential to life depends on money. This gives ultimate power to those who control the creation and allocation of money. Five features of the existing money system virtually assure abuse.

1.    Money issuance and allocation are controlled by private banks managed for the exclusive benefit of their top managers and largest shareholders. 

2.    Money issued by private banks as debt must be repaid with interest. This requires perpetual economic growth to create sufficient demand for new loans to create the money required to pay the interest due on previous loans. The fact that nearly every dollar in circulation is generating interest for bankers and their investors virtually assures an ever-increasing concentration of wealth. 

3.    The power to determine how much money will circulate and where it will flow is concentrated and centralized in a tightly interlinked system of private-benefit corporations that operate in secret, beyond public scrutiny, with the connivance of the Federal Reserve. 

4.    The Federal Reserve presents itself as a public institution responsible for exercising oversight, but it is accountable only to itself, operates primarily for the benefit of the largest Wall Street banks, and consistently favors the interests of those who live by returns to money over those who live by returns to their labor. 

5.    The lack of proper regulatory oversight allows players at each level of the system to make highly risky decisions, collect generous fees based on phantom profits, and pass the risk to others.’

Source: Yesmagazine, David Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy

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“Wall St. Helped Greece to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis” According to The New York Times “Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.” (…) “One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.” Source: The New York Times, February 13, 2010

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Bonus time as banks pay out £40bn. ‘The world's biggest investment banks are expected to pay out more than $65bn (£40bn) in salaries and bonuses in the next two weeks, reinforcing the view that it is business as usual on Wall Street and in the City barely a year since the taxpayer bailout of the banking system.’ Source: The Guardian, January 8, 2010

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France poised to join UK in taxing bankers' bonuses. ‘France will follow the UK's lead and impose a new super-tax on bonuses paid to its country's bankers. (…) According to financial newspaper Les Echos, the French government will introduce legislation imposing a 50% tax on all bank bonuses over €27,000 (£24,400).’ Source: The Guardian, December 10, 2009

Banking on a green industrial revolution. In Britain, the idea of a national investment bank to steer economy towards low carbon future gains ground. Source and article: The Guardian, November 30, 2009

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Britain plans windfall tax on bank bonuses. ‘Ministers are drawing up plans to use this week’s pre-Budget report for a windfall tax on the large bonuses paid to bankers.’ Source: The Telegraph, December 6, 2009

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The Solidarity Economy Network is a group of socially responsible businesses, non-profits, and cooperatives that collaborate with one another —at local, regional, and national levels— to create a more just economy. “The Solidarity Economy is an alternative development framework that is grounded in practice and the in the principles of: solidarity, mutualism, and cooperation; equity in all dimensions (race/ethnicity/ nationality, class, gender, LGBTQ); social well-being over profit and the unfettered rule of the market; sustainability; social and economic democracy; and pluralism, allowing for different forms in different contexts, open to continual change and driven from the bottom-up.”

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Universal Healthcare: a feasible economic project

2.5 billion humans –i.e. ca. 40% of the world population- still don’t have access to basic healthcare. At the end of the Global Earth Conference, organized in Brussels by the Hélène De Beir Foundation in October 2009, a group of 80 experts concluded that universal healthcare is a feasible economic project. All it would take is 100 billion dollar or 40 dollar per individual. According to top academic economist and director of the Earth Institute at the Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs, who was one of the participating experts, the writing is on the wall that we have difficulty in finding a few billion dollars to keep millions of children alive while bankers should run off with tens of billions of tax money. That’s something we should not let happen. Jeffrey Sachs states that it is only logical to demand that the Wall Street Bankers should give their bonuses back to the government at the end of this year, but … the political power of our banks is so huge that they usually carry their point … Source: De Morgen, Maarten Rabaey, October 24, 2009.

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Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government: “The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true. Source: New York Times, November 22, 2009

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Standard & Poor’s (S&P), a division of McGraw-Hill that publishes Financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds, “has given warning that nearly all of the world's big banks lack sufficient capital to cover trading and investment exposure, risking further downgrades over the next 18 months unless they move swiftly to beef up their defences. (…) Every single bank in Japan, the US, Germany, Spain, and Italy included in S&P's list of 45 global lenders fails the 8pc safety level under the agency's risk-adjusted capital (RAC) ratio. Most fall woefully short.”  Source: The Telegraph, November 24, 2009

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Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor, Vince Cable commenting on recent revelations that RBS and HBOS were lent £61.6 billion in emergency funding at the height of the financial panic in October 2008: "Given the sheer size of the support these two banks were receiving, it is astonishing that this was kept secret for over a year. The Government has treated taxpayers like children while expecting them to foot the bill for these banks. What is particularly concerning is that the Government was pumping billions into HBOS at the exact same time it was convincing Lloyds to take it over. The Chancellor knew he was selling Lloyds a lemon but he did it anyway to save his own skin. The Government only wanted HBOS to be taken over so that it didn't have to fully nationalize another bank. This had nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics.” Source: www.vincentcable.org.uk/news/  Read Also: ‘Bank of England reveals secret £62bn loans used to prop up RBS and HBOS.’

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British City Minister (Financial Services Secretary), Lord Myners attacks ‘tin ears’ of bankers over bonuses: He said banks were reluctant to heed calls for restraint and warned that unless top bankers were prepared to show "a new culture of fairness" there would be calls for more regulatory invention. Directing his remarks at the Goldman Sachs boss, who recently said that bankers did "God's work", Myners said: "He seemed to some to be on a different planet to the rest of humanity, ignoring a year of record losses, of dangers and damage. Blankfein appeared to have lost sight of the impact the crisis had on ordinary people and their extreme annoyance at perceived personal excesses expressed as entitlement by those implicated.” “"Blankfein's reaction was to move on to the offence, present the positive side of what banks can do for economic welfare. Yet the reality is that many people are dismayed by the continuing 'tin ears' of those who seem to operate with a 'heads I win, tails you lose' mentality." (…)"Many banks have earned large profits this year from remarkably benign conditions – conditions created by the interventions by governments across the world, profits that owe very little to the talents and skills of individual traders or investment bankers." (…)"Even in institutions that have taken huge benefits from the taxpayer either directly or under the umbrella of the support provided to the market in funding and guarantees, there is much opposition to restraint in remuneration. I continue to be astonished by the thickness of the skins of some with whom I speak in trading rooms and executive suites.” (…) "Taxpayers feel entitled to have a view on this matter – particularly if they perceive directors are unable to strike the right balance in determining sensible remuneration practices that are calibrated to risk or shareholders who do not appear willing or able to hold directors to account," Myners said. Source: The Guardian, November 25, 2009

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80 years after the crash of 1929

“Is there a new soap bubble in the making?

It looks like it.”

Paul De Grauwe, professor of international economics at the catholic university of Louvain, Belgium, warns of potential for a new financial crash:”During the last months, there are some new indications that speculative euphoria is prevailing again. As a result of the rescue operations elaborated by the central banks, big financial institutions have accumulated massive amounts of liquid assets. They don’t use this cheap money to grant credit to companies or private individuals, but to speculate on the financial markets. Is there a new soap bubble in the making? It looks like it.” De Morgen, October 24, 2009

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Journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs (in Rolling Stone, July 13, 2009):

The Great American Bubble Machine

‘From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again’

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.” (…)

“The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.”

“They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.” (…)

“Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.”

To read the full article: click here

To watch Matt Taibbi talking about The Great American Bubble Machine: click here

Read also:

The Big Takeover (Matt Biatti, March 19, 2009, Rolling Stone): ‘The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution.’

Gore’s Dual Role in Spotlight: Advocate and Investor (The New York Times, November 2, 2009) Mr. Gore: “I believe that the transition to a green economy is good for our economy and good for all of us, and I have invested in it. And if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me.”

According to a new Friends of the Earth Report 'cap and trade' carbon markets have done little to reduce emissions but have been plagued by corruption and inefficiency: "The majority of the trade is carried out not between polluting industries and factories covered by carbon trading schemes, but by banks and investors who profit from speculation on the carbon markets – packaging carbon credits into increasingly complex financial products similar to the 'shadow finance' around sub-prime mortgages which triggered the recent economic crash." ‘The carbon market, mainly based in Europe, was worth $126 billion in 2008 and is predicted to mushroom to $3.1 trillion by 2020 if a global carbon market takes off.’ Source: The Guardian, November 5, 2009 / Link to video

Did High Oil Prices cause the Financial Crash? Article by GIUSEPPE MARCONI, November 18,  2009

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Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs:

“I’m doing ‘God’s work’.

We’re very important. We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose."

From The Sunday Times, November 8, 2009

“Social purpose? Those who have lost their jobs or seen their pay slashed thanks to bankers who flogged dodgy mortgages and dreamt up investments so complex not even they understood them, would gladly tell him where to stick his social purpose. But the problem is, Blankfein is a good advertisement for wealth creation. His own.” (…)

“Number 85 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004, is where the money is. All of it. It’s the site of the best cash-making machine that global capitalism has ever produced, and, some say, a political force more powerful than governments.” (…)

“The public, politicians and the press blame bankers’ reckless trading for the credit crunch and, as the most successful bank still standing, Goldman is their prime target. Here, politicians and commentators compete to denounce Goldman in ever more robust terms — ‘robber barons’, ‘economic vandals’, ‘vulture capitalists’.” (…)

“The list of former Goldman executives who have held key posts in the US administration and vital global institutions in New York and Washington alone is mind-boggling. It includes: the treasury secretary under Bill Clinton (Robert Rubin); the treasury secretary under George Bush (Hank Paulson); the current president and former chairman of the New York Federal Reserve (William Dudley and Stephen Friedman); the chief of staff to the treasury secretary Timothy Geithner (Mark Patterson); the chief of staff under President Bush (Joshua Bolten); the economic adviser to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton (Robert Hormats); the chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (Gary Gensler); the under-secretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs under President Bush (Reuben Jeffery); the past and current heads of the New York Stock Exchange (John Thain and Duncan Niederauer); the chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division (Adam Storch). Moreover, Goldman’s new top lobbyist in Washington, Michael Paese, used to work for Barney Frank, the congressman who chairs the House Financial Services Committee.” (…)

As in the US, the Goldman Sachs bank is closely linked to the British government as well. “Its former chief economist and partner, Gavyn Davies, is married to Gordon Brown’s special adviser Sue Nye. Under Tony Blair, Davies became chairman of the BBC. His successor as chief economist at Goldman, the late David Walton, was handed a seat on the Bank of England’s interest-rate setting Monetary Policy Committee. Paul Deighton, who is running the London Olympic Games organising committee, used to be Goldman’s chief operating officer. Goldman is a key banking adviser to the government.”

Read the full article at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk

November 17, 2009: Lloyd Blankfein has apologised for the Wall Street titan's role in helping to create the financial crisis.

After being ridiculed for saying he was doing God's work, and having seen his company labelled as a bloodsucking vampire squid, Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, delivered a mea culpa to a conference in New York on November 17.

"We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret," Blankfein said. "We apologise." Source: The Guardian, November 18, 2009

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From Jean-François Noubel’s

The Vow of Wealth

“I leave the current monetary system. I will not acquire or sell anything with  conventional money anymore.

I leave every asset that I acquired in the past via this system. I will only keep what was offered to me as a gift.

I commit to use free currencies that liberate and catalyze wealth everywhere, in any community, for every being, in a universal manner.

Whatever I need to exchange with my fellow brothers and sisters will be done by means of these free currencies.”

http://noubel.com/vow/

Robert Zoellick, World Bank President, September 2009

source: www.bloomberg.com / Tne New York Post, Sep. 28, 09

Sarkozy: 'A great revolution is waiting for us ...'

Some days before the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked world leaders to 'join a ''revolution'' in the measurement of economic progress by dropping their obsession with gross domestic product to account for factors such as health-care availability and leisure time.' (…)

''A great revolution is waiting for us,'' Sarkozy said. ''For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos.''

''The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so.'' (…)

‘Governments' addiction to inflating the GDP of their economies has endangered the planet by encouraging risky behavior and as overconsumption triggers environmental concerns,’ Sarkozy said.

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“Left and Right mean nothing. The only thing that counts is: Are you working for Wall Street or are you trying to defend the people against the financiers.”

Author, journalist and lecturer Webster Tarpley in ‘The Obama Deception’

“The banks - hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. They frankly own the place.” 

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Democratic Party Whip, April 30, 2009 - Source

‘Wall Street is bankrupt. Instead of trying to save it, we can build a new economy that puts money and business in the service of people and the planet—not the other way around.’

David Korten  www.yesmagazine.org

‘Our leaders will only be empowered to put through the necessary changes in the present money system against the opposition of powerful defenders of the status quo, if we compel our leaders to make the changes.’

James Robertson

Link to James Robertson's Newsletter June 2009.

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Ellen Brown on Alternet: “California Doesn't Need to Borrow Billions from Washington - It Can Create Its Own Money.” An excerpt:

“Money in a government-owned bank could give us the best of both worlds. We could have all the credit-generating advantages of private banks, without the baggage cluttering up the books of the Wall Street giants, including bad derivatives bets, unmarketable collateralized debt obligations, mark to market accounting issues, oversized CEO salaries and bonuses, and shareholders expecting a sizeable cut of the profits. A state could deposit its vast revenues in its own state-owned bank and proceed to fan them into eight to 10 times their face value in loans. Not only would it have its own credit machine, but it would control the loan terms. The state could lend at ½% interest to itself and to municipal governments, rolling the loans over as needed until the revenues had been generated to pay them off. According to Professor Margrit Kennedy in her 1995 book Interest and Inflation-free Money, interest composes, on average, fully half the cost of every public project. Cutting costs by 50% could make currently-unsustainable projects such as low-cost housing, alternative energy development, and infrastructure construction not only sustainable but actually profitable for the government.

If all this seems too radical and unprecedented to venture into, consider that one state has had its own bank for 90 years; and it has not only escaped the credit crunch but is doing remarkably well...

The Innovative Bank of North Dakota

Only three of 50 states are now solvent, meaning they have the revenues to meet their state budgets; and one of them is North Dakota. It is an unlikely candidate for the distinction. It is a sparsely populated state of fewer than 700,000 people, largely located in isolated farming communities afflicted with cold weather. Yet since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and wages have grown 34%. The state not only has no funding issues, but this year it actually has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion, the largest it has ever had.”

Link to full text: click here

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In August 2009 the IMF announced that the cost of mopping up the mess of two years global financial crisis has come to $11.9 trillion, enough to finance a $2965 handout for every man, woman and child on the planet. Source: The Telegraph, August 08, 2009

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How banks make money: “Yes, the government prints our paper money. But that’s only a small fraction of the money in use. Most of the money in national economies is created when banks write it into their customers’ accounts out of thin air as bank loans.” Doug Pibel in YES! Magazine. Source

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James Robertson in YES! Magazine: “Supplying money should be a public service, not a cash cow for banks.” Source

James Robertson Newsletter September 2009: click here

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According to a new report by the US census bureau, “the world is about to cross a demographic landmark of huge social and economic importance, with the proportion of the global population 65 and over set to outnumber children under five for the first time.”

The US census bureau “highlights a huge shift towards not just an ageing but an old population, with formidable consequences for rich and poor nations alike. The transformation carries with it challenges for families and policymakers, ranging from how to care forolder people living alone to how to pay for unprecedented numbers of pensioners – more than 1 billion of them by 2040. The report, An Ageing World: 2008, shows that within 10 years older people will outnumber children for the first time. It forecasts that over the next 30 years the number of over-65s is expected to almost double, from 506 million in 2008 to 1.3 billion – a leap from 7% of the world's population to 14%. Already, the number of people in the world 65 and over is increasing at an average of 870,000 each month.” Source: The Guardian, July 20, 2009

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On July 30, 2009 The New York Times wrote about big banks paying billions in bonuses amid Wall Street crisis: “Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general. (…) Mr. Cuomo, who for months has criticized the companies over pay, said the bonuses were particularly galling because the banks survived the crisis with the government’s support. “If the bank lost money, where do you get the money to pay the bonus?” he said.  '

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‘Banks profiteering on mortgages with record gap between borrowing and lending rate’: “The difference between the interest rate that banks charge and the rate at which they borrow is the biggest since the Bank of England started collecting data 15 years ago. The figures demonstrate that, two years after the credit crunch began, consumers are being hit harder than ever, despite the Bank cutting interest rates to an all-time low of 0.5 per cent.” Source: The Telegraph August 11, 2009

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A report written by the 15 years old British student Matthew Robson about how teenagers consume media, shook the media-experts and investors in the City, London’s financial heart. The most shocking finding was the statement that teenagers avoid to a maximum services that cost money. Source

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In his new book, THE END OF MONEY and the FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION, (Chelsea Green, Vermont, 2009, paperback, 268 pp.) Thomas Greco ‘provides specific design proposals and exchange-system architectures for local, regional, national, and global financial systems.’ Greco’s book also offers a devastating criticism of the present "monopolistic control over credit, exercised through a banking cartel armed with government-granted privilege" which "allows wealth to be extracted from producer clients and, despite the trappings of democracy, the control of governments to be maintained in the hands of a few. Credit is allocated on a biased basis to favoured clients, including central governments, which distorts both the system of economic rewards and the exercise of political power".

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At the opening of a three-day U.N. financial summit in New York in June 2009 Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, said, "The current crisis cannot be an excuse to abandon pledges. Here is an example, by some estimates annual aid to Africa is at least 20 billion dollars below the promises made in Gleneagles in 2005. Surely, if the world can mobilize more than 18 trillion dollars to keep the financial sector afloat, it can find more than 18 billion dollars to keep commitments to Africa." Source: world.globaltimes.cn

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“The scale of the commitments made by European countries for the bailout of the banking system is also without precedent, representing potentially a multiple of their annual GDP. To give an idea of what we are dealing with, here is the ratio of the assets of the three largest banks in each country that have now been guaranteed by their respective governments. This ratio represent 130% of annual GDP for Germany; 142% of annual GDP for Italy; 147% of GDP for Portugal; 218% for Spain; 257% for France; 253% for Ireland; 317% for the UK; 409% for the Netherlands (2 largest banks); 528% for Belgium-Luxemburg; 773% for Switzerland (2 largest banks); and 1,079% of the GDP for Iceland (the first country that went officially bankrupt). (1) In short, governments, the world over, have just bled themselves dry to an unprecedented extent, to the point that the Financial Times even wonders whether the worldwide panic in October 2008 “is not about faith in the banks, but faith in the governments to save them.” (2) This begs the question: What happens when the costs for rescuing the bank system become unbearable? Governments learned in the 1930s that they can’t afford to let the banking system go under, as this brings down the entire economic system. What some may learn in our times is that they can’t afford to save the banking system.”

(1) All percentages computed from data from the map in the Financial Times, September 30, 2008 page 3

(2) Gillian Tett “Leaders at wits’ end as markets thrown one tantrum after another” Financial Times October 11/12, 2008. pg 1.

Source: Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis, Bernard Lietaer, Robert Ulanowicz and Sally Goerner

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Crisis in the credit system, a ground-breaking online film made by Melanie Gilligan

Melanie Gilligan explains:  "Four years ago, I saw how the global debt-fuelled bubble was unsustainable. I started thinking about the impact a crash would have - not only for those in finance but for the rest of us. Who would be left to pick up the tab? At that point, I wrote a song with my band Petit Mal called Crisis in the Credit System. I started work on a film of the same name a year ago, with the song as soundtrack."

View all four episodes at http://www.crisisinthecreditsystem.org.uk

Crisis in the Credit System - the song by Petit Mal, AKA Ben Seymour and Melanie Gilligan, fuses '80s synth pop and '00s electronica to create a haunting anthem for capitalism's latest crash.
Visit   http://www.myspace.com/petitmalpetitmal   Single out now on Difficult Fun Records.
source: PR Newswire – Press Release, Crisis in the Credit System, 10.22.08