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Headlines : CorporationsVolcker to head Obama economy team
Recall please the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, when prices of oil went up 140%, and the Saudi’s demanded payment in greenbacks, and all those greenbacks went into the Federal Reserve and out again to low interest loans to third world countries, with a lot of help from the NSA’s economic hitmen, and then some bozo came along and raised the interest rates on everything — to create the infamous third world debt crisis that immediately preceded all those “free trade” agreements that created all that slave labor and subsequently motivated the corporations to offshore the bulk of US jobs?
That bozo was Volcker.
From A Century of War (Chapter 11, LOL, “Imposing the New World Order”):
In the United States, Volcker’s monetary shock policy [drove] U.S. interest rates up to an astonishing 20 per cent level for select interest rates. The economics of this interest rate austerity were soon obvious to all. Interest rates of 20 per cent, or even 17 per cent, meant that any normal investment requiring more than four or five years to complete was simply not profitable. Interest charges on the construction alone prohibited this.
Volcker’s shock medicine phased out all legal ceilings on interest rates which the banks could charge customers under what the Federal Reserve called ‘Regulation Q’ as well as repealing all state laws which had set interest rate limits, the so-called anti-usury laws.
The sky was the interest rate limit under the religious dogma of the new Anglo-American monetarism; money was to king, and the world, or at least, the payer of usurious interest rates to the banks of London and New York, its dutiful servant.
Long-term government- funded infrastructure and capital investment, such as railroad, highway, bridge, sewer and electricity plant construction, was devastated.
It would be no exaggeration to say that there would not have been a Third World debt crisis during the 1980s had it not been for Paul Volcker’s radical monetary shock policies.
END OF QUOTE
“Fresh thinking and bold new ideas”? I don’t THINK so.
[Posted By microdot]Republished from Al Jazeera
Barack Obama, the US president-elect, has named Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, as the head of his new economic recovery advisory board, aimed at stabilising troubled financial markets and averting a US recession.
Obama introduced the members of the board, comprised of experts outside of the US government, at a news conference in Chicago on Wednesday.
Obama praised Volcker, who has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, as someone who “pulls no punches”.
He also said the panel would bring “fresh thinking and bold new ideas from the leading minds across America”.
Posted by microdot
What?
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Posted by microdot on Wednesday, November 19th 2008
oh my God. it’s amazing how fast i am losing hope.
YES WE CAN YES WE CAN
Volcker is 81.
See also Who is Paul Volcker?
Volcker’s record from 1979 to 1987 suggests what this “fresh perspective” will consist of. Unemployment in the United States reached 11.3 percent in 1982, double the level of 1975. The average wage of young workers fell 30 percent by 1987. Infant mortality, family violence, drug addiction and other concomitants of economic hardship soared.
But the wealthiest 1 percent of the population saw a staggering 50 percent increase in their wealth during that period.
END OF QUOTE — so that’s what Obama means when he says “fresh” . . .
8 years fifty percent growth is not excessive everyone is good be cool
but i do think the V, the legend, is no doubt an unpleasant fellow by the fellows he keeps.
smug bunch gang can not work with those outside, i think they are desperate
desperate to steal and control in the name of our greater good
the “growth” as you say, came the last time from off-shoring US jobs — while people still had savings with which to still shop. It was a long slow process of off-shoring. And then, of course, they sucked up profits by virtue of converting all those third world economies to export economies and saddling them with exorbitant loan payments and Structural Adjustment Programs.
But it looks like the only people they’ve managed to foist loans on this time around are Ukraine and Pakistan.
Did I get that right? Did Iceland pop for an IMF special?
And the US is really overwhelmingly unemployed. And defaulting on their mortgages. It really ain’t the same this time around.
Of course, this time around, their profit model is better known as The War on Terror. So we know what they’re going to sell. They know what they’re going to “sell” . . . to places like India and Pakistan — hopefully Europe will put the brakes on the Ukraine / Georgia project — but, actually, we don’t know who is going to pay.
It’s actually pretty amazing what they’re thinking the US taxpayer can still afford.
someone even said if they bail out the 3 us auto giants they should be turned into pure war machine companies
There HAVE been good arguments for bailing out the 3 us auto giants/war machines, but it makes more sense to re-engineer the jobs. Obviously those cars have been an important part of the feudal laundromat.
They form the major reason the United States and Europe have used to go to war. Those SUVs are less efficient than cars of the 1970s — unless you are Big Oil — in which case what they represent is a fucking revolution in cash flow.
But the wars themselves, remember, are just laundromats. That’s the Feudal State’s Core Business Model. The cost of war. They’re not spending it on armor for the kids. It’s all going to offshore bank accounts to fund more war and the emerging global police state.
And everytime they flush the “cash” through the system — they inflate it, along with their egos.
Here we go :
The IMF agreed this month to $41.8 billion in loans, approving $16.4 billion for Ukraine, $15.7 billion for Hungary, $2.1 billion for Iceland and $7.6 billion for Pakistan. Financing is in the works for Serbia, Turkey, Belarus and Latvia, turning eastern Europe into a regional ward of the IMF the way Southeast Asia was a decade ago.
end of quote
whateverthefuck is Belarus thinking? Alexander! Volcker! FN Volcker!!!!!
Can’t say I’m particularly surprised about Mr. EU-or-Bust in Serbia.
Meanwhile, Japan has a deficit of an estimated $6.3 trillion and but they’ve decided to be generous and “give” the IMF $300 billion to lend out to emerging economies willing to take the bait.
Nothing wrong with that picture, oh no no no no.