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Economic Crisis And Disintegration Of The American Empire

January 14th, 2009 Comments off
What we of this generation are witnessing is one of those rare epochal events that occur perhaps once in a millenium: the disintegration of an empire. The Global Economic Crisis will claim as its ultimate casualty the American Empire. How ironic that the neoconservative clique that advocated “American exceptionalism” based on wars of imperial expediency without end, financed by borrowing from foreign creditors, have ended up being the eventual gravediggers of the United States as the hyper-power of the planet.

For over a year, while the U.S. economy was mired in recession and exporting its economic disasters globally, the senior political and business leaders of the American establishment proclaimed to the American people that all was well, that the fundamentals of the economy were “strong,” while they threw taxpayers money at corporations and financial institutions “too big to fail” in a vain and desperate attempt to keep the floodtide of financial failure from inundating the whole economy. The collapse of Lehman Brothers exposed the fragility and rot for all to see and now the entire world is mired in a Global Economic Crisis that more and more economists are labeling as a second Great Depression.

While no one can predict with exactitude what the ultimate outcome will be after the world’s economies have completed their march through Calvary, it is likely that the denouement of this economic and financial apocalypse will see the end of American power as the hegemony-driven master of the planet.

America’s superiority was based on its military infrastructure, and the capability to project power thousands of miles from its shores, inflicting “shock and awe” on any foreign entity that inspired its ire. However, that military industrial complex required a massively productive and successful economy to maintain itself. During the last eight years, while America replaced its ability to create goods that the world needed with complex financial instruments and securitized mortgages as its primary export product, it relied on foreign creditors to subsidize the American military establishment and the cost of the foreign wars it was engaged in. That bubble is now in the process of bursting with tectonic force.

The U.S. government managed to double its national debt during the last 8 years, even before the onset of the Global Economic Crisis. Since then, the government has borrowed $700 billion for the TARP Wall Street Bailout, and is projecting a budget deficit of over one trillion dollars in 2009. That is before the Obama administration passes its own stimulus package after it takes office, possibly boosting the deficit to the stratospheric level of over two trillion dollars! With foreign countries America relies on to finance its deficit now about to embark on their own massive stimulus spending based on deficits, that source of credit will either dry up or become costly beyond tolerance. A few years more of multi-trillion dollar deficits and the single largest item in the federal budget will be the servicing of the national debt. When that happens, it will be fiscally impossible for the United States to maintain its current military outlay, which equals if not exceeds the rest of the world combined.

At present the U.S. pours roughly a trillion dollars into its military industrial complex. What must be understood about the U.S. defense budget is the depth of its deceptive architecture. While the official Pentagon budget is in the range of $600 billion, it excludes other expenditures scattered throughout the line items of the federal budget that properly belong under the category of military allocations. For example, the official defense budget excludes nearly two hundred billion dollars of unfunded (meaning borrowed) spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It excludes military benefits for veterans, intelligence gathering and other national security activity. Most deceptively excluded is most spending on nuclear weapons, measured in the tens of billions of dollars, which is clearly a military allocation, but is budgeted under the Department of Energy.

The smoke and mirrors is about to be shattered, as the Global Economic Crisis gathers momentum. The U.S. will lose its capacity to finance its military establishment, unless it replicates the example of the once-mighty Soviet Union, which placed its military first and civilian economy last, ultimately leading to the implosion of both.

We are truly witnessing a global economic trauma that will also radically reorder the geopolitical configuration of our planet. What is uncertain is if America will emerge as a constitutional, democratic republic at peace with the world, or as a desperate actor that will grasp at retaining its once invincible economic and military power no matter the cost to its future generations.

 

 

 

 

National Insolvency As Policy Response To Economic Crisis?

January 11th, 2009 Comments off

A global panic by policy makers has been in overdrive since the initial financial crisis brought the world’s credit markets to the brink of total meltdown. Staggering sums of money that boggle the human imagination are being heaved at the global crisis. With a fully-fledged global economic crisis now underway, the spigot of debt-driven cash is flowing out of governments like Niagara Falls. The most conspicuous example is the Obama stimulus package, now in preparation for rapid passage once the 44th U.S. President is sworn in. The planned American stimulus package alone may top one trillion dollars over two years. This comes on top of the $700 billion TARP program of Hank Paulson infamy, now conceded by many economists to have been a poorly conceived boondoggle.

The global public square is being told that this massive amount of money must be spent, or the world economy will fall into even worse distress. Conveniently being veiled is the inconvenient fact that these monstrously large expenditures must be made with borrowed money, as many nations, especially the United States, have treasuries that have long been laid bare by accumulated deficit spending.

Even economists who are convinced that huge amounts of deficit spending must be tolerated to salvage the global economy are aware that the “medicine” may be the harbinger of its own financial disease. Consider what Nouriel Roubini, the “prophet of doom,” told BusinessWeek in a recent interview about the U.S. stimulus spending:

“…the cost of issuing a huge amount of public debt will be trillion-dollar budget deficits this year and next, which eventually is going to have a crowding-out effect on private demand. So either we issue a huge amount of public debt to finance it, and that’s going to push up interest rates, or we print a lot of money that eventually is going to be inflationary and again damaging to the economy. We have no choice but to have an aggressive policy response, but it’s not a free lunch.”

Not a free lunch, states Roubini, a reality that policymakers are hiding from their publics. These, the very same mediocre political leaders who facilitated the global economic crisis, surrendering to the “logic” of the unregulated market place. What does “no free lunch” mean?

The United States is currently broke, from a fiscal standpoint. The trillions of dollars in excess expenditures being planned by the policy makers will inevitably require massive borrowing, at a time when foreign countries whose credit markets the American authorities depend on will be doing their own stimulus deficit spending. The only way the U.S. will be able to attract foreign credit in this context is through much higher interest rates. This will kill private borrowing, stifling investment and ultimately defeating the purpose of the stimulus spending. The other alternative is to simply print the money, and produce the hyper-inflationary hell that now exists in Zimbabwe.

Virtually every serious economist agrees that massive deficit spending in the United States by both the public and private sector was the driver of the global economic crisis. Strange that the identical prescription that led to this disaster is now being advertised as the cure.

Obama Speech Warns of Economic Armageddon

January 9th, 2009 Comments off

Less than two weeks before his inauguration as America’s 44th President, Barack Obama delivered a major speech on the U.S. economy. The essence of his message is that Congress must quickly pass an economic stimulus package with a vast price tag, possibly in the range of a trillion dollars, or face economic Armageddon. With an apocalyptic tone, President-elect Obama delivered a sobering message. Undoubtedly, the economic crisis is even more dire than described in Obama’s speech.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors during the Clinton administration, has joined the chorus of economic specialists warning that the global economy is going down the proverbial sink-hole, with the U.S. economy serving as the financial locomotive of this global train wreck. Among the destructive economic and financial forces he has recently written and commented on is the whole phenomena of de-leveraging.

According to Stiglitz, “America’s economy had been supercharged by excessive leveraging; now comes the painful process of de-leveraging. Excessive leveraging, combined with bad lending and risky derivatives, has caused credit markets to freeze. After all, when banks don’t know their own balance sheets, they aren’t about to trust others.”

Despite massive efforts by the Fed in the U.S. and central banks across the globe to unfreeze credit markets, the financial arteries of the world remain clogged. Though some shrinkage in the Libor rates and Ted Spread has occurred, the overwhelming degree of counter-party risk has eroded the element of trust to such an extent, monetary policy by central bankers cannot overrule human sentiment. The recent Madoff Ponzi scheme that may have bilked investors out of $50 billion has had far greater impact in defining the state of trust in the marketplace than near-zero interest rates being offered by central bankers.

The credit crunch may impact the massive economic stimulus package being proffered by Obama as the one great hope of salvaging the U.S. and global economy. To finance the massive amount of spending being planned by the incoming Obama administration, upwards of a trillion dollars of additional deficit funding will have to be borrowed, primarily from foreign creditors such as China. However, with China now requiring massive funding for its own economic stimulus spending, that nation and other foreign creditors may not be as readily available for financing U.S. government debt spending. Counter-party risk exists not only among private investors and institutions; foreign countries and sovereign wealth funds may prove as tight with their willingness to loan money, especially to an American government that is projecting trillion dollar plus deficits for years to come.

If the U.S. is unable to finance its massive deficit spending plans, what then? Perhaps economic Armageddon does loom in out future, as the Global Economic Crisis widens its vortex of destruction and doom.

Jobs Crisis Threatens World Peace

January 7th, 2009 Comments off

What began initially as the Global Financial Crisis has now become the Global Economic Crisis. The global demand destruction that is raging is now leading to a massive jobs crisis that will ravage the societies of virtually every nation on the planet. Governments throughout the world will attempt to address the jobs crisis in the same manner they have been responding to the financial and economic crisis: they will beg, borrow and print money measured in the trillions of dollars to throw at the problem. Their results in combating monstrous levels of unemployment will likely be as ineffectual as our political masters and their “experts” have been in attempting to ameliorate every other aspect of the Global Economic Crisis.

Later this week, updated unemployment statistics for the United States will be released. President-elect Barack Obama has already warned that they will be “sobering,” which likely means he already knows how bad they are. However, the U.S. government deliberately understates the true unemployment rate when they release official numbers. Among the statistical gymnastics utilized by the U.S. Labor Department is the expediency of excluding discouraged jobless who have given up hope of finding employment; they simply do not exist when the U.S. government counts its number of unemployed workers. When this component of the unemployed is counted, the true jobless rate in the United States is in excess of 12%, about half the peak rate experienced during the Great Depression. No wonder Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has now joined the list of those proclaiming that the U.S. is now in an economic depression.

The consumer demand of the U.S., driven by debt, is now collapsing with the growing jobs crisis. This is leading to demand destruction for those export goods developing economies around the world depend on to employ their teeming masses. During the course of the year the jobs crisis will clearly be a global phenomena, as are all the other factors that characterize the ongoing Global Economic Crisis. While the ultimate result is unclear, history tells us that massive unemployment on a global scale rips asunder social cohesion, facilitates political extremism and despotism, and exacerbates international tensions. The jobs crisis may ultimately contribute to a geopolitical crisis that threatens the very peace of our planet.

 

Global Financial Meltdown:Perspective Of A Leading African Economist

January 6th, 2009 Comments off

Dr.Obadiah Mailafia is a distinguished African economist. Currently he is the Chairman of the Center for Policy and Economic Research (CEPER), in Abuja, Nigeria. Dr. Mailafia has had a distinguished career in government, academia and international development. He has been a university academic, international banker and a senior government official. He was until recently Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a Senior Advisor to the President of Nigeria (with rank of Minister of State). He was also for several years an official of the African Development Bank Group. He is by training an economist and policy scientist, with research interests in monetary economics, international finance, and strategic management and development administration. On December 16th, 2008. Dr. Mailafia delivered a speech on the current Global Economic Crisis for the Kaduna Chamber of Commerce in Nigeria. Though his talk dealt in part with the impact of the global meltdown on the Nigerian economy, Dr. Mailafia’s presentation provides an exceptionally cogent and lucid analysis of the ongoing global financial and economic turmoil. Below is an excerpt from the speech on the Global Economic Crisis, which Dr. Mailafia graciously provided permission for WWW.Global EconomicCrisis.com to publish on our blog.

 

 

Presentation on the Global Economic Crisis by Dr.Obadiah Mailafia:

 

 

From first principles, we must not forget that financial booms and busts are not a new phenomenon. What is disquieting about the current meltdown is that it is in the nature of a seismic tremor of earth-shaking proportions.

Within a few moths, some of the biggest financial giants have gone belly-up, while several more are in serious trouble. How indeed are the mighty fallen! Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merill Lynch. The automobile giants are virtually on their deathbeds while a good number of industrials are surviving only by the skin of their teeth. A rather prosperous central European nation, Iceland, has virtually sued for bankruptcy, resorting to an IMF standby arrangement – the first since the British ‘humiliation’ of 1967.

The contagion has spread to Europe, Japan, Asia, Africa and Latin America. An estimated US$1.7 trillion in bailout funds has already been committed by OECD countries, but we are yet to see the end of the tunnel, not to talk of any light in it. According to a recent report, the world stands in need of a staggering US$4 trillion to fully resolve this crisis.

Any explanation of the current financial turbulence must begin with the housing bubble fuelled by low interest rates, increased global liquidity and predatory lending by the financial giants. According to some estimates, the annual issuance of US sub-prime mortgage backed securities increased from a mere $56 billion in 2000 to a massive $508 billion in 2005, comprising something of the order of 20 percent of total US mortgages. By 2006, the housing bubble was beginning to unravel, as higher interest rates and rising oil and food prices – and a generalized decline in consumer confidence – were starting to take their toll.

For Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Clinton, greed has to be the main explanatory variable. For billionaire investor George Soros, on the other hand, the main villain is former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan whose monetary policies allegedly encouraged speculative exuberance even as interest rates were at an all-time low and asset prices were spiraling out of control. Predictably, President-elect Barack Obama puts most of the blame on the misguided policies of the Bush administration, describing the situation as “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression”. To all intents and purposes, the big ratings agencies must also bear some of the blame for failing to be more rigorous in their risk assessments. There  Acare yet others who blame the situation on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act 1933 which had made a clear demarcation between general commercial banking on the one hand, and investment banking activities, on the other. The absence of such a demarcation was underlined as one of the factors accounting for the speculative exuberance that led to the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Linked to this is the dwindling capacity of regulatory authorities. The reality is that the world of high finance has become so complex in our digital age, with capital travelling at the speed of light and several instruments engineered using the arcane language of quantum physics. The hedge funds, which control over a US$1 trillion in assets, are not subject to many of the traditional regulatory regimes. Inevitably, such power without responsibility is bound, sooner or later, to lead to anarchy or even worse.

Another factor that may not be so apparent is what I would term “the crisis of American hegemony”. It is an open secret that America is today the world’s number one debtor-nation. One of the greatest achievements of the Clinton Presidency was to have eliminated the budget deficit. When the Republicans took over, the notion of balanced budgets was thrown out of the window. It was further aggravated by military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost an astonishing US$1 billion daily in taxpayers’ money. And we all know that those adventures have more to do with advancing the interests of oil sharks and the military-industrial complex than about fighting terrorism or spreading the ideals of democratic government.

A hypothesis made famous by the late Harvard economist Charles Kindleberger and others posits that a stable international monetary is possible only where there is a world power able and willing to bear the burdens of responsibility for the preservation of the prevailing system. Such a leader must also be prepared to act as a lender of last resort. Britain played this role in the nineteenth century. America was to play this role for much of the twentieth century. For such theorists, the decline of a ‘hegemon’ is often reflected in international financial disequilibrium, a situation which perhaps offers part of the explanation for the current difficulties.

For America, it will not be the end of the world, but it certainly signals the end of en era. In over-extending herself beyond her means and her material capabilities, America has ended up alienating her allies, pursuing a unilateralist course that its wisest statesmen would never have dared to contemplate. In so doing, George W. Bush and his neoconservative brethren have exhausted the moral capital that the American Republic has accumulated for the better part of a century. More than at any time in her illustrious history, America stands isolated and bereft of moral authority…

I have to confess that I am not one of those who are easily taken in by the report attributed to Merrill Lynch, which declares our economy to be the safest in the world. As far as I know, our alleged safety derives from the paradox of marginality – to the simple fact that we are not deeply hooked into the global digital economy. It is foolhardy to behave like the proverbial ostrich when Rome is on fire and when the embers of financial contagion have been unleashed everywhere.

Madam President, talking about the much-vaunted Vision 2020, I am constrained to note that we are yet to see a clear economic strategy around which to anchor rational expectations and mobilize the vast resources and energies of our people. Our leaders have all but forgotten the onerous task of nation building. The simple truth is that we are not yet a nation and we are far from having that spiritual bond which the British political philosopher Sir Ernest Baker regarded as the most critical factor in the building of a united and prosperous democracy.

Clearly, we have enormous work to do and several steep mountains to climb. At the global level, we would need to work with others to hammer out a brave new world in which the demands of equity harmonize with the imperatives of international solidarity.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, for us in this benighted continent, the current upheaval provides an opportunity to re-launch the African Century and to consolidate the foundations of democracy that would enhance peaceful and just development for our long-suffering people. After a millennium of servitude, our continent may, at last, be coming to its own. No nation is better placed, in my view, than ours to champion this continental rejuvenation, whose foundations must be built on sound economic and public management. But I daresay that we will not rise to the occasion until we have transformed our national mindset, reformed the way we do business and changed the structure of our politics and the very spirit of our constitution, leadership and nationhood.

U.S. Economy Now In Depression, Claims The Economist

January 4th, 2009 Comments off
The Economist, one of the leading financial magazines in the world and a leading voice for free enterprise economics, presented a bombshell in its most recent edition: the economy of the United States is in the throes of a depression rather than recession. As many economists who concede that the global economic crisis has inflicted the worst financial turmoil in the U.S. since the Great Depression still refuse to use the “D” word, this is a major turning point in public perceptions of the economic disaster that is now unfolding.

In formulating its dire assessment, The Economist based its conclusion on an analysis of past depressions. The Economist stated that the U.S. economy is manifesting the characteristics of a depression, taking into account the causes of the current economic crisis.

According to The Economist, the primary distinction between a recession and an economic depression is not linked to the decline in growth nor its duration, which are factors encountered in an economic recession. The magazine indicated that a depression is triggered by a bursting of the asset and credit bubble, a contraction in credit, and a decline in general price levels, all the indicators being experienced in the current Global Economic Crisis, especially in the United States.

The U.S GDP figures for the fourth quarter of 2008 declined by an estimated six- percent. Though less severe than during the Great Depression of the 1930s, The Economist maintains that the decline in American GDP is more closely aligned to an economic depression, given that it was facilitated by the bursting of the largest asset and credit bubbles in financial history. The findings by The Economist add substance to the growing consensus that the Global Economic Crisis will be a worldwide catastrophe of monumental proportions.