Friday, May 16, 2008

BAD MONEY With oil prices climbing, disaster abroad and economic despair at home... now is the time for you to enroll in Blackwater Business School. UN: "According to WESP 2008, the world economy is facing serious challenges in sustaining the strong pace of economic growth seen over the past few years. While the baseline forecast is for world economic growth to moderate somewhat in 2008, the risks associated with the bursting of the housing bubble in the United States, the related unfolding credit crisis, the decline of the dollar, large global imbalances and high oil prices are all pointing to the downside. The report draws some lessons from the global financial turmoil of 2007, which was triggered by the meltdown of sub-prime mortgages in the United States, and points out that the various measures adopted by central banks of the major economies did not address the root causes of the turmoil: the huge global imbalances. In an alternative scenario, which takes into account the possibility of a sharper-than-expected decline in house prices in the United States and a hard landing of the US dollar, the United States economy would fall into a recession, while global growth would be significantly lower than the baseline. In addition to trends in international trade and capital flows, WESP 2008 also covers the latest progress and policy issues related to international trade negotiations and reform of the international financial system." Kevin Phillips in Bad Money: "The most worrisome thing about the vulnerability of the U.S. economy circa 2008 is the extent of official understatement and misstatement - the preference for minimizing how many problems there are and how interconnected they are. Whether the U.S. government and the Republican and Democratic parties can remedy the debt- and oil-related transformations of the last two or three decades is dubious enough. Far more worrisome is the possibility that neither Washington nor Wall Street is willing to confront the deeper problem - the ascendancy of finance in national policymaking (as well as in the gross domestic product), and the complicity of politicians who really don't want to talk about it. Looking back a decade, we can now understand that a perverse incarnation of millennial utopianism crested in a form that critics have since labeled 'market triumphalism' - the belief that history was 'ending' because near perfection had been achieved through the enthronement of English-speaking democratic capitalism. Smugness paraded across a bipartisan spectrum." The only part of our economy that is booming is the war industry, but it is ruining all other sectors. The war industry and related oil-industry are the leeches that suck the blood out of our economy. 11:14:47 AM

© Copyright 2008.