All is well: the major stock markets are on the rise; banks are explaining that public confidence is up again; the growth of business capital is going better than expected; enormous recovery plans have been put into place; significant measures have been announced at the G20 to ensure a revival of global growth in 2010 and better transparence in some tax havens, better control over rating agencies and a significant increase in the IMF’s resources. Unfortunately, starting the day after the G20, we will come to understand that no accounts have truly been settled:
• Stock market growth is only contingent on the April 2nd instituting of a decision made several months ago which allows assets to be valued at levels higher than the in markets. And share prices which “buy low and sell high” should start to lower again.
• The primary sources of fiscal fraud and financial depravity, that is the City and the United States, will remain unharmed: no one at the G20 will bring up questioning the system of English trust or fiscal legislation in Delaware or Nevada. Nor that of Macao or Hong Kong.
• Credit default-swaps, which still make up at least $60 trillion, are increasingly used not as insurance policies, but to speculate on business bankruptcies and even in order to provoke them by enormous leveraging, all with the blessing of the American government which is providing a bad example with the outrageous Geithner plan – a plan that will allow certain American funds to make a fortune and take over the best so-called “toxic” bank assets, with taxpayer money.
• The primary banks (who are maintaining the right to securitize their loans 100% while this is the selfsame cause of the subprime problem since it allows them to make risk-free loans) still do not possess any capital; and those of insurance companies are highly threatened; numerous industrial businesses do not have any customers and the fall of every government’s fiscal revenue will make the promises made in 2009 untenable in 2010.
• The opposition is high between the Americans (who want to increase consumption, even at the price of inflation), the Chinese (who want to boost investment and protect their holdings), the Europeans (who want to regulate global capitalism), and the poorest countries, who are again the main victims.
Why is this so? Because, instead of reconvening the IMF International Monetary and Financial Committee, composed of 24 members, a legitimate organism for determining well-balanced reform, we have chosen to reconvene a powerless committee, the G20, because its presidency had been British (while that of the IMFC had been Egyptian) and thus the Anglo-Saxon world could protect its privilege while waiting for the natural return of worldwide growth.
This strategy could work: if the Americans manage, by massive big business failures, to reduce their rate of indebtedness, and with a strong economic boost to restart their economy; if the Chinese continue to fund Anglo-Saxon deficits; if a rise in oil prices up to $80 a barrel restarts the economies of producing countries; and if technological progress does the rest.
But if all these conditions are not brought to bear, the crisis will deepen and it will no longer be possible to resolve it without the nationalization of the principal American banks, limitations on leveraging and securitization, a ban on buying CDS without possessing the underlying requirements, and control of Anglo-Saxon tax havens. That is, without a radical questioning of the power of those organizing the comedy of London.