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Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare over Future of Global Bank Power

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Junkdrawer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-08-08 07:37 PM
Original message
Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare over Future of Global Bank Power
Interesting read....

By F. William Engdahl, 8 October 2008

What is clear from the behavior of European financial markets over the past two weeks is that the dramatic stories of financial meltdown and panic are deliberately being used by certain influential factions in and outside the EU to shape the future face of global banking in the wake of the US sub-prime and Asset-Backed Security (ABS) debacle. The most interesting development in recent days has been the unified and strong position of the German Chancellor, Finance Minister, Bundesbank and coalition Government, all opposing an American-style EU Superfund bank bailout.

Stock market falls of 7 to 10% a day make for dramatic news headlines and serve to foster a broad sense of unease bordering on panic among ordinary citizens. The events of the last two weeks among EU banks since the dramatic state rescues of Hypo Real Estate, Dexia and Fortis banks, and the announcement by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling of a radical shift in policy in dealing with troubled UK banks, have begun to reveal the outline of a distinctly different European response to what in effect is a crisis ‘Made in USA.’

....

Using panic to centralize power

As I document in my forthcoming book, Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century, in every major US financial panic since at least the Panic of 1835, the titans of Wall Street—most especially until 1929 the House of JP Morgan—have deliberately triggered bank panics in order to consolidate their grip on US banking. The private banks used the panics to control Washington policy including the exact definition of the private ownership of the new Federal Reserve in 1913, and to consolidate their control over industry such as US Steel, Caterpillar, Westinghouse and the like. They are, in short, old hands at such financial warfare to increase their power. Now they must do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American Century.

That process of using panics to centralize their private power created an extremely powerful, concentration of financial and economic power in a few private hands, the same hands which created the influential US foreign policy think-tank, the New York Council on Foreign Relations in 1919 to guide the ascent of the American Century, as Time founder Henry Luce called it in a pivotal 1941 essay.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that people like Henry Paulson, who by the way was one of the most aggressive practitioners of the ABS revolution on Wall Street before becoming Treasury Secretary, are operating on motives beyond their over-proportional sense of greed. They, as did Fed Chairman Greenspan, had a strategy. Knowing that at a certain juncture the pyramid of trillions of dollars of dubious sub-prime and other high risk home mortgage-based securities would come falling down, they apparently determined to spread the so-called ‘toxic waste’ ABS securities as globally as possible in order to seduce the big global banks of the world, most especially of the EU into their honey trap.

....

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Financial_Tsunami/Warfare_Behind_Panic/warfare_behind_panic.html

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aquart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-08-08 07:42 PM
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1. Doesn't that make Paulson a terrorist?
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Junkdrawer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-08-08 07:46 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. They alway leave their mark with timing....
Funny how this crisis occurred at the very last second that a $700 billion bailout could be passed before Congress adjourned for elections...
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Romulox Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 06:59 AM
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8. If Paulson is a terrorist, what does that make Nancy Pelosi? His accomplice? nt
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Junkdrawer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 09:11 AM
Response to Reply #8
11. Perhaps unwitting, but yes. n/t
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HCE SuiGeneris Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-08-08 07:48 PM
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3. K & R
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magellan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-08-08 07:50 PM
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4. Very early this morning
...I heard some talking head opining favorably that the inevitable outcome of this financial crisis is the consolidation of our banks/financial institutions into larger, fewer ones. How anyone other than a corporate elitist can support that idea is beyond me. Monopolies in any industry are well-proven to be good for only one group of people: the owners.

Capitalism requires strong regulation and competition to work for the benefit of everyone.
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Junkdrawer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-08-08 07:54 PM
Response to Reply #4
5. Industrial power has left the US, Military and Banking power remain....
Edited on Wed Oct-08-08 07:54 PM by Junkdrawer
The current, upcoming rival to the Dollar as Oil reference currency is the Euro.

I think the author is making the case that the US is waging a preemptive attack on European banking power.
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bread_and_roses Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 07:10 AM
Response to Reply #4
10. No degree of regulation and competition will make capitalism "work for everyone"
Capitalism is inherently exploitive and oppressive; regulation can ameliorate but not remedy its' inevitable effects.
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gopbuster Donating Member (715 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-08-08 08:24 PM
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6. Here may be the apparent lay of the landscape
Can't attest to the perfect accuracy but:


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Junkdrawer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 06:58 AM
Response to Reply #6
7. LOL...I have JP Morgan in the office pool...n/t
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Irish Girl Donating Member (265 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 07:07 AM
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9. k&r
:wtf:
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Suspicious Donating Member (780 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 09:22 AM
Response to Original message
12. K & R
VERY interesting read....
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Karenina Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 11:20 AM
Response to Original message
13. Interesting piece!
:kick:
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Junkdrawer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 03:18 PM
Response to Reply #13
14. I recommend his first book:
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Junkdrawer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-09-08 07:19 PM
Response to Original message
15. Kick
:kick:
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