SO FAR IT HAS BEEN BERNIE SANDERS AND RUSS FEINGOLD THAT HAVE SHOUTED FOR STRONG BANK REFORM AND JUSTICE IN THESE MASSIVE FRAUDS....SO LET'S GET THEM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT/VICE-PRESIDENT IN 2016!!!
Did you hear the corporate NPR introduction of Obama's next Wall Street appointment to an agency supposedly protecting the public from economic instability and work for high employment? What a stellar appointment of a good all-round guy!!! We all love him! Now, if you look at the US Federal Reserve as the center of global corporate tribunal rule acting to place massive corporate fraud on steroids and installing policy that keeps the public caught in boom and bust crony and criminal markets losing all their wealth and causing ever-growing levels of unemployment.....ALL MAXIMIZING WEALTH FOR THE FEW---- you see from where this promotion comes. Indeed, Fischer is in fact THAT good ole' boy. In the days of TPP there is no public sector or US citizens to consider for goodness sake!
For those who know better you'll see below how the Fischer/Bernake/Draghi fit goes with the TROIKA mess that has hold of the US and Europe. You can follow the money to see his place in the pecking order of moving massive wealth. Again, we want to thank Anonymous and those hackers that are doing civil disobedience and not stealing people's pin numbers.....hacking to download banking information that is allowing International Journalists to follow the money to off-shore accounts to the tune so far of $35 trillion dollars. We are getting a great picture of who has the money and where it is so when Rule of Law is reinstated the people of Europe and US will be able to recover the loot and reverse wealth inequity. THIS IS WHERE FISCHER COMES INTO THE PICTURE.
We all remember when Obama placed Greenspan's deputy and Geithner to head Financial agencies needed by the public to hold banks accountable. These two where of course in the forefront of allowing the massive frauds to go forward while everyone was shouting MASSIVE AND SYSTEMIC MORTGAGE AND FINANCIAL FRAUD throughout the 2000s. This is now round two of 'IT'S ABOUT THE GLOBAL TRIBUNAL AS WORLD RULER' politics. Yellen has stated she supports all of what Bernanke did so she will be status quo for the US economy and wealth inequity.
For those liking to follow the financial fraud this is the next connection of dots in the revolving door of cronyism. It is important because as more people see how corrupt this system is, the more people will move to revolution. Fischer is MIT material tied to Summers and Italy's Draghi. Draghi is now head of the European ECB. We all know Summers as Clinton's global market king and MIT is of course farm team for Wall Street. Fischer's connection with the BAnk of Israel coincides with the exact time Wall Street was moving massive amounts of money off-shore and guess where the top off-shore location was according to International Investigative Journalists using WIKILEAKS hacking download of Wall Street banks showing the movement of $35 trillion dollars????? ISRAEL WAS ONE TO THE TOP LOCATIONS. Know why Pope Benedict retired suddenly...Draghi's Italy used the Vatican Bank to move money from NYC through the Vatican. See the crony? It is all illegal and it is all documented by International Justice groups!!!!
Obama to nominate Stanley Fischer, 2 others to Federal Reserve seats
By Jim Puzzanghera January 10, 2014, 8:35 a.m. Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- President Obama will nominate Stanley Fischer, the former head of the Bank of Israel, to be vice chair of the Federal Reserve, and also tapped two other people for seats on the central bank's Board of Governors, the White House said Friday.
Lael Brainard, who recently stepped down as Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, was chosen to fill one of the vacant seats on the seven-member Fed board.
And Jerome H. Powell, a former Treasury official and investment banker who has served on the Fed board since 2012, will be renominated. Powell was confirmed to an unexpired term that expires on Jan. 31.
PHOTOS: Federal Reserve chairs through the years
"These three distinguished individuals have the proven experience, judgment and deep knowledge of the financial system to serve at the Federal Reserve during this important time for our economy," Obama said.
The nominations, which had been expected, add to the major changes coming at the Fed as it tries to pull back on its aggressive stimulus efforts without damaging the economic recovery.
Current Vice Chair Janet L. Yellen was confirmed this week to replace Ben S. Bernanke, whose second four-year term as central bank chair expires on Jan. 31. She will lead a different, and potentially more fractious Fed policy-making team.
This month, four new regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents will rotate into the 12 voting positions on the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, which sets monetary policy. All seven Fed governors are voting members.
Friday's disappointing government report showing the economy created just 74,000 net new jobs in December highlighted the difficulties for Fed policymakers. They must decide if the economy is strong enough to continue the reduction started last month in the Fed's bond-buying stimulus program, when most data pointed to an improving labor market.
Fischer, who was governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005-13, is a legendary economist who brings a wealth of experience to the Fed board.
He has worked at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and was vice chairman of Citigroup Inc. from 2002-05.
Fischer was the PhD advisor for outgoing Fed Chair Ben S. Bernanke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fischer also taught European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers.
If confirmed by the Senate, Fischer would replace Yellen as the Fed's No. 2 official.
"He is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading and most experienced economic policy minds and I’m grateful he has agreed to take on this new role and I am confident that he and Janet Yellen will make a great team," Obama said.
Brainard also brings international experience to the Fed. And she helps close a pending gender gap on the central bank's board. Elizabeth Duke stepped down last year and Sarah Bloom Raskin is awaiting confirmation as deputy Treasury secretary.
If Raskin departs as expected, Yellen would be the only woman remaining on the board.
Obama said Brainard's "knowledge of international monetary and economic issues will be an important addition to the Fed."
Powell served as an assistant secretary and under secretary at the Treasury Department under President George H.W. Bush.
Fed governors have 14-year terms but rarely serve all of it. Powell is nominated to a full 14-year term. Fischer would fill a term expiring in 2020 and Brainard one expiring in 2026.
_______________________________________________________________________
Below you see nothing has been done with the Financial Reform Bill. Volcker demanded long ago that his name be taken off of what neo-liberals are pretending are rules that will safeguard the banking system. NO ONE BELIEVES THAT. I'v spoken as to the importance of bank capitalization and the fact that most financial experts wanted this to be at least 20%...below you see the TROIKA as will the FED move away from any accountability. Remember, QE and 0% recapitalized the banks by taking all the most toxic subprime mortgages off the banks accounting and move them to the FED in the trillions of dollars. THIS IS WHAT CORPORATE NPR CALLS 'THE BANKS/CORPORATIONS ARE HEALTHY NOW'.
Somehow we are getting bank warnings that requiring capital will hurt lending that has yet to happen as they roll in profit and will not happen as the goal is to consolidate all small and regional businesses into these global corporations.
The two issues in financial reform were banks having enough capital to cover leverage and the Glass Steagall separation of bank's money from its consumers....the Volcker Rule was advanced for this. So, capitalization many thought needed to be 20% as it had historically been 70%. When the financial reform debate was hot we were told we would get 8-10% which was a start, but now we see below they are back where it was before the crash....3%. NOT ONE CHANGE HAS BEEN MADE....NOT ONE BIT OF ACCOUNTABILITY.....AND THIS IS BECAUSE WE HAVE A NEO-LIBERAL PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS.
KEEP IN MIND THAT IT IS THE FEDERAL RESERVE WRITING MANY OF THESE LAWS AND CHOOSES TO ENFORCE REGULATIONS OR NOT. SINCE NEO-LIBERALS CONSIDER TPP A DONE DEAL.....ALL THE POLICY IS ABOUT WHAT MAXIMIZES PROFIT....MORE NAKED CAPITALISM.
What the American people want is a President that appoints people that want the opposite.....more capitalization, more regulation, and more downsizing by recovering tens of trillions of dollars in fraud still owed.
SO FAR IT HAS BEEN BERNIE SANDERS AND RUSS FEINGOLD THAT HAVE SHOUTED FOR STRONG BANK REFORM AND JUSTICE IN THESE MASSIVE FRAUDS....SO LET'S GET THEM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT/VICE-PRESIDENT IN 2016!!!
Debt Rule Faces Dilution as Regulators Heed Bank Warnings
By Jim Brunsden Jan 10, 2014 8:05 AM ET
Lenders are poised to win concessions from central bank chiefs and global regulators over a debt limit they criticized as a blunt instrument that would penalize low-risk activities and curtail lending.
A revised leverage-ratio plan is set to be laxer than a draft published last year by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, said a person familiar with the scope of a Jan. 12 meeting of the group’s oversight body at which the measure will be discussed.
Leverage ratios are designed to curb banks’ reliance on debt by setting a minimum standard for how much capital they must hold as a percentage of all assets on their books. A quarter of large global lenders would have failed to meet the draft version of the leverage limit had it been in force at the end of 2012, according to data published by the committee in September.
“I expect considerable change in the rule to defer to applicable national accounting systems,” Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Washington-based research firm Federal Financial Analytics Inc., said in an e-mail. “If the rule in fact doesn’t do this, it will wreak tremendous havoc in securities financing, repo, and other capital-market activities and send them over to the shadows.”
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said, “My personal view, is that a leverage ratio... Read More
Some supervisors have called for greater use of leverage ratios instead of standard Basel capital requirements, which are measured as a ratio of banks’ equity against risk-weighted assets, because banks are inconsistent in the way they calculate these standards.
Asset Size The draft leverage rule published last year would have required banks to hold capital equivalent to at least 3 percent of their assets, without any possibility to take into account the riskiness of their investments. Stefan Ingves, the Basel committee’s chairman, has said that discussions in the group have focused on calibrating how banks should calculate the size of their assets, as opposed to reopening talks on the 3 percent figure.
“In our view, the final leverage rule will be significantly moderated to avoid it becoming a binding constraint on bank lending activity,” research firm Capital Alpha Partners LLC wrote in a note to clients yesterday.
The “most likely adjustments will be to allow for greater netting for derivatives and securities financing transactions,” according to the note. There is also “a good chance” that regulators will scale back rules on how banks must calculate the size of some off balance sheet commitments, it said.
Stated Intentions The Basel committee declined to comment on the leverage ratio talks.
“Overall and in contrast to publicly stated intentions, a binding leverage ratio may actually encourage increased risk-taking by European banks while at the same time forcing them to cut back on low-risk exposures” such as derivatives used to hedge risk, Jan Schildbach, senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, said in an e-mail. This would potentially hurt “their clients and the European economy as a whole.”
Global regulators have met for almost 40 years in Basel, Switzerland, to negotiate common standards for supervising the banking system.
The Jan. 12 meeting will be of the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision, or GHOS, which oversees the committee’s work and is comprised of central bank and regulatory chiefs. The GHOS is led by Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank.
Bank Strength Relying on leverage ratios to assess a bank’s strength wouldn’t be sensible as the measure can easily be influenced and is hard to compare between lenders under different reporting standards, Rabobank Groep Chief Financial Officer Bert Bruggink said in an interview this week.
“For banks reporting under European accounting rules, a leverage ratio of 3 percent or 4 percent is very well defendable,” Bruggink said. “Requiring higher numbers, especially if that’s done with reference to U.S. banks, would be wrong and harmful to the economy.”
Main Item The leverage measure is the main item on the agenda for the GHOS talks, according to two other people familiar with the talks. All three asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Under the published Basel timetable, banks will be expected to publicly disclose how well they measure up to the standard from 2015, with the rule to become a binding minimum standard in 2018.
Banks such as BNP Paribas SA (BNP), Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. (C) have called for a rewrite of the draft leverage rule published in June, saying it would adversely affect economic growth and job creation, make it more expensive for governments to sell their debt and give banks incentives to invest in riskier assets.
“The leverage ratio instrument sets the wrong incentives by discriminating against low-risk business, which also accounts for a larger share of European banks’ operations than for U.S. institutions,” Schildbach said. “In addition, in the U.S., a compulsory leverage ratio has been in place for many years already, whereas the Europeans are used to align their business models to a system of risk-weighted capital ratios.”
More Scope Banks have called on the committee to alter the rule by giving lenders more scope to carry out netting, which would allow them to reduce the size of the pool of assets used to calculate the leverage ratio.
Netting is an accounting term describing the process of banks offsetting the value of different assets and liabilities they have taken on with a single counterparty.
Lenders have argued that they should be allowed to net the collateral received on derivatives trades because otherwise the protection they gain wouldn’t be taken into account by the leverage ratio. They have also called for more scope to use netting on securities financing transactions such as repurchase agreements, or repos.
Other requests from banks have included that assets perceived to bear little risk of loss, such as high quality mortgage debt, should be exempted or partially exempted from the leverage ratio calculation.
Playing Field Knowing how the international leverage ratio is defined “is important domestically for a level playing field,” Bank of England Governor Mark Carney told U.K. lawmakers in November, according to a public record of the proceedings.
“My personal view, is that a leverage ratio is an integral part of the capital framework of banks, so it is absolutely necessary,” Carney said.
There is no chance that all high quality assets will be removed from the calculations, Simon Hills, executive director at the British Bankers’ Association, said in a telephone interview.
“The most we can probably hope for on scope is a little movement,” he said. “Our priority is that cash held with central banks should be excluded from the leverage ratio calculations, as well as gilt purchases made as part of central bank monetary policy operations. We think that merits another look.”
__________________________________________________
As corporate NPR and local WYPR pretend they do not know the economy is ready to implode with the same conditions as last time only instead of subprime mortgage fraud in the trillions it will be sovereign and muncipal bond debt that took Europe last crash. We are over the $600 trillion leverage mark now!
This is why Fischer and Yellen are so important for the global tribunal because they both will use the same system of bailout and coverup that Bernanke and Geithner did in 2007-2008.
Derivatives: The $600 Trillion Time Bomb That's Set to Explode
It's because risk in the $600 trillion derivatives market isn't evening out. To the contrary, it's growing increasingly concentrated among a select few banks, especially here in the United States.
In 2009, five banks held 80% of derivatives in America. Now, just four banks hold a staggering 95.9% of U.S. derivatives, according to a recent report from the Office of the Currency Comptroller.
The four banks in question: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS).
Derivatives played a crucial role in bringing down the global economy, so you would think that the world's top policymakers would have reined these things in by now - but they haven't.
Instead of attacking the problem, regulators have let it spiral out of control, and the result is a $600 trillion time bomb called the derivatives market.
Think I'm exaggerating?
The notional value of the world's derivatives actually is estimated at more than $600 trillion. Notional value, of course, is the total value of a leveraged position's assets. This distinction is necessary because when you're talking about leveraged assets like options and derivatives, a little bit of money can control a disproportionately large position that may be as much as 5, 10, 30, or, in extreme cases, 100 times greater than investments that could be funded only in cash instruments.
The world's gross domestic product (GDP) is only about $65 trillion, or roughly 10.83% of the worldwide value of the global derivatives market, according to The Economist. So there is literally not enough money on the planet to backstop the banks trading these things if they run into trouble.
Compounding the problem is the fact that nobody even knows if the $600 trillion figure is accurate, because specialized derivatives vehicles like the credit default swaps that are now roiling Europe remain largely unregulated and unaccounted for.
Tick...Tick...Tick To be fair, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimated the net notional value of uncollateralized derivatives risks is between $2 trillion and $8 trillion, which is still a staggering amount of money and well beyond the billions being talked about in Europe.
Imagine the fallout from a $600 trillion explosion if several banks went down at once. It would eclipse the collapse of Lehman Brothers in no uncertain terms.
A governmental default would panic already anxious investors, causing a run on several major European banks in an effort to recover their deposits. That would, in turn, cause several banks to literally run out of money and declare bankruptcy.
Short-term borrowing costs would skyrocket and liquidity would evaporate. That would cause a ricochet across the Atlantic as the institutions themselves then panic and try to recover their own capital by withdrawing liquidity by any means possible.
And that's why banks are hoarding cash instead of lending it.
The major banks know there is no way they can collateralize the potential daisy chain failure that Greece represents. So they're doing everything they can to stockpile cash and keep their trading under wraps and away from public scrutiny.
What really scares me, though, is that the banks
think this is an acceptable risk because the odds of a default are allegedly smaller than one in 10,000.
But haven't we heard that before?
Although American banks have limited their exposure to Greece, they have loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to European banks and European governments that may not be capable of paying them back.
According to the Bank of International Settlements, U.S. banks have loaned only $60.5 billion to banks in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy - the countries most at risk of default. But they've lent $275.8 billion to French and German banks.
And undoubtedly bet trillions on the same debt.
There are three key takeaways here:
__________________________________________________
Corporate NPR/APM likes to tell us that the world's economy is getting better now that looted money has made it to offshore accounts and austerity in Europe and US has the public filling the $17 trillion whole in the national deficit caused by the massive frauds. The free money and QE has moved most of the US real estate into the hands of these huge investment firms now controlling development and soaking people with rents and slum-landlording. YES, THIS IS INDEED THE NEW ECONOMY!!!
So, as Americans pray the TPP nations that signed the treaty can bring down their governments to end the TPP......and as we pray that the Atlantic Trade deal will fall because of loss of trust created by the NSA exposure and Europe's farm/environment issues that will not bend to US naked capitalism.....this we know:
Europeans are not all rosy and cheerily agreeing to austerity and TROIKA rule and the dismantling of their social programs and labor unions contracts. In fact the move for dismantling the Euro is far stronger and Wall Street knows that the shock from this default will be traumatic to the world and US economy. What is happening in Spain, Wall Street's favorite nation following TROIKA orders as you see below is a return of Fascism to Spain. Global corporate tribunals will be totalitarianism and while Americans have not known this personally and this is why we are slow to fight.....
EUROPEANS HAVE ALL OF THIS AUTOCRACY IN RECENT MEMORY AND THEY WILL NOT ALLOW IT TO CREEP! That's why the NSA scandal was so important, it is why attempts to pass laws limiting protest and political speech happening in the US will not fly in Europe. Remember, it was Germany/DeutscheBank and Wall Street/Goldman Sachs that started this full fledged attack on social governments over the decade and it started with fraudulent financial instruments hiding sovereign debt and then loading these countries with tremendous municipal debt. Europeans know this dynamic and will not join a European union with Germany leading the TROIKA and the UK fat on massive financial fraud on top! As we see the PIIGS nations have been made IMF developing world wards with this massive fraud and attack on their sovereignty!
What does that mean to you and me? It means that all the US pensions and municipal bonds that are now propping up these European nations under attack by the TROIKA will default and just as with these same US pensions./municipal bonds sent into the stock market to prop up the Wall Street banks in 2007 losing 1/2 their value to fraud.....it is about to happen big time sometime soon and your politician, your pension fund manager knows this! With the amount of debt Wall Street has....$600 trillion in leveraged debt, the FED has several trillion in leveraged debt, the US Federal debt of $17 trillion, and local credit bond and municipal debt soaking local budgets-----
THIS WILL BE A DEPRESSION-MAKER JUST AS WE HEAD INTO 2014 ELECTION YEAR. REMEMBER OBAMA ELECTED JUST AS THE LAST CRASH HIT? WE WILL HEAR ALL POLICY AGAIN SURROUNDING BAILING OUT THE ECONOMY.
This is where Obama's Federal Reserve appointments come into play as the same system of bailouts and protection from fraud happen all over!!
The EU is a new form of colonialism – it’s time to break free
Posted by revoltingeurope ⋅ January 14, 2014 ⋅
Spain has a future but it means breaking with the Eurozone and EU institutions, argue Hector Illueca and Adoración Guamán
The economic crisis affecting our country and the austerity policies imposed by the troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) are leading to an increasingly evident social fracture. Astonished citizens observe the degradation of everyday life and the tolerance of abuses of power by the most privileged in the country. The deterioration of the material conditions of an increasingly wide social majority comes accompanied by grave corruption scandals that have infected the political and economic elites, shining a light on a society in which injustice and inequality are ever more entrenched.
In this context, the dream of European integration has become a nightmare of a brutal present and a bleak future. Citizens have been quite deliberately served up a false, ideological and idyllic image of the European Union, with the media projecting a mythical vision quite removed from reality: the truth is that the European Union completely alien to the principles of cohesion and solidarity collaborative solidarity and has become a sort of German hunting ground where strong economies exploit their economic and commercial advantages to crush the weak economies. This is a European Union governed by the law of the jungle .
However, the severity of the economic situation and declining well-being has cast aside the veil and the inhabitants of the periphery are starting to understand that they are victims of a new settlement. It is increasingly difficult to hide that the introduction of the euro has led to a centre-periphery relationship within the European Union, where the North dominates the South. It is no longer possible to deny that the single currency has benefited Germany and the other rich countries of Europe, strengthening their position in the European scheme as net exporters of capital goods and consumption, and net importers of overall demand.
To put it plainly and simply: economic and monetary union has allowed the core countries, especially Germany, to accumulate growing trade surpluses in Europe, blocking any possibility of competitive devaluation and fuelling a radical redistribution of work to the detriment of the less powerful economies of the Mediterranean basin. Strong core countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, increase their competitiveness, retain their national sovereignty and finance their welfare states due to loss of competitiveness and the destruction of sovereignty and welfare in the European periphery.
The new European division of labour
Spanish workers, along with workers in other peripheral economies, have become a reservoir of low cost labour. As noted by others, the process of European integration has created a new international division of labour, fuelling colonialist dynamics characterized by German hegemony and the subordination of peripheral [1 ] economies. This is what explains why state control over the market and the protection of social rights are being dismantled according to the dictates of economic and monetary union.
When this process clashes with state provisions in social policy, peripheral states adapt their welfare systems, always, to be clear, reducing the protection of labour and social rights. Social dumping has not only not been challenged, but it has been fostered, placing labour regulation as a competitive factor and triggering a fierce regulatory Darwinism to reduce labour standards and social protection.
SOUND FAMILIAR????? SAME THING HAPPENING IN THE US!!!
The new European division of labour explains and promotes the progressive destruction of state -sponsored social models desired by the Troika and which is immediately apparent in two key areas: the flexibility of labour markets (in particular, lowering the protection for stabile employment and cutting the cost of labour) and the reduction of welfare, in particular social security systems (reducing pensions, health care reforms, etc. . ) .
Its influence is also evident in the education reform in Spain pursued by Minister Wert, reforms which are also sponsored by European institutions, which guide the educational system towards the formation of cheap labour and providing the knowledge needed to deal appropriately with the garbage that characterizes the labour market in underdeveloped countries. The dependent and peripheral position of our economy in the European scheme is radically incompatible with the existence of public pensions, education and public health and a fair and decent job market.
By accepting the dictates of the Troika, the ruling classes of the peripheral countries show their inability to take an independent path for their respective countries and seal a relationship of subordination and dependence similar to that which occurs in the process of classic colonization, characterized by the systematic dispossession of peripheral economies and the exploitation of its workers. We must not forget that they are the ruling classes of the Member States which have built and paid for this European Union model, under whose untouchable legitimacy the most unpopular and tough reforms have sheltered. The undermining of the bargaining position of the unions is the price of the treacherous collusion of the elites of the deficit countries in forging a strong and stable alliance with the German bourgeoisie to impose a new political and social order throughout Europe.
More Europe?
In this context, it is surprising that certain sectors of the Spanish and European left insist on reforming the eurozone as a solution to the current social and economic emergency. With something of a Panglossian air, they invoke the need for “more Europe” , denounce the fragmentation of fiscal policy and the criticise the ECB for providing ample liquidity to banks while abandoning indebted member states to face speculative attacks.
They propose the abolition of the Stability Pact, the creation of a fiscal authority and amendments to the statutes of the ECB to enable loans to governments experiencing difficulties. In a burst of ingenuity, they even speak of a “good euro” in which one could establish a European minimum wage to reduce the competitiveness differentials between countries.
This is an illusion that for decades has paralyzed much of the left and the labour movement and blocked the construction of an alternative at the service of the masses of our country. The euro area lacks a single European state and there is no expectation that one will be created in the near future. The unification of fiscal policy would mean a complete restructuring of sovereignty throughout the European Union, constructed from a strict hierarchy of states and a careful calculation of national interests, and would require a consensus that will not occur.
Any possible reform would follow the existing hierarchy of power, characterized by the dominance of the countries of the centre and especially Germany. To be exact, the euro has been the means to build the hegemony of German capital, which has inexorably imposed itself on the European stage and prevents the possibility of implementing a programme that meets the needs of the social majority.
Time for a break
In our opinion, any political agenda that seeks to actually break with neoliberalism, even in a reformist direction, should seriously consider euro exit. As noted by Costas Lapavitsas [2 ] , the only progressive answer for our people is to leave the euro zone and regain control of sovereignty in the context of a radical shift in economic and social power to labour.
This strategy must start with the default on sovereign debt and extends to a euro exit to allow our country to escape the cataclysm of internal devaluation imposed by the European Union. Our country has a future, but a decent future will necessarily mean breaking with this Europe and the European institutions.
Did you hear the corporate NPR introduction of Obama's next Wall Street appointment to an agency supposedly protecting the public from economic instability and work for high employment? What a stellar appointment of a good all-round guy!!! We all love him! Now, if you look at the US Federal Reserve as the center of global corporate tribunal rule acting to place massive corporate fraud on steroids and installing policy that keeps the public caught in boom and bust crony and criminal markets losing all their wealth and causing ever-growing levels of unemployment.....ALL MAXIMIZING WEALTH FOR THE FEW---- you see from where this promotion comes. Indeed, Fischer is in fact THAT good ole' boy. In the days of TPP there is no public sector or US citizens to consider for goodness sake!
For those who know better you'll see below how the Fischer/Bernake/Draghi fit goes with the TROIKA mess that has hold of the US and Europe. You can follow the money to see his place in the pecking order of moving massive wealth. Again, we want to thank Anonymous and those hackers that are doing civil disobedience and not stealing people's pin numbers.....hacking to download banking information that is allowing International Journalists to follow the money to off-shore accounts to the tune so far of $35 trillion dollars. We are getting a great picture of who has the money and where it is so when Rule of Law is reinstated the people of Europe and US will be able to recover the loot and reverse wealth inequity. THIS IS WHERE FISCHER COMES INTO THE PICTURE.
We all remember when Obama placed Greenspan's deputy and Geithner to head Financial agencies needed by the public to hold banks accountable. These two where of course in the forefront of allowing the massive frauds to go forward while everyone was shouting MASSIVE AND SYSTEMIC MORTGAGE AND FINANCIAL FRAUD throughout the 2000s. This is now round two of 'IT'S ABOUT THE GLOBAL TRIBUNAL AS WORLD RULER' politics. Yellen has stated she supports all of what Bernanke did so she will be status quo for the US economy and wealth inequity.
For those liking to follow the financial fraud this is the next connection of dots in the revolving door of cronyism. It is important because as more people see how corrupt this system is, the more people will move to revolution. Fischer is MIT material tied to Summers and Italy's Draghi. Draghi is now head of the European ECB. We all know Summers as Clinton's global market king and MIT is of course farm team for Wall Street. Fischer's connection with the BAnk of Israel coincides with the exact time Wall Street was moving massive amounts of money off-shore and guess where the top off-shore location was according to International Investigative Journalists using WIKILEAKS hacking download of Wall Street banks showing the movement of $35 trillion dollars????? ISRAEL WAS ONE TO THE TOP LOCATIONS. Know why Pope Benedict retired suddenly...Draghi's Italy used the Vatican Bank to move money from NYC through the Vatican. See the crony? It is all illegal and it is all documented by International Justice groups!!!!
Obama to nominate Stanley Fischer, 2 others to Federal Reserve seats
By Jim Puzzanghera January 10, 2014, 8:35 a.m. Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- President Obama will nominate Stanley Fischer, the former head of the Bank of Israel, to be vice chair of the Federal Reserve, and also tapped two other people for seats on the central bank's Board of Governors, the White House said Friday.
Lael Brainard, who recently stepped down as Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, was chosen to fill one of the vacant seats on the seven-member Fed board.
And Jerome H. Powell, a former Treasury official and investment banker who has served on the Fed board since 2012, will be renominated. Powell was confirmed to an unexpired term that expires on Jan. 31.
PHOTOS: Federal Reserve chairs through the years
"These three distinguished individuals have the proven experience, judgment and deep knowledge of the financial system to serve at the Federal Reserve during this important time for our economy," Obama said.
The nominations, which had been expected, add to the major changes coming at the Fed as it tries to pull back on its aggressive stimulus efforts without damaging the economic recovery.
Current Vice Chair Janet L. Yellen was confirmed this week to replace Ben S. Bernanke, whose second four-year term as central bank chair expires on Jan. 31. She will lead a different, and potentially more fractious Fed policy-making team.
This month, four new regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents will rotate into the 12 voting positions on the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, which sets monetary policy. All seven Fed governors are voting members.
Friday's disappointing government report showing the economy created just 74,000 net new jobs in December highlighted the difficulties for Fed policymakers. They must decide if the economy is strong enough to continue the reduction started last month in the Fed's bond-buying stimulus program, when most data pointed to an improving labor market.
Fischer, who was governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005-13, is a legendary economist who brings a wealth of experience to the Fed board.
He has worked at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and was vice chairman of Citigroup Inc. from 2002-05.
Fischer was the PhD advisor for outgoing Fed Chair Ben S. Bernanke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fischer also taught European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers.
If confirmed by the Senate, Fischer would replace Yellen as the Fed's No. 2 official.
"He is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading and most experienced economic policy minds and I’m grateful he has agreed to take on this new role and I am confident that he and Janet Yellen will make a great team," Obama said.
Brainard also brings international experience to the Fed. And she helps close a pending gender gap on the central bank's board. Elizabeth Duke stepped down last year and Sarah Bloom Raskin is awaiting confirmation as deputy Treasury secretary.
If Raskin departs as expected, Yellen would be the only woman remaining on the board.
Obama said Brainard's "knowledge of international monetary and economic issues will be an important addition to the Fed."
Powell served as an assistant secretary and under secretary at the Treasury Department under President George H.W. Bush.
Fed governors have 14-year terms but rarely serve all of it. Powell is nominated to a full 14-year term. Fischer would fill a term expiring in 2020 and Brainard one expiring in 2026.
_______________________________________________________________________
Below you see nothing has been done with the Financial Reform Bill. Volcker demanded long ago that his name be taken off of what neo-liberals are pretending are rules that will safeguard the banking system. NO ONE BELIEVES THAT. I'v spoken as to the importance of bank capitalization and the fact that most financial experts wanted this to be at least 20%...below you see the TROIKA as will the FED move away from any accountability. Remember, QE and 0% recapitalized the banks by taking all the most toxic subprime mortgages off the banks accounting and move them to the FED in the trillions of dollars. THIS IS WHAT CORPORATE NPR CALLS 'THE BANKS/CORPORATIONS ARE HEALTHY NOW'.
Somehow we are getting bank warnings that requiring capital will hurt lending that has yet to happen as they roll in profit and will not happen as the goal is to consolidate all small and regional businesses into these global corporations.
The two issues in financial reform were banks having enough capital to cover leverage and the Glass Steagall separation of bank's money from its consumers....the Volcker Rule was advanced for this. So, capitalization many thought needed to be 20% as it had historically been 70%. When the financial reform debate was hot we were told we would get 8-10% which was a start, but now we see below they are back where it was before the crash....3%. NOT ONE CHANGE HAS BEEN MADE....NOT ONE BIT OF ACCOUNTABILITY.....AND THIS IS BECAUSE WE HAVE A NEO-LIBERAL PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS.
KEEP IN MIND THAT IT IS THE FEDERAL RESERVE WRITING MANY OF THESE LAWS AND CHOOSES TO ENFORCE REGULATIONS OR NOT. SINCE NEO-LIBERALS CONSIDER TPP A DONE DEAL.....ALL THE POLICY IS ABOUT WHAT MAXIMIZES PROFIT....MORE NAKED CAPITALISM.
What the American people want is a President that appoints people that want the opposite.....more capitalization, more regulation, and more downsizing by recovering tens of trillions of dollars in fraud still owed.
SO FAR IT HAS BEEN BERNIE SANDERS AND RUSS FEINGOLD THAT HAVE SHOUTED FOR STRONG BANK REFORM AND JUSTICE IN THESE MASSIVE FRAUDS....SO LET'S GET THEM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT/VICE-PRESIDENT IN 2016!!!
Debt Rule Faces Dilution as Regulators Heed Bank Warnings
By Jim Brunsden Jan 10, 2014 8:05 AM ET
Lenders are poised to win concessions from central bank chiefs and global regulators over a debt limit they criticized as a blunt instrument that would penalize low-risk activities and curtail lending.
A revised leverage-ratio plan is set to be laxer than a draft published last year by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, said a person familiar with the scope of a Jan. 12 meeting of the group’s oversight body at which the measure will be discussed.
Leverage ratios are designed to curb banks’ reliance on debt by setting a minimum standard for how much capital they must hold as a percentage of all assets on their books. A quarter of large global lenders would have failed to meet the draft version of the leverage limit had it been in force at the end of 2012, according to data published by the committee in September.
“I expect considerable change in the rule to defer to applicable national accounting systems,” Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Washington-based research firm Federal Financial Analytics Inc., said in an e-mail. “If the rule in fact doesn’t do this, it will wreak tremendous havoc in securities financing, repo, and other capital-market activities and send them over to the shadows.”
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said, “My personal view, is that a leverage ratio... Read More
Some supervisors have called for greater use of leverage ratios instead of standard Basel capital requirements, which are measured as a ratio of banks’ equity against risk-weighted assets, because banks are inconsistent in the way they calculate these standards.
Asset Size The draft leverage rule published last year would have required banks to hold capital equivalent to at least 3 percent of their assets, without any possibility to take into account the riskiness of their investments. Stefan Ingves, the Basel committee’s chairman, has said that discussions in the group have focused on calibrating how banks should calculate the size of their assets, as opposed to reopening talks on the 3 percent figure.
“In our view, the final leverage rule will be significantly moderated to avoid it becoming a binding constraint on bank lending activity,” research firm Capital Alpha Partners LLC wrote in a note to clients yesterday.
The “most likely adjustments will be to allow for greater netting for derivatives and securities financing transactions,” according to the note. There is also “a good chance” that regulators will scale back rules on how banks must calculate the size of some off balance sheet commitments, it said.
Stated Intentions The Basel committee declined to comment on the leverage ratio talks.
“Overall and in contrast to publicly stated intentions, a binding leverage ratio may actually encourage increased risk-taking by European banks while at the same time forcing them to cut back on low-risk exposures” such as derivatives used to hedge risk, Jan Schildbach, senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, said in an e-mail. This would potentially hurt “their clients and the European economy as a whole.”
Global regulators have met for almost 40 years in Basel, Switzerland, to negotiate common standards for supervising the banking system.
The Jan. 12 meeting will be of the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision, or GHOS, which oversees the committee’s work and is comprised of central bank and regulatory chiefs. The GHOS is led by Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank.
Bank Strength Relying on leverage ratios to assess a bank’s strength wouldn’t be sensible as the measure can easily be influenced and is hard to compare between lenders under different reporting standards, Rabobank Groep Chief Financial Officer Bert Bruggink said in an interview this week.
“For banks reporting under European accounting rules, a leverage ratio of 3 percent or 4 percent is very well defendable,” Bruggink said. “Requiring higher numbers, especially if that’s done with reference to U.S. banks, would be wrong and harmful to the economy.”
Main Item The leverage measure is the main item on the agenda for the GHOS talks, according to two other people familiar with the talks. All three asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
Under the published Basel timetable, banks will be expected to publicly disclose how well they measure up to the standard from 2015, with the rule to become a binding minimum standard in 2018.
Banks such as BNP Paribas SA (BNP), Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. (C) have called for a rewrite of the draft leverage rule published in June, saying it would adversely affect economic growth and job creation, make it more expensive for governments to sell their debt and give banks incentives to invest in riskier assets.
“The leverage ratio instrument sets the wrong incentives by discriminating against low-risk business, which also accounts for a larger share of European banks’ operations than for U.S. institutions,” Schildbach said. “In addition, in the U.S., a compulsory leverage ratio has been in place for many years already, whereas the Europeans are used to align their business models to a system of risk-weighted capital ratios.”
More Scope Banks have called on the committee to alter the rule by giving lenders more scope to carry out netting, which would allow them to reduce the size of the pool of assets used to calculate the leverage ratio.
Netting is an accounting term describing the process of banks offsetting the value of different assets and liabilities they have taken on with a single counterparty.
Lenders have argued that they should be allowed to net the collateral received on derivatives trades because otherwise the protection they gain wouldn’t be taken into account by the leverage ratio. They have also called for more scope to use netting on securities financing transactions such as repurchase agreements, or repos.
Other requests from banks have included that assets perceived to bear little risk of loss, such as high quality mortgage debt, should be exempted or partially exempted from the leverage ratio calculation.
Playing Field Knowing how the international leverage ratio is defined “is important domestically for a level playing field,” Bank of England Governor Mark Carney told U.K. lawmakers in November, according to a public record of the proceedings.
“My personal view, is that a leverage ratio is an integral part of the capital framework of banks, so it is absolutely necessary,” Carney said.
There is no chance that all high quality assets will be removed from the calculations, Simon Hills, executive director at the British Bankers’ Association, said in a telephone interview.
“The most we can probably hope for on scope is a little movement,” he said. “Our priority is that cash held with central banks should be excluded from the leverage ratio calculations, as well as gilt purchases made as part of central bank monetary policy operations. We think that merits another look.”
__________________________________________________
As corporate NPR and local WYPR pretend they do not know the economy is ready to implode with the same conditions as last time only instead of subprime mortgage fraud in the trillions it will be sovereign and muncipal bond debt that took Europe last crash. We are over the $600 trillion leverage mark now!
This is why Fischer and Yellen are so important for the global tribunal because they both will use the same system of bailout and coverup that Bernanke and Geithner did in 2007-2008.
Derivatives: The $600 Trillion Time Bomb That's Set to Explode
- By Keith Fitz-Gerald, Chief Investment Strategist, Money Map Report · October 12, 2011 · Print | Email
It's because risk in the $600 trillion derivatives market isn't evening out. To the contrary, it's growing increasingly concentrated among a select few banks, especially here in the United States.
In 2009, five banks held 80% of derivatives in America. Now, just four banks hold a staggering 95.9% of U.S. derivatives, according to a recent report from the Office of the Currency Comptroller.
The four banks in question: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS).
Derivatives played a crucial role in bringing down the global economy, so you would think that the world's top policymakers would have reined these things in by now - but they haven't.
Instead of attacking the problem, regulators have let it spiral out of control, and the result is a $600 trillion time bomb called the derivatives market.
Think I'm exaggerating?
The notional value of the world's derivatives actually is estimated at more than $600 trillion. Notional value, of course, is the total value of a leveraged position's assets. This distinction is necessary because when you're talking about leveraged assets like options and derivatives, a little bit of money can control a disproportionately large position that may be as much as 5, 10, 30, or, in extreme cases, 100 times greater than investments that could be funded only in cash instruments.
The world's gross domestic product (GDP) is only about $65 trillion, or roughly 10.83% of the worldwide value of the global derivatives market, according to The Economist. So there is literally not enough money on the planet to backstop the banks trading these things if they run into trouble.
Compounding the problem is the fact that nobody even knows if the $600 trillion figure is accurate, because specialized derivatives vehicles like the credit default swaps that are now roiling Europe remain largely unregulated and unaccounted for.
Tick...Tick...Tick To be fair, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) estimated the net notional value of uncollateralized derivatives risks is between $2 trillion and $8 trillion, which is still a staggering amount of money and well beyond the billions being talked about in Europe.
Imagine the fallout from a $600 trillion explosion if several banks went down at once. It would eclipse the collapse of Lehman Brothers in no uncertain terms.
A governmental default would panic already anxious investors, causing a run on several major European banks in an effort to recover their deposits. That would, in turn, cause several banks to literally run out of money and declare bankruptcy.
Short-term borrowing costs would skyrocket and liquidity would evaporate. That would cause a ricochet across the Atlantic as the institutions themselves then panic and try to recover their own capital by withdrawing liquidity by any means possible.
And that's why banks are hoarding cash instead of lending it.
The major banks know there is no way they can collateralize the potential daisy chain failure that Greece represents. So they're doing everything they can to stockpile cash and keep their trading under wraps and away from public scrutiny.
What really scares me, though, is that the banks
think this is an acceptable risk because the odds of a default are allegedly smaller than one in 10,000.
But haven't we heard that before?
Although American banks have limited their exposure to Greece, they have loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to European banks and European governments that may not be capable of paying them back.
According to the Bank of International Settlements, U.S. banks have loaned only $60.5 billion to banks in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy - the countries most at risk of default. But they've lent $275.8 billion to French and German banks.
And undoubtedly bet trillions on the same debt.
There are three key takeaways here:
- There is not enough capital on hand to cover the possible losses associated with the default of a single counterparty - JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), BNP Paribas SA (PINK: BNPQY) or the National Bank of Greece (NYSE ADR: NBG) for example - let alone multiple failures.
- That means banks with large derivatives exposure have to risk even more money to generate the incremental returns needed to cover the bets they've already made.
- And the fact that Wall Street believes it has the risks under control practically guarantees that it doesn't.
__________________________________________________
Corporate NPR/APM likes to tell us that the world's economy is getting better now that looted money has made it to offshore accounts and austerity in Europe and US has the public filling the $17 trillion whole in the national deficit caused by the massive frauds. The free money and QE has moved most of the US real estate into the hands of these huge investment firms now controlling development and soaking people with rents and slum-landlording. YES, THIS IS INDEED THE NEW ECONOMY!!!
So, as Americans pray the TPP nations that signed the treaty can bring down their governments to end the TPP......and as we pray that the Atlantic Trade deal will fall because of loss of trust created by the NSA exposure and Europe's farm/environment issues that will not bend to US naked capitalism.....this we know:
Europeans are not all rosy and cheerily agreeing to austerity and TROIKA rule and the dismantling of their social programs and labor unions contracts. In fact the move for dismantling the Euro is far stronger and Wall Street knows that the shock from this default will be traumatic to the world and US economy. What is happening in Spain, Wall Street's favorite nation following TROIKA orders as you see below is a return of Fascism to Spain. Global corporate tribunals will be totalitarianism and while Americans have not known this personally and this is why we are slow to fight.....
EUROPEANS HAVE ALL OF THIS AUTOCRACY IN RECENT MEMORY AND THEY WILL NOT ALLOW IT TO CREEP! That's why the NSA scandal was so important, it is why attempts to pass laws limiting protest and political speech happening in the US will not fly in Europe. Remember, it was Germany/DeutscheBank and Wall Street/Goldman Sachs that started this full fledged attack on social governments over the decade and it started with fraudulent financial instruments hiding sovereign debt and then loading these countries with tremendous municipal debt. Europeans know this dynamic and will not join a European union with Germany leading the TROIKA and the UK fat on massive financial fraud on top! As we see the PIIGS nations have been made IMF developing world wards with this massive fraud and attack on their sovereignty!
What does that mean to you and me? It means that all the US pensions and municipal bonds that are now propping up these European nations under attack by the TROIKA will default and just as with these same US pensions./municipal bonds sent into the stock market to prop up the Wall Street banks in 2007 losing 1/2 their value to fraud.....it is about to happen big time sometime soon and your politician, your pension fund manager knows this! With the amount of debt Wall Street has....$600 trillion in leveraged debt, the FED has several trillion in leveraged debt, the US Federal debt of $17 trillion, and local credit bond and municipal debt soaking local budgets-----
THIS WILL BE A DEPRESSION-MAKER JUST AS WE HEAD INTO 2014 ELECTION YEAR. REMEMBER OBAMA ELECTED JUST AS THE LAST CRASH HIT? WE WILL HEAR ALL POLICY AGAIN SURROUNDING BAILING OUT THE ECONOMY.
This is where Obama's Federal Reserve appointments come into play as the same system of bailouts and protection from fraud happen all over!!
The EU is a new form of colonialism – it’s time to break free
Posted by revoltingeurope ⋅ January 14, 2014 ⋅
Spain has a future but it means breaking with the Eurozone and EU institutions, argue Hector Illueca and Adoración Guamán
The economic crisis affecting our country and the austerity policies imposed by the troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) are leading to an increasingly evident social fracture. Astonished citizens observe the degradation of everyday life and the tolerance of abuses of power by the most privileged in the country. The deterioration of the material conditions of an increasingly wide social majority comes accompanied by grave corruption scandals that have infected the political and economic elites, shining a light on a society in which injustice and inequality are ever more entrenched.
In this context, the dream of European integration has become a nightmare of a brutal present and a bleak future. Citizens have been quite deliberately served up a false, ideological and idyllic image of the European Union, with the media projecting a mythical vision quite removed from reality: the truth is that the European Union completely alien to the principles of cohesion and solidarity collaborative solidarity and has become a sort of German hunting ground where strong economies exploit their economic and commercial advantages to crush the weak economies. This is a European Union governed by the law of the jungle .
However, the severity of the economic situation and declining well-being has cast aside the veil and the inhabitants of the periphery are starting to understand that they are victims of a new settlement. It is increasingly difficult to hide that the introduction of the euro has led to a centre-periphery relationship within the European Union, where the North dominates the South. It is no longer possible to deny that the single currency has benefited Germany and the other rich countries of Europe, strengthening their position in the European scheme as net exporters of capital goods and consumption, and net importers of overall demand.
To put it plainly and simply: economic and monetary union has allowed the core countries, especially Germany, to accumulate growing trade surpluses in Europe, blocking any possibility of competitive devaluation and fuelling a radical redistribution of work to the detriment of the less powerful economies of the Mediterranean basin. Strong core countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, increase their competitiveness, retain their national sovereignty and finance their welfare states due to loss of competitiveness and the destruction of sovereignty and welfare in the European periphery.
The new European division of labour
Spanish workers, along with workers in other peripheral economies, have become a reservoir of low cost labour. As noted by others, the process of European integration has created a new international division of labour, fuelling colonialist dynamics characterized by German hegemony and the subordination of peripheral [1 ] economies. This is what explains why state control over the market and the protection of social rights are being dismantled according to the dictates of economic and monetary union.
When this process clashes with state provisions in social policy, peripheral states adapt their welfare systems, always, to be clear, reducing the protection of labour and social rights. Social dumping has not only not been challenged, but it has been fostered, placing labour regulation as a competitive factor and triggering a fierce regulatory Darwinism to reduce labour standards and social protection.
SOUND FAMILIAR????? SAME THING HAPPENING IN THE US!!!
The new European division of labour explains and promotes the progressive destruction of state -sponsored social models desired by the Troika and which is immediately apparent in two key areas: the flexibility of labour markets (in particular, lowering the protection for stabile employment and cutting the cost of labour) and the reduction of welfare, in particular social security systems (reducing pensions, health care reforms, etc. . ) .
Its influence is also evident in the education reform in Spain pursued by Minister Wert, reforms which are also sponsored by European institutions, which guide the educational system towards the formation of cheap labour and providing the knowledge needed to deal appropriately with the garbage that characterizes the labour market in underdeveloped countries. The dependent and peripheral position of our economy in the European scheme is radically incompatible with the existence of public pensions, education and public health and a fair and decent job market.
By accepting the dictates of the Troika, the ruling classes of the peripheral countries show their inability to take an independent path for their respective countries and seal a relationship of subordination and dependence similar to that which occurs in the process of classic colonization, characterized by the systematic dispossession of peripheral economies and the exploitation of its workers. We must not forget that they are the ruling classes of the Member States which have built and paid for this European Union model, under whose untouchable legitimacy the most unpopular and tough reforms have sheltered. The undermining of the bargaining position of the unions is the price of the treacherous collusion of the elites of the deficit countries in forging a strong and stable alliance with the German bourgeoisie to impose a new political and social order throughout Europe.
More Europe?
In this context, it is surprising that certain sectors of the Spanish and European left insist on reforming the eurozone as a solution to the current social and economic emergency. With something of a Panglossian air, they invoke the need for “more Europe” , denounce the fragmentation of fiscal policy and the criticise the ECB for providing ample liquidity to banks while abandoning indebted member states to face speculative attacks.
They propose the abolition of the Stability Pact, the creation of a fiscal authority and amendments to the statutes of the ECB to enable loans to governments experiencing difficulties. In a burst of ingenuity, they even speak of a “good euro” in which one could establish a European minimum wage to reduce the competitiveness differentials between countries.
This is an illusion that for decades has paralyzed much of the left and the labour movement and blocked the construction of an alternative at the service of the masses of our country. The euro area lacks a single European state and there is no expectation that one will be created in the near future. The unification of fiscal policy would mean a complete restructuring of sovereignty throughout the European Union, constructed from a strict hierarchy of states and a careful calculation of national interests, and would require a consensus that will not occur.
Any possible reform would follow the existing hierarchy of power, characterized by the dominance of the countries of the centre and especially Germany. To be exact, the euro has been the means to build the hegemony of German capital, which has inexorably imposed itself on the European stage and prevents the possibility of implementing a programme that meets the needs of the social majority.
Time for a break
In our opinion, any political agenda that seeks to actually break with neoliberalism, even in a reformist direction, should seriously consider euro exit. As noted by Costas Lapavitsas [2 ] , the only progressive answer for our people is to leave the euro zone and regain control of sovereignty in the context of a radical shift in economic and social power to labour.
This strategy must start with the default on sovereign debt and extends to a euro exit to allow our country to escape the cataclysm of internal devaluation imposed by the European Union. Our country has a future, but a decent future will necessarily mean breaking with this Europe and the European institutions.
RSS Feed
