Outlaw the Shadow Banking System

I am hesitant to discuss this subject because I know that only a very few people have a sophisticated understanding of the background and history of the global banking system that is now so broken.

In fact, in the absence of a proper popular history we have instead a slew of alternate badly flawed explanations supported by enthusiastic adherents.

We get here though that the two major political forces that are cast in the center of this maelstrom are now working toward clawing back some semblance of control over this bloated monster.

Let us get it right. The offshore monster did not create the subprime disaster, but their hunger for product created a ready market for poorly engineered financial garbage. If they were not feeding, Wall Street would never have had a market for securitized crap and everyone would have continued to make an honest living doing what they do best.

The money was so free and easy, that they went out and financed the fence posts. Yes, they all knew better, and they knew that they were damaging their countries’ credit system like they were some South American dictator, and most took early retirement just as fast as they could get away and left the pending train wreck to the rookies. And yes, it is appropriate to charge them with treason.

The result is that each country has to restructure their banking system to bail themselves out. What are going to be saved are the domestic banking systems. The rest is hanging and very likely massive offshore failures are going to sweep away billions in private wealth. Perhaps as it should.

The two major financial powers are now getting ready to clean up the offshore banking game with all the power of the state at their control.

Imagine you are a personal banker in the Bahamas or say Switzerland with a largish portfolio of private investors who have placed money with you for decades for shady reasons.

Imagine you are invited for coffee with a fine gentleman who informs you that he is a CIA operative and that he has some instructions for you and he really does not care what laws you think are protecting you. After all your clients believe in the law of the jungle, so why should not you?

Suppose those instructions include a complete disgorgement of client data. What recourse do you have? Or your clients for that matter.

This game has been protected because the clients could influence the game in their home countries to prevent any form of pursuit. That may have just ended.

We are going to now get a global financial regulatory system that will generally work and the USA will not be standing aloof as has been their want for all the usual reasons. The complete failure of the system is a direct result of American political folly, and as mentioned before, the blame is shared. In fact it is offensive to see politicians stand up and point fingers across the aisle when a simple read of their record can easily make them the greater culprit. Few today look good.

"Outlaw the Shadow Banking System!"

Guess Who Said It?

By Matthias Chang

URL of this article:

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12584

Global Research, March 7, 2009
FutureFastForward.com

When I read the remarks of President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown after their meeting at the Oval Office on March 3, 2009 and the speech of the latter to the Joint Session of Congress on March 4, 2009, I realized that a growing antagonism has emerged between certain factions of the ruling elites in the City of London and in Washington DC.

The first warning of the acute differences was sounded by President Obama himself and it was most surprising that the mass media paid hardly attention to it. In his weekly address on February 28, 2009, President Obama said:

“I realize that passing this budget won't be easy. Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington. I know that the insurance industry won't like the idea that they'll have to bid competitively to continue offering Medicare coverage, but that's how we'll help preserve and protect Medicare and lower health care costs for American families. I know that banks and big student lenders won't like the idea that we're ending their huge taxpayer subsidies, but that's how we'll save taxpayers nearly $50 billion and make college more affordable. I know that oil and gas companies won't like us ending nearly $30 billion in tax breaks, but that's how we'll help fund a renewable energy economy that will create new jobs and new industries. In other words, I know these steps won't sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they're gearing up for a fight as we speak. My message to them is this:

“So am I.”

Read the underlined words again.

It is clear something is definitely amiss within the ruling elites and President Obama has thrown the gauntlet to his adversaries. The skeptics may say that we should not read too much into this above quoted paragraph, as it could be mere spin to rally the troops in times of crisis. Time will tell.

I take the view that it is inevitable that the members of the ruling elites would go for each other's throats because those who were given the charge to ensure that the money-machine keeps running have screwed up big time. Someone must answer for the fiasco.

The Blame Game

It would be naïve to assume that the status quo would remain, when the Global Trillion Dollar Casino is for all intents and purposes broken down beyond repair.

Confirmation that the blame game has started in earnest can be found in the aforesaid remarks of President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown on March 3, 2009 given after their meeting at the Oval Office and Brown's speech to Congress on March 4, 2009.

Let us come back to the issue of the money-lenders. For some strange reason, many people are put off by the term “money-lenders” but are ever so comfortable with bankers.

But are not bankers, money-lenders?

In fact I would say that money-lenders are more honourable than your high street bankers, as they can only rob you in the millions. The global bankers, they rape and plunder in the trillions!

Is it any wonder that Gordon Brown and President Obama, the political representatives of the Power Elites have decided that it is about time that these financial harlots are to be brought under control before they wreck the entire global power structure?

Let us have no illusions about Obama and Gordon Brown. They are going after these financial harlots not because they want to protect us from these criminals, but because for too long the political faction had to play second fiddle to the financial faction in the overall scheme of global one world government.

Until lately, money power triumphed over political power. However, when the entire financial system broke into pieces, it was time to settle scores!
Read for yourself:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's remarks at the White House, March 3, 2009

“Well, there's got to be deep regulatory change. We've just been talking, Barack and I, about the need for proper supervision of shadow banking systems, of areas where there was bank practices that were unacceptable, where remuneration policies got out of hand and weren't based on long-term success, but on short-term deals. And these are the changes that we've already announced that we are going to make.”

“We've had a global banking failure, and it's happened in every part of the world. It's almost like a power cut that went right across the financial system. And we have got to rebuild that financial system. We've got to isolate the bad assets.”

“You don't want shadow banking systems. You don't want regulatory tax havens. So we've got to act as a world together to deal with that. And that's one of the things we'll be talking about in April in London.”

President Obama's response at the White House, March 3, 2009

“Now, having said that, the banking system has been dealt a heavy blow. It has to do with many of the things that Prime Minister Brown alluded to: lax regulation, massive over-leverage, huge systemic risks taken by unregulated institutions, as well as regulated institutions. And so there are a lot of losses that are working their way through the system. And it's not surprising that the market is hurting as a consequence. In fact, I think what we're seeing is that as people absorb the depths of the problem that existed in the banking system, as well as the international ramifications of it, that there's going to be a natural reaction.”

“We are cleaning up that mess. It's going to be sort of full of fits and starts in terms of getting the mess cleaned up, but it's going to get cleaned up.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Speech to Congress, March 4, 2009

“And we need to understand what went wrong in this crisis, that the very financial instruments that were designed to diversify risk across the banking system instead spread contagion across the globe. And today's financial institutions are so interwoven that a bad bank anywhere is a threat to good banks everywhere.”

“And you are also restructuring your banks. So are we. But how much safer would everybody's savings be if the whole world finally came together to outlaw shadow banking systems and offshore tax havens?”

Blink and read again the underlined words. You have just read that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made the call to “outlaw the shadow banking system and offshore tax havens!”

Wow!

Even if you are a skeptic and holds the view that the quotes are mere spin to delude the people, you cannot deny that Prime Minister Brown has let the genie out of the bottle!

Whether there are any follow through actions by President Obama and Prime Minister Brown, the global citizens must take action independently, if they want to save their children, and their children's children from decades of impoverishment and extreme hardship.

The most powerful leader of the Western world and his side-kick has openly and unreservedly acknowledged that we are having a global financial melt-down. And that the cause for this catastrophe is the shadow banking system!

There is now an open warfare between the political factions and the financial factions of the global power elites. This will be ugly. And as President Obama warned, “they are gearing for a fight ” He has also responded to the challenge: “So am I.”

Given the above scenario, we must first take out the financial elites, and thereafter the political faction, failing which we will all plunge into the black hole of financial Armageddon!Matthias Chang is a prominent barrister, author and analyst of the New World Order based in Malaysia.
His website: www.FutureFastForward.com

Super China

Without question, China has been handed a heaven sent opportunity, not to take advantage of the discomfiture of the developed world’s financial system which is simply counter productive, but to use the time out as wisely as possible to strengthen the internal Chinese economy itself.

This is when you establish the proper social support systems so clearly missing and establish a national Medicare system and provide more internal capital through the banks to encourage local village development. All those folks who just came back to the village prematurely are a fabulous resource if they are modestly bankrolled. Microcap is the flavor of the times.

A pause led by the expansion of the internal economy will hugely lower China’s exposure to similar financial shocks in the future. Steady internal growth will sponge up the surplus labor over about three years. After that the economy will be driven by the expansion of the internal consumer economy, already well entrenched.

In fact, since last year, China reached the point in which there were no more surplus workers to leave the villages, it has actually reached the point in which all able bodied people are gainfully employable in the modern economy and this will mean rising pay packets over the next decade and Chinese consumer demand driving Indian economic maturation.

In practice it has taken China thirty years to trace the same path traced by Japan in forty years. It is now entering an era of solid internal growth in which the benefits of the modern economy penetrates to every Chinese household. Economically China has reached the top of the development S curve and must now figure out how to maintain growth by reinvention just like the rest of the developed world.

Super China
Robert Peston
5 Mar 09, 06:25 AM

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/03/super_china.html

Much of what the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, described this morning to the 11th National People's Congress as his country's programme to combat the evils of global recession would have sounded very familiar to a European or American audience.

What have become the new orthodox policy prescriptions for this time of crisis were all there: tax cuts; big increases in public spending; massive jumps in public-sector borrowing; more lending to business; anti-protectionist rhetoric; calls for improved regulation of banking and financial services.

It could almost have been Gordon Brown addressing the 3000 members of the National People's Congress in the Great Hall of the People under the giant red star.

Except for one glaring and important difference.

The Chinese economy remains - by the standards of the US or the UK - exceptionally strong.

It's true, as I've been pointing out over the past few days, that growth in China has been slowing down - and regions particularly dependent on exports, especially the south, have suffered mass closures of factories and painful rises in unemployment.

But many economists believe that the Chinese economy is still growing, even if they also say that the official statistics overstate that growth.

Thus Stephen Green at Standard Chartered reckons there was 1% growth between the third and fourth quarters of last year, and that there'll be a similar expansion in the first three months of this year.

For 2009 as a whole, he's forecasting GDP growth of between 6 and 7% - which is only a little less than China's official forecast of 8% (which Wen Jiabao repeated today).

That may be a long way from the low teens growth of last year. But it looks pretty amazing compared with the very painful recessions in Japan, the UK, Germany and the US.

And here's another frightening comparison between China on the one hand and the UK and US on the other.

Wen Jiabao announced that China's budget deficit this year will be 950bn yuan. That sounds like a big number - and it is an all-time record for China.

But, in relative terms, it's a flea bite compared with public-sector borrowing in the UK.

Converted to sterling, that 950bn yuan is equivalent to roughly £100bn.
Which is almost 20% less than what the UK government expects to borrow in 2009/10.

When those numbers are expressed as a percentage of GDP, there's an even starker picture of Chinese prudence versus what many would describe as British profligacy.

China's deficit is less than 3% of GDP, compared with 8% in the UK.

And, of course, the US public sector is arguably mortgaged up to an even higher hilt than Britain's.

When you add in the near-crippling indebtedness of businesses, banks and consumers in the UK and the US, well at that point China's financial strength looks almost awesome.

Also, as I've been emphasising, China's giant state-controlled banks have been much more cautiously managed than our commercial banks - and have neither the capital or funding constraints of ours.

None of which is to retreat from what I've been highlighting, which is that China faces formidable problems - in particular the challenge of maintaining social stability at a time when wages are being squeezed and millions are losing their jobs.

It's just that - in a way - we'd be fortunate to have their economic problems (if not their social ones).

So what are the big messages I took away from Wen Jiabao's two-hour address (perhaps we should, at the least, be grateful that Gordon Brown shows no sign of adopting Chinese speechmaking habits)?

Well he said some very striking things about allowing inefficient businesses to fail, about reducing the country's reliance on low-cost manufacturing of the basics, and about wanting to stimulate consumer spending.

All of that is both a threat and an opportunity for developed economies like ours.
There should be scope to increase our exports to China. But the competitive threat to the companies of developed economies will - if anything - intensify.

And over time (but it will take years) China's massive financial surplus - which was in part responsible for the glut of cheap money in the US and UK that fed our dangerous addiction to debt - should diminish.

For what it's worth, however, every Chinese person I've met over the past few days - from the lowliest factory work up to the Chinese Commerce Minister, Chen Deming - lays the blame for the global economic crisis on crazy risk-taking by American banks (Britain's aren't famous enough to register with them) and excessive borrowing in the US.

In that context, here's my favourite quote from my interview with Chen Deming, which pokes gentle fun at those who say China was at fault for saving too much and then lending that surplus to spend-spend-spend consumers in the west:

"Personally I can't agree with some people on their point that they [US households and businesses] borrow money from others, they overly spend this money and they make trouble for the rest of the world, but finally they blame those who lend them money for making these troubles. According to Chinese philosophy this kind of accusation is totally ridiculous and unreasonable."

I suspect that many of you would agree with China's equivalent of Peter Mandelson.

That said, China's leaders recognise that the country's prosperity is wholly dependent on ours.

So even if they believe that our mess is our own fault, they see that they have a powerful interest in helping us to clear it up.

In that context, it was striking that Chen Deming strongly disagreed with me when I described China as an economic superpower, perhaps because of a fear that as such China would have to take on the heavy burden of new responsibilities to the global community.

By contrast, today's rhetoric from Wen Jiabao's was all about a more open, outward looking China.

Wen Jiabao's China seems to want to play an important role in making the global economy safe for all of us - and is not revelling in our economic humiliation.