"Slump", the new world order - by D Ravi Kanth
Darkening recessionary clouds are steadily enveloping country after country. While the mayhem caused by Wall Street continues unabated, its impact on the real economy is rather difficult to fathom.The underlying reality is finance played havoc with the real economy that produces goods and services for people to consume and survive. Those who depended on the production of these goods and services have not only suffered via depressed real wages during the last 30 years when the boom took the incomes of those in the financial sector to stratospheric levels.Those erstwhile heroes of "irrational exuberance" fame, like Alan Greenspan, are already admitting the "flaw[s]" and "mistake[s]" in their assessment of the credit boom and the housing bubble they unleashed on the world economy. Similarly, the pressure is mounting to put some of the high-profile Wall Street actors behind bars. Clearly, there is an urgent need for naming and shaming of all those who are responsible for creating this gigantic mess.
The person responsible for this drift towards unilateralism is none other than US President George W Bush. So, when he summons world leaders from 20 countries to "advance common understanding of the causes of the [financial] crash" and prepare "a common set of principles for the reform of the regulatory and institutional regimes for the world's financial sectors", it is hardly surprising there is a deep cynicism as to what this will achieve. Amid conflicting interests around the table next month in Washington , it will be too much to expect any radical policy prescriptions. For all we know, Karl Marx -- whose Das Kapital is selling more copies in Germany this year due to the financial plague -- might prove right once again when he said history repeats itself twice, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce"!
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