Banking Industry - Meltdown - and out -- by David Ransom
The people who brought you the financial meltdown have been pouring the molten remains into the same broken mould. The latest G8 finished with a promise of $20 billion over three years for agriculture in the ‘developing’ world. That’s less than $7 a year for each of the estimated billion people (and counting) who are now malnourished - even supposing that the cash materializes, and that G8 promises don’t come as cheap as they are.
No G8 leaders - even ministers - bothered to turn up at a UN conference on the financial crisis in June. Rather, they went out of their way to rubbish it. That was partly because a UN Commission, chaired by the Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, dared to propose modest reforms, including some sort of UN Economic Council to oversee the IMF, World Bank and WTO - and a new international currency to replace the US dollar. Despite talk of ‘recovery’, so far it relates to little more than the continuing flow of public funds into private banks (now via ‘quantitative easing’ - or printing money). They’re still not lending, least of all to each other. An unknown quantity of toxic debt remains. In politics the recent elections to the European Parliament the usual political suspects, plus assorted neo-fascists, emerged almost triumphant. Fresh political - as well as financial - thinking is urgently required.
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