SURVIVING

THE
CATACLYSM

YOUR GUIDE THROUGH THE GREATEST

FINANCIAL CRISIS IN HUMAN HISTORY

BY WEBSTER G. TARPLEY

WASHINGTON GROVE BOOKS

PO BOX 1486
WASHINGTON GROVE, MARYLAND 20880
USA

© 1999 BY WEBSTER G. TARPLEY

FOR LEAH AND CHLOE
TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1: THE ONCOMING CATACLYSM

CHAPTER 2: DERIVATIVE MADNESS

CHAPTER 3: THE $5 TRILLION MUTUAL FUND GAMBLE

CHAPTER 4: THE DESCENT INTO THE MÆLSTROM

CHAPTER 5: THE IMMISERATION OF AMERICA

CHAPTER 6: MODELS OF COLLAPSE

CHAPTER 7: MODELS OF DISINTEGRATION

CHAPTER 8: USURY AND NATURAL LAW

CHAPTER 9: THE AGE OF OLIGARCHY

CHAPTER 10: THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

CHAPTER 11: SELF DEFENSE IN THE CRISIS

CHAPTER 12: WORLD ECONOMIC RECOVERY

APPENDIX: SHADOWS OF THINGS THAT MIGHT BE

BIBLIOGRAPHY
TO THE READER

. . .I have not found among my belongings

anything as dear to me or that I value as much
as my understanding of the deeds of great
men, won by me from a long acquaintance
with contemporary affairs and a continuous
study of the ancient world; these matters I
have very diligently analyzed and pondered
for a long time, and now, having summarized
them in a little book, I am sending them to
Your Magnificence. -- Machiavelli, The
Prince.

This book has been written in the shadow of the greatest financial crash of all
human history. The idea of writing it came to me when I was speaking at a
conference in Melbourne, Australia in July 1995, when I heard the news that
Japan's Cosmo Credit Union had gone bankrupt. "That is the beginning of the
end," I told my very kind Australian host when we heard this news on
television. That event could already have triggered an immediate world-wide
banking panic, and it prompted me to consider what I could do to issue a
warning to persons of good will. The text was well advanced by October 1997,
when the wave of panic from Hong Kong virus was hitting the American and
European markets. The last phases were completed in August-October 1998,
against the background of the Russian, Brazilian, and Long Term Capital
Management debacles, and on the eve of the sinister false dawn of the euro.

It has been my aim to offer an overview of the collapse and disintegration of

the world financial system before the breakdown had been completed. My
goal was to provide something more than an instant book which appears
shortly after the fact. I wanted if possible to write a pre-emptive book, a
forecast that would help people to survive as individuals, and which, more
importantly, would give them the concepts needed for the United States and
the other modern nations to withstand the crisis. By the time you read this, the
central political issue of the day may well be whether the International
Monetary Fund will put the United States into receivership, or whether the
United States should put the IMF into bankruptcy liquidation. In my view, it is
the IMF, along with the entire globaloney system of world finance, which has
to go.

I considered it important to present this analysis in the form of a book.

Newspaper and magazine articles are valuable, but ephemeral. Because they
are written for the moment, they always tend to express the political or
financial hopes and fears of the moment. In other words, their common failing
is that they can easily become propaganda. Anyone who believes as I do that
the world financial system is indeed well advanced on the path leading to
collapse and disintegration has the responsibility of making the case for that
view in the systematic, inclusive and permanent form which a book-length
study affords. Anyone who declines to assemble in book form an overview of
the disintegration, while offering piecemeal a program of measures to deal
with it, hardly lay claim to the mantle of historical or economic prescience.
Agencies with far greater manpower and resources than I possess could have
produced a book of this type, but have not done so. I therefore offer my own
work to fulfill a vital need emerging in the world.

But why should anybody care about the opinions of Webster G. Tarpley about
the world economy? The comprehensive answer is represented by this book as
a whole. But in terms of an immediate and ponderable credential, I offer the
following. This analysis was written for a private client in one of the three top
Swiss banks, and was issued on November 15, 1993.

IS THE DERIVATIVES CRASH AT HAND?

It has of course become a commonplace in the world financial

press that the very possible defeat of NAFTA on Nov. 17 could
collapse the Mexican and other third world stock exchanges, thus
precipitating a world-wide financial and banking panic that could
bring down the US dollar and the American banking system.
This "NAFTA 1929" scenario is eminently plausible, especially
because possible warning tremors of the long-awaited derivatives
panic have already been observed.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average continues to trade near its

record highs in the neighborhood of 3700. But during the first
two weeks of October, an alarming decline has taken place in the
Dow Jones Utilities Average, and this appears to be associated
with a reversal in the overall direction of the market for long term
US Treasury bonds.

On October 29, the Dow Jones Utilities closed at 240.18. On

Monday, November 15, the Dow Jones Utilities closed at 222.52.
This represents a decline of more than seven per cent during a
relatively short period, a significant correction in a sector of the
market that is likely to be easily upset by volatility. Utility
companies include electric power companies and similar firms
that tend to appeal to conservative investors who are averse to
risk but want stable prices and safe returns. Wall Street observers
stress that the utilities average is prediscounting a rise in the rate
of inflation that is now widely reputed to be on the horizon,
including such basic sectors as food.

The decline in utilities was then quickly reflected in the prices of

long-term US Treasury bonds. Interest rates on the 30-year
reached their lowest point on October 15, with yields hovering
around 5.75%. This corresponded to the highest price on these
bonds in recent history. By Friday, October 29, the last trading
day in the month, the interest rate on 30-year bonds had backed
up to 5.96. During the following week the interest rate on these
long bonds rose a startling one quarter of one per cent, bringing
the yield up to 6.20%. This was accompanied by a downward
slide in prices and above all by markedly increased volatility,
with the long bond price jumping around from hour to hour like
the quotation of a highly speculative stock. The New York Times
noted on November 5 that the selloff was a "little like the fires in
California. Selling has swept the market like wind-driven flames
while traders and investors watched, stunned and unable to stop
it." On Nov. 15, with long bond yields only slightly better at
about 6.15%, the same paper discussed the skittishness of the
bond market under the headline "Signs of Investor Nervousness
 Grow." Many of the Wall Street crowd now think that the long
rally in bonds, which had its beginnings back in 1991, is now
definitively over. If so, the resulting instabilities could prove
profoundly unsettling to the world of finance.

This turned out to be a highly accurate forecast. The bond rally was indeed
over, and interest rates were turning sharply upward. What followed was the
great bond market crisis of 1994, the worst since the period after World War I.
This was the turning point which Soros, Orange County, Barings, Goldman
Sachs, and other powers of the financial world guessed wrong. By their
miscalculation, they variously incurred bankruptcy, liquidation, default,
grievous loss, and personal ruin. Based on this track record, it is worth reading
this book, even if its analysis contradicts the allegedly authoritative insider
opinion being offered by brokers, bankers, and economics professors. If
Robert Citron and Nick Leeson -- to name just two -- had heeded my advice at
the end of 1993, they would have avoided the kind of notoriety which they
achieved in 1994 and 1995.

It is the author's hope that the programmatic ideas in this book may be used to
facilitate the immense task of world economic recovery and reconstruction in a
post-oligarchical twenty-first century. Ideally, it might be employed as a
sourcebook by candidates preparing to run for office in the aftermath of the
cataclysm, or by government officials around the world. The basic ideas of
economics are universals, and their essence does not vary much from place to
place.

Today, some economic authorities deny that there is any crisis, and thus
maintain that nothing needs to be done about it. Others admit that there is a
crisis, but deny that anything can be done -- this is a group which is destined to
grow. Some others have been predicting the crisis for a long time, and claim
that only they know how it can be solved. The author indignantly rejects the
idea that economic recovery is some kind of book sealed with seven seals,
which only a certain individual or party has been mysteriously empowered to
open. No mortal human being, or group of them, has any monopoly on the
ideas and programs which can produce economic recovery. The notion that
they do represents an obscurantism worthy of Simon Magus, the founder of
gnosticism. There is nothing esoteric, nothing secret at all about economic
recovery. There is only the blindness generated by vast and stubborn
ignorance, hardened by greed, pride, envy, and the other cardinal sins. Valid
economic theory has developed historically over many centuries, and it is no
one's private property.

The author's hope is that the considerations contained here may contribute to
the rise of a new school of thought in economics, history, philosophy,
sociology, and other areas of inquiry. This might be called the anti-oligarchical
school, and the contention here is that it is the typically American outlook.
Oligarchy is the social reality behind globalization and usury. An anti-
oligarchical current in modern thought would provide the needed antidote to
the oligarchical assumptions which now pervade the Zeitgeist, and which
make the task of dealing with the looming breakdown crisis of world
civilization much more difficult than it really needs to be. Every nation on
earth would profit from promoting an enlightened and tolerant nationalism as
against the presently dominant oligarchical modes of thinking. For the United
States, the effective countering of oligarchical axioms would necessitate a
revival of the ideas of Franklin, Hamilton, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt,
whose eclipse has made our intellectual tradition insipid.

This book aims at intellectual as well as economic reconstruction. In the late

twentieth century, people think of education and learning as questions of
information. This notion of information silently accepts empiricism and
pragmatism as the inevitable ways of looking at the world. This boom rejects
empiricism and pragmatism as philosophical schools, and rather attempts to
exemplify the historical-philosophical method associated with Plato and his
successors. Readers are therefore encouraged to concentrate on the
philosophical method which the information is meant to convey.

The great need of the current moment is for a regroupment of anti-oligarchical

and anti-globaloney forces worldwide. This needs to be done on a civil basis,
without abuse or vituperation, and carefully respecting the human dignity of
each and every participant. Methods inherited from the Protestant sectarians of
the seventeenth century, from the Inquisition or counter-Reformation, or from
the Third and Fourth Communist internationals will surely be counter-
productive. Rigidly organized formations have often turned out to be their own
worst enemies, and in any case belong to the past. Instead, there are two
relevant models for the type of discussion which the author of this book hopes
to stimulate. One model goes back to the gardens of the Rucellai mansion in
Florence in the years just after 1515-1516. Here in the so-called Orti
Oricellari a group of Florentine and Italian patriots gathered in the midst of a
very difficult age to discuss strategy. Machiavelli was one of the participants,
and one of the lasting fruits of these discussions is Machiavelli's masterpiece,
the Discorsi, a book which perhaps more than any other influenced the
American Constitution of 1787, and thus the entire concept of the modern
state. The other model is the network of correspondents maintained by G. W.
Leibniz during the years before and after 1700, which provided the impulse for
many of the scientific innovations which have made the modern world
possible. A modern equivalent for the Orti Oricellari or the Leibniz network
might be found today on the Internet. In this spirit, the author invites
comments and criticisms of his work, and will attempt, within the ever-present
financial constraints, to find a way to expand his web site so as to promote a
many-sided dialogue among serious participants. Others should do the same.

Parts of Chapters VI, VII, and X have previously appeared in different form in
various publications and at my website.

Finally, I would like to apologize to those who ordered pre-publication copies

during the autumn of 1998 for the considerable delay in shipping the computer
disks on which this book is being issued. Thank you for your orders, and thank
you for your patience.

Webster G. Tarpley
December 1998

This publication is designed to provide accurate and

authoritative information in regard to the subject matter
covered. It is sold with the understanding that the author
and publisher are not engaged in rendering financial,
investment, legal, accounting, or other professional
service or recommendations. If legal or financial advice
or other expert assistance is required, the services of a
professional advisor who can become familiar with your
specific needs should be sought. The author, editors, and
publisher cannot accept any responsibility for errors or
omissions or for the consequences of the application of
the information in this book, and make no warranties,
express or implied, with respect to its contents.

Webster G. Tarpley was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1946. In 1966 he

graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University, where he was elected
to Phi Beta Kappa. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Turin, Italy.
He later taught English at Cornell University and the University of Milan,
Italy. From 1974 to 1984, he was a correspondent in central Europe, during
which time he co-authored Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro (Who Killed Aldo Moro,
1978) a study of international terrorism. In 1979-80, he appeared as
commentator for Teleradiosole, a television station in Rome. From 1984 to
1996, he was a correspondent in Washington DC. He is the co-author of
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), which sold 25,000 copies
and remains the only critical biography of the former President. In 1997 he
published an anthology entitled Against Oligarchy: Essays and Speeches
1970-1996. These books can be consulted on the internet at www.tarpley.net.
Tarpley has appeared with CNN Crossfire, Charley Rose, and numerous
television and radio programs. He has lectured in numerous colleges and
universities around the world. In 1995 Tarpley was named a consultant to the
Universal Ecological Academy of Moscow. He can be reached at
[email protected], or by mail at PO Box 1486, Washington Grove, Maryland
20880-1486 USA.
CHAPTER I

THE ONCOMING CATACLYSM

You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the
starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the
bankruptcies of business; the "Hoovervilles," and the young men
and women of the nation facing a hopeless, jobless future; the
closed factories and mines and mills; the ruined and abandoned
farms; the stalled railroads and the empty docks; the blank despair
of a whole nation -- and the utter impotence of the federal
government. - Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 23, 1944.

Around the end of the second millennium, the world is poised to experience
the final disintegration of the current international financial system. If the
present policy consensus among the Group of 7 nations persists, virtually all
of the leading financial institutions of the planet will be wiped out in a panic
of awesome scale and rapidity. The International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve System,
the Bank of England, the Bundesbank, the Banque de France, the Bank of
Japan - all will be at high risk of default, bankruptcy, liquidation, and final
demolition. Not just the United States dollar, but all currencies and all paper
financial instruments risk becoming virtually worthless and non-negotiable -
inevitably so, if the current policies are not urgently reformed. Entire types
of markets, such as many stock markets and derivatives markets for futures
and options on paper instruments, will almost certainly cease to exist.

The approaching cataclysm must not be confused with a mere collapse in

these markets. A collapse is a decline in prices. Today the Dow Jones
Industrial Average hovers above 8000 points. Within a day or two it could
descend to 1000, to 50, or to 10. That is a collapse, the same type of event
which we saw in 1929 or, in a milder form, in 1987. But what happens when
the Dow Industrials approach zero? What happens when the New York
Stock Exchange suspends trading, as it came close to doing in the worst
moments of the 1929 and 1987 crashes? What happens if the New York
Stock Exchange shuts down and stays shut, the market for Dow stocks
becomes so illiquid as to disappear? If the stocks in question become non-
negotiable paper, in the same class with the bonds of Tsarist Russia, the
Confederate States of America, and other lost causes, then this kind of
instrument can be said to have disintegrated. If something similar happens in
bonds, futures, options, indices, and other paper instruments, and if we also
have a panic run on banks and a currency crisis, then we begin to see what a
disintegration might look like.

Decades ago, Al Capp's comic strip L'il Abner featured the rasbucknik, a
communist-bloc currency unit. The peculiarity of the rasbucknik was that it
not only had no exchange value, but actually had negative value. How can a
currency have negative value? Because, if you had a mass of rasbuckniks,
you had to pay someone to take them away. A great deal of the $200 trillion
or so in financial paper which oppresses the world towards the close of the
twentieth century will soon be found to be in the same category with the
rasbucknik.

Disintegration is much worse than 1929 or 1987, or the Panics of 1837,

1873, or 1893. Disintegration is worse than the Tulip bubble, the Mississippi
bubble, or the South Seas bubble. The classic modern example of financial
disintegration is the German hyperinflation of 1923, when the German mark
fell from 4.2 to a US dollar in 1914 to 10-12 trillion marks to a dollar by
mid-November 1923. That meant that the value of all existing paper
instruments had been wiped out, and order had to be restored from outside of
the country. Collapse is a bear market, followed by severe economic
slowdown and high unemployment. Disintegration is no market -- and,
what's worse, no job, no food, no electricity, no clothing and other
merchandise - unless and until an anti-depression program is proposed by
the President and validated by the Congress.

In the era of credit cards, debit cards, and electronic fund transfers, the
concept of disintegration has acquired new and ominous overtones. A
meltdown of the interbank settlement systems, followed by a shutdown of
most banks, would lead to a freeze on most plastic money, checks,
automated teller machines, and the like. Ask yourself how much cash you
have in your pocket right now, and how many days you and your family
could live with food bought with that cash. Then recall that the entire world
System (has Henry Kissinger reverently refers to it) could be shut down in 3
to 5 business days, or even sooner.

Ponder the food shelves of your local supermarket. Note that apart from
bread and grains, a rising proportion of that food is now imported, including
meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, and other items. What will happen if the US
dollar is no longer routinely accepted in world trade, as could very easily
happen in the kind of crisis that now looms? Many varieties of food that are
now available will no longer be there. If food supplies are cut off for several
days, food riots with the looting of supermarkets are likely to follow. A
scenario like this one gets much uglier as the days go on. Ask the residents
of Moscow or Jakarta, who have been living through it. And of course, it
can happen here.

Disintegration implies no mere financial blowout, however inconvenient.

Disintegration threatens the breakdown crisis of a whole mode of
civilization, as in the collapse of the Roman Empire after Diocletian and
Constantine, or as in the combination of war, bankruptcy, and plague which
wrecked the civilization of Medieval Europe. The fourteenth century
breakdown crisis in Europe reduced the population by about one third.
Given the more demanding thermodynamic prerequisites of the late
twentieth-century world economy, a full-fledged breakdown crisis now
might reduce today's world population from almost six billion to less than a
billion, possibly over a period of several decades. Demographic collapse can
already be observed in Russia, to cite only one example.

This is the cataclysm which is now rapidly approaching. The handwriting is

on the wall: since the fall of 1994, we have experienced an unprecedented
series of financial and economic crises. After the fateful turn upward in US
Treasury bond interest rates in October, 1993, we had first of all the great
bond market crisis of 1994, which was the worst since World War II. Then,
around Thanksgiving 1994, came the Orange County bankruptcy - the
biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Popular legend blamed
Robert Citron, the man in charge of Orange County's investments. But
Citron's practices were absolutely typical, and the insolvency of this once-
rich county had been caused by derivative investments sold to Orange
County by Merrill Lynch.

It was through the Orange County debacle that many ordinary people first
heard of derivatives. They were surprised to find that these extremely
volatile "financial products" had already inflicted grievous losses on Procter
& Gamble, Gibson Greeting Cards, Ferruzzi, and Cayuhoga County, Ohio.
Pay attention to these derivatives, since they are destined to play a key role
in the coming collapse, much as brokers' margin loans did in 1929, or as
portfolio insurance did in 1987. In early December 1994 there began the
crisis of the Mexican peso and the Mexican stock market. The Mexican
crisis revealed the foolishness of those who had touted the so-called
"emerging markets" around the world, promising windfall profits in the
looting of underdeveloped nations which had turned away from
protectionism, communism, or statist models. From Brazil to India, from
Poland to Argentina, all emerging markets were touched by panic.

By the last Sunday in January 1995, the Mexican crisis had brought the
world to the edge of panic and collapse. On that day Georgia Senator Sam
Nunn told one of the Sunday morning television interview programs that a
US bailout package for Mexico could not pass the Senate. On Monday,
January 30 the Mexican stock and currency markets panicked. That evening
President Clinton decided to use emergency powers and Executive Orders to
halt the Mexican panic with a US bailout package. When Clinton acted,
other lending institutions joined in, and the result was a $50 billion bailout
package. Clinton's action on Tuesday prevented the fall of the Mexican
banking system on Wednesday, which would have been followed by panic
runs and bankruptcies for the main Wall Street banks on Thursday. By
Friday, the European, Japanese, and world banking systems would have
been in ruins. Clinton had solved nothing, although he had bought some
time. As for Mexico, it began to undergo a violent contraction in real
economic activity along the lines of the US experience in 1930-33.

At the end of February 1995, Barings Bank went bankrupt. A previous crisis
at Barings had detonated the Panic of 1893 in Wall Street. This time Barings
ceased to exist. Attempts by Barings to blame its bankruptcy on a rogue
broker are an insult to the intelligence of the public. It is now an
institutionalized practice to scapegoat a "rogue trader" if a large financial
institution is bankrupted or decimated by derivatives losses. This is about as
ridiculous as the kindred practice of blaming every political murder or act of
terrorism on a deranged "lone assassin." But in May 1995, another venerable
British merchant bank, S.G. Warburg, had to be saved from bankruptcy
through a takeover by the Union Bank of Switzerland.

By March 1995, the crisis of the United States dollar occupied center stage.
It was natural that a worldwide financial crisis should envelop the world's
leading currency. Some suggested making the German mark or the Japanese
yen into worldwide reserve currencies, but these are even less capable than
the dollar of discharging such functions. The dollar's wild roller-coaster of
instability during the rest of the spring calmed somewhat during the summer,
but started up again in September.

In June, in the midst of the financial equivalent of a category V hurricane,

the heads of state and government of the Group of Seven - the leading
economic powers of the world - met at Halifax for another of their yearly
consultations in the series started at Rambouillet in 1975. Although the US
delegation was able to at least place crisis symptoms like Mexico and
Barings on the agenda, no serious measures were ordered to deal with the
reality of the crisis. Rather, the G-7 consensus called for "reflationary crisis
management," pumping up money supplies in order to stave off liquidity
crisis and bankruptcy. Much of the new liquidity was to come from Japan,
which had embarked on attempted reflation with a 0.5% prime rate. The
world continued to drift into the maelstrom.

During the summer months of 1995, it became evident that the colossal
family fortunes of the titled European nobility, especially the British, were
aware that the bubble of paper investments was about to explode. They
began shifting their assets into gold, silver, other precious metals, basic
metals, strategic metals, oil, grain, and other foods. They were buying in the
cash market, and they were demanding immediate delivery to their own
warehouses. They did not want options or futures; they insisted on taking
physical possession. These oligarchical families were thus preparing for the
cataclysm, going short on paper instruments and long on commodities. Their
policy was no longer paper speculation; it was speculative hoarding of
tangible, physical raw materials. This move by the leading oligarchical fondi
was studiously ignored by the leading financial commentators.

As July 1995 turned into August, the icy breath of banking panic was felt in
Japan and Taiwan. This was the run on Tokyo's Cosmo Credit Union.
Cosmo was soon followed by Hyogo Bank, the first bank failure in postwar
Japanese history. During the following weeks it emerged that the leading
Japanese banks had built up more than $1 trillion in bad loans in their real
estate lending portfolios. Soon the ratings of the Japanese banks in question,
which include the very biggest in the world, went past F to FFFF or 4-F,
unfit for service. In the last week of September 1995, a new and unexpected
ingredient was added to the panic: Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich,
Chairman Pete Dominici of the Senate Budget Committee, and more than
154 Republican House members began to agitate for a Treasury default on
the public debt of the United States. Such a default had never occurred in
recorded history so far, but Newt and his fellow enthusiasts of the
Conservative Revolution were threatening to use the need to raise the $4.9
billion ceiling on the public debt to force Clinton to accept a reconciliation
bill that would include a capital gains tax cut plus savage cuts in Medicare,
Medicaid, Social Security (in Title 4A, aid to families with dependent
children, commonly known as welfare), farm support payments, student
loans, and other entitlements. Dominici was claiming that ten market
insiders like Soros's man Druckenmiller had told him that balancing the
budget would far outweigh the problems inherent in a default. On the day
that Gingrich made his threats, the US dollar fell by about 5% against world
currencies. It was clear that a default by the US Treasury, which had become
a distinct possibility for October-November 1995, had the potential to
detonate the final phase of the ongoing collapse, and perhaps thus to usher in
disintegration itself.

The situation of the Japanese banks and the desperate measures undertaken
by the Tokyo government to bail them out dominated the financial news
during late 1995 and 1996. Japanese hot money dished out by the Bank of
Japan to keep Japanese commercial banks above water was the key to price
gains in US stocks. In the fall of 1995, the US branch of Daiwa Bank
reported over a billion in losses, and this was blamed once again on a rogue
trader. In June 1996, it was allegedly another Japanese "rogue trader" who
racked up astronomical losses for Sumitomo and its copper trading
operations. How long could Japanese interest rates at 0.5%, providing
liquidity to pump up the world bubble? These were the questions the
speculators asked each other in 1997.

1997 saw one of the greatest monetary crises of the postwar period. In 1992
and 1993 the monetary crisis was centered in Europe. In 1994 the epicenter
was the Mexican peso; in 1995 the US dollar was collapsing for a time. In
1997 it was the turn of Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia,
Singapore, and finally Hong Kong. The danger emerged that a financial
debacle in one or more of these countries could administer a lethal blow to
the Japanese banking system, and magnify a regional currency crisis into the
beginning of world disintegration. This potential began to turn into reality
with the explosion of the Asian regional crisis in the summer and autumn of
1997. The regional crisis was immediately as systemic one, involving
Russia, Latin America, and all the so-called merging markets. Russia began
to fall part in May 1998, and by August Russia had defaulted. In the
meantime, Brazil was in the tempest as well. In the midst of it all, the
Japanese banking system continued to deteriorate, and the world was
moving deeper into economic depression, towards final financial
disintegration.

THE FAILURE OF PROFESSIONAL ECONOMICS IN THE AGE OF

GLOBALONEY

The implication of these recent events is that this is not a time of financial
stability, and that we do not have a stable world financial system. Risk is
pervasive, and the danger of default is never absent. We see the empirical
fact of a series of crises. But behind them there is the larger issue that
combines practical survival with theoretical economics: what about a new
world depression on the scale of the 1930s, or even worse? What about a
worldwide financial meltdown? What about, to use the bankers' own code
word, the threat of "systemic crisis"? Academic economists are usually
found cheerleading for some new rip-off of the public interest in the name of
"competitiveness in the global economy" (hereinafter "globaloney" for
short). But a few of these older academics, in their lucid moments, are
willing to admit that economic theory is in total crisis. The Keynesian
synthesis was overturned by the monetarists, they will say, and the
monetarists have been overturned by the unexpected consequences of
monetarism as practiced by governments from Nixon to Carter to Thatcher
and Reagan. There is no theory left standing, concede the academics, as they
leave for their next board meeting. Economics as a science in search of truth
is long since dead. All that is left is chaos theory and "fuzzy engineering",
the specialty of the quantitative analysts employed by hedge funds and
securities firms.

THE INGREDIENTS OF GLOBALONEY

Most economists are only too happy to repeat the absurd litany of
globaloney. But everyone should remember the warning that sausage-eaters
should stay out of the sausage factory, since they are sure to be shocked
when they see how their favorite snacks are really made. So it is with that
most dubious sausage, globaloney. Here are some essential components of
this new creed:

1. Floating exchange rates among currencies, with wild gyrations and no

gold convertibility.

2. Hot money speculation, stockjobbing, and usury, culminating in hedge

funds and the $200+ trillion worldwide bucket shop of financial derivatives.

3. Privately owned and privately controlled central banks, with the private
Bank for International Settlements as the flagship, the Federal Reserve, the
Bank of England, etc.

4. Free trade, dumping, and the runaway shop, as in NAFTA, GATT, the
European single market, etc.

5. Secular deflation; depression as cure for inflation (Keynes in reverse),

with high interest rates expressing the political ascendancy of the
bondholders.

6. Deregulation, especially of financial markets, with growing domination

by oligopolies and cartels.

7. Stagnating and declining world production, especially in basic industry

and especially in per capita terms.

8. Casino society, frantically seeking monetary wealth under the constant

threat of systemic crisis.

9. Permanently high unemployment and declining standards of living, with

weak labor unions, union-busting, a shrinking middle class, and fabulous
wealth for a tiny, parasitic oligarchy of financiers of about 500,000 persons
worldwide.

10. Anti-statism, with the withering away of the national state, its
infrastructure, and its social safety net, except when the insolvency of
financial institutions threatens systemic crisis (Bush S&L bailout,
Greenspan's backdoor bailout of US banks at Treasury expense, $50 billion
Mexican bailout fund, $500 billion Japanese bailout fund, and IMF bailouts
funded by taxpayers of IMF member states).

11. A race to the bottom among nations (and even among states and
provinces) to gut health, environmental, safety, and other regulations, while
offering tax incentives to venture capitalists.

12. Oligarchy, more often referred to under such terms as "the

establishment," "the elites," "the market, "market forces," or "market
democracy."

13. Class war of the tiny finance oligarchy against the vast majority of
humanity.

Such are the principal axioms of the way things are done at the moment.
Many a career has been made with these crude slogans. Each of these points
is a shibboleth of the globalized economy, and each one is at the time an
affront both to God's natural law as well as to the practical needs of
developing human society. That leaves the question of whether these
arrangements are headed for systemic crisis. Reagan, with the help of
Volcker, had been the harbinger of a serious recession in 1982. Bush had
also presided over a pronounced downturn. But these had been contained.
What about the possibility of a collapse or even of a disintegration,
accompanied by bottomless depression?

During the collective insanity of a dying financial bubble, almost nobody

wants to hear anything about economic crisis. But this remains the great
issue of our time, and the evidence looks worse and worse the more one
looks. For example: economic depression itself is not a theoretical
possibility; in terms of declining industrial production and infrastructural
decay, depression is already a practical reality and has been with us since the
height of Volckerism in 1982-83. By postwar historical standards, economic
depression is already a given. The only question is when this state of affairs
begins to impact the consciousness of the hedge-fund operators and mutual
fund speculators who dominate "the market."

In the past, economists were capable of frankly discussing the possibility of

a new world economic depression. Let us hear once more the comforting
words of Paul Samuelson, the MIT professor whose textbook, Economics,
was the standard college introduction to economics for several decades.
Samuelson for many years reassured everyone that a new depression was
impossible because of the "built-in stabilizers" of the modern US economy.
(In the meantime, one of the last of his stabilizers, the cold-war military
economy, has been dismantled.) Samuelson was also sure that the
government would never permit a new depression. We cite from
Samuelson's 11th edition, published in 1980:

Banks are much safer than they used to be before the depression....
Banks are safe today because everyone realizes that it is a vital
function of government to stand behind them (and behind its Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation, set up to protect depositors) should a
depression come and panicky 'runs' on the banking system ever recur.
No banking system with fractional reserves - i.e., none which keeps
less than 100% of its deposits in cash - can ever turn all its deposits
into cash on a moment's notice. So every fractional-reserve system
would be a 'fair-weather system' if government did not stand ready to
back it up. If panic ever came again, Congress, the President, and the
Federal reserve Board would act, even using their constitutional
powers over money to print the money needed in a national
emergency! Had this been said and done back in the black days of the
early 1930s, history might have been different. Our country might
have been spared the epidemic of bank failures that destroyed the
money supply, creating fear and crisis for the whole capitalist system.
With the American people of both political parties realizing that the
government stands behind the banking system, it is highly improbable
that a panic could ever get started. Here is a case where being
prepared to act heroically probably makes it unnecessary to do so.
[Samuelson, 281-282]

Unfortunately, since the coming of global deregulation and globalization,

and since the Republican Party's conservative revolution of November 1994,
nothing remains of the factors cited by Samuelson to justify his optimism.
An Executive Branch whose chief concern is to hold Kenneth Starr and the
would-be impeachers at bay may not be able to act. The US Government has
done much to make the economic crisis worse, and cannot be relied upon to
fight the breakdown crisis, even when it is finally evident to all. Citizens
must mobilize to secure a positive outcome.
WARNINGS

The coming of the final collapse phase has been to some degree an open
secret. While publications that cater to the gullibility of the American middle
classes have seldom devoted any systematic analysis to the possibility of a
financial cataclysm, publications addressed to the international financial elite
-- that is to say, to the beneficiaries of globalization -- have sometimes
conducted a brutally cynical discussion of the dimensions and timing of the
catastrophe over the period of the last several years. A number of popular
writers have also pointed to the danger of depression. To bring the average
American up to speed, we will provide a quick overview of this debate.

The popular author Douglas Casey has been predicting world economic
depression since the time of the Carter administration. In his most recent
book, published in 1993, he reaffirmed this perspective that what he calls a
"Greater Depression" will soon be upon us: "In Crisis Investing (1979) and
Strategic Investing (1982), I argued that a depression was inevitable. This
prognosis still holds, and I believe this depression will dwarf the events of
1929. ...Why should a depression occur now? A depression could have
materialized out of any of the credit crunches in the last three decades,
including the financial squeezes of 1962, 1966, 1970, 1980, and 1982. With
each episode inflation went higher, interest rates rose, unemployment
increased, and the bankruptcies were bigger. Near bankruptcies (such as
Lockheed, New York City, Chrysler, Continental Bank) became more
numerous and dangerous and more likely to demand a government rescue.
But each time we experienced just a recession that the government ended
before the underlying distortions in the economy had been eliminated....
there likely will be a titanic struggle between the forces of inflation and the
forces of deflation. Each will probably win, but in different areas of the
economy." [Casey, 3,9,30] Notice that Casey believes that it is government
which is ultimately responsible for depressions.

A MUTUAL FUND CRISIS

One specific feature of the coming crisis was singled out for attention in
1993-1994 by Donald Christensen, the publisher of the Insider Outlook
newsletter. Christensen's focus is the mutual fund market, and the likelihood
of a severe decline, cause in part by mutual fund managers engaging in high-
risk speculative practices, including "weird instruments," as he calls
derivatives. In his book Surviving the Coming Mutual Fund Crisis,
Christensen warned of a coming "mutual fund crisis [that] will probably
come to a head some time in 1996 or 1997." "If we are lucky," Christensen
added, "- if for some reason the push to ease mutual fund investment
limitations slows or if America's unquestioned love affair with the mutual
fund idea cools - we might make it to the turn of the century." [Christensen,
177]

THE BIGGEST FINANCIAL CATASTROPHE SINCE 1776

A secular decline in stock and other asset prices based on analysis using the
Elliott Wave Theory was offered by Robert R. Prechter, Jr., in his July 1995
book, At the Crest of the Tidal Wave. Prechter forecast a "slow-motion
economic earth quake that will register 11 on the financial Richter scale."
According to Prechter, "Markets that began declining early will continue
their descent to depths currently inconceivable to conventional observers.
The giant wash will take with it wholesale prices, consumer prices,
employment, profits and tax receipts, as well as the fortunes of banks,
manufacturers, insurance companies, and pension funds. Ultimately, the
process will devastate the debt balloon, the welfare state, the solvency of
municipal and federal governments, and the political status quo." [Prechter,
408] Specifically, Prechter predicts the following: "(1) the stock market is
near the end of Cycle wave V from 1932; (2) the Dow Jones Industrial
Average will fall back to at least 1000; and (3) when the stock market falls
that far, we will have a depression." [Prechter, 409]

Prechter's view is derived from material published in the Elliott Wave

Theorist going back to the early 1980s. At that time, Prechter was predicting
about a dozen fat years of spectacular bull markets, followed by the "biggest
financial catastrophe since the founding of the Republic" towards the middle
of the 1990s. In this perspective, we are faced today with the end of a Grand
Supercycle bear market; the result will be to wipe out all financial gains
reaching back to the conclusion of the American Revolution. According to
the Elliott Wave analysis, the coming crash will be so severe as to provoke a
worldwide monetary and economic collapse, including "worldwide banking
failures, government bankruptcy, and eventual destruction of the paper
money system." [Elliott Wave Theorist, April 6, 1983 and April 3, 1984]
Prechter's expectation is that the long-term low point in world markets will
be reached between 1998 and 2004, and he recommends liquidating stocks
and bonds, getting out of debt, putting cash in T-bills, and acquiring a gold
hedge.

Another early warning came from economist Lyndon LaRouche. In the

Executive Intelligence Review of June 24, 1994, LaRouche offered the
following forecast:

The presently existing global financial and monetary system will

disintegrate during the near term. The collapse might occur this
spring, or summer, or next autumn; it could come next year; it will
almost certainly occur during President William Clinton's first term in
office; it will occur soon. That collapse into disintegration is
inevitable, because it could not be stopped now by anything but the
politically improbable decision by leading governments to put the
relevant financial and monetary institutions into bankruptcy
reorganization." [EIR, June 24, 1994]

Possible financial collapse has also been widely discussed in the daily
newspapers, especially in Europe. On August 2, 1995, the liberal German
daily Frankfurter Rundschau used the occasion of the panic run on Japan's
Cosmo Credit Union to analyze the relations of the Japanese banks to the
rest of the financial world. According to this paper, "The fear is spreading
outside of Japan that a much bigger bank than the troubled medium-sized
Cosmo Credit Union could go under, thereby triggering a chain reaction in
the international financial system." This soon happened.

On September 8, 1995 the German financial weekly magazine

Wirtschaftswoche assembled various commentaries on the parlous state of
world financial markets under the title "Selling in a Panic." Leading the
Cassandras was Roland Leuschel of Banque Bruxelles Lambert (Lambert as
in the late lamented Drexel Burnham Lambert) who predicted new market
turbulence: "this time as well," said Leuschel, "there will be a crash at the
stock exchange." Leuschel had stated earlier that "the countdown to the
crash has begun. We are paying the price today for the creation, during the
past two years, especially in the United States, of the biggest financial
bubble in human history." To this were added the ruminations of hedge-fund
magnate George Soros, to the effect that "at present, the market is in a boom
phase, but exactly because of that, it has the potential for a crash." Soros
quickly added that "something special has to happen in order to trigger a
collapse." But a few weeks later Soros, for one, decided that he had been too
bearish for his German readers. At this time, Soros was announcing profits
of hundreds of millions of dollars raked in by selling the US currency short.
On September 22, 1995 Leuschel repeated his analysis to the Sueddeutsche
Zeitung of Stuttgart in an article entitled "Clouds Over Wall St." This time
Leuschel focussed on the unrealistically high price/earnings ratios of the
S&P 500 stocks. For Leuschel, these p/e ratios were comparable only to
levels reached in Japan in 1989, before the Nikkei turned downwards, and in
the US before the 1929 crash. Leuschel also characterized the German
public debt and budget deficit as "a time bomb."

A PARASITIC PREDATOR

Another critical estimate of the perspectives of the global economy came in

1995 from David C. Korten, a disciple of Willis Harman who proceeds from
New Age premises towards a utopian ecological and communitarian
program, but offers numerous valid observations along the way. Korten sees
first of all that the world financial system has separated itself from the
productive economy, and is now attacking the latter. He describes
graphically the life of the half-million or so persons who make up the
world's financial elite, rising each morning to immerse themselves in
tracking the market gyrations that flicker across their computer screens and
the same time to ignore the reality around them. "The global financial
system," he finds, "has become a parasitic predator that lives off the flesh of
its host -- the productive economy." [Korten, 193] Korten sees derivatives as
what they are, new and risky forms of leverage purchased using borrowed
money. Derivatives create risk; they do not manage it, because it is
becoming unmanageable. Financiers love volatility for its own sake, since it
brings fees and profits. Korten portrays "corporate cannibalism," the
practices of the raiders and leveraged buyout specialists. "A rogue financial
system is actively cannibalizing the corporate sector," he stresses. [Korten,
214] Summing up recent financial explosions, Korten concludes that "this
system is inherently unstable and is spiraling out of control -- spreading
economic, social, and environmental devastation and endangering the well-
being of every person on the planet. Among its more specific sins, the
transmogrified financial system is cannibalizing the corporations that once
functioned as good local citizens, making socially responsible management
virtually impossible and forcing the productive economy to discard people at
every hand as costly impediments to economic efficiency." [Korten, 206]

"SHOCKPROOF"!

By contrast, one of the most absurd blanket denials of any current possibility
of financial system meltdown came at the beginning of 1996 in Foreign
Affairs, the organ of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, which is
itself the American branch of the Royal Institute for International Affairs,
the so-called Chatham House. The author was Ethan B. Kapstein, the
director of studies at the CFR. Kapstein's line of argument might have made
the most unscrupulous mutual fund salesman blush. As evidence of
imperturbable stability, Kapstein cited the great financial debacles of 1995,
including the Mexican crisis, the Barings bankruptcy, and the losses of
Daiwa bank in New York. Kapstein was mightily encouraged by the ability
of the System to survive these dramatic financial collapses: "...the markets
responded to these financial crises with little more than a 'ho-hum'. In fact,
the US stock market boomed, and interest rates around the world declined.
The Bank of England allowed Barings to fold, and nothing happened.
American regulators closed Daiwa Bank's New York office, and the markets
did not squeal. Both inside and outside the US government and international
organizations, analysts continue to debate whether the Mexican bailout was
really necessary." So the idea is that the System has been able to deal with
three potential catastrophes without batting an eye. The title of Kapstein's
piece suggests his conclusions: "Shockproof: The End of the Financial
Crisis."

Look at the difference -- enthused Kapstein -- between 1995 and the bad old
days of 1974, at the dawn of the deregulated hot money era, when bank
failures of the small to middling sort like Herstatt and Franklin National
were capable of sending the entire System to the brink of insolvency!
According to Kapstein, the sage central bankers, with their 1975 Basel
Concordat and their 1987 Basel Accord on minimum capital standards, have
guaranteed that the markets will continue unshakable. Kapstein's conclusion
is that "Over the past 20 years the leading economic powers have created a
regulatory structure that has permitted the financial markets to continue
toward globalization without the threat of systemic collapse." No more
depressions, assures Kapstein, who ends on a note of nostalgia for
Schumpeter's theory that depressions brought "creative destruction" and kept
the System dynamic. Kapstein chose to ignore the greater Japanese banking
crisis of which the Daiwa shenanigans were but a facet. This Japanese crisis,
as Kapstein surely knew, had in mid-1996 impelled the US government to
ready a bailout fund of $500 billion, ten times as large as the Mexican
bailout fund which he does mention. From 1996 on, the Japanese banking
crisis remained the most obvious menace of systemic breakdown.

The Basel Accord and its purported minimum capital adequacy standards
have been rendered meaningless by the so-called off-balance sheet activities
of the biggest banks, including derivatives. What use can these standards be
if Chase Manhattan's derivative exposure amounted to 267 times its equity
capital at the moment that Kapstein was writing? In reality, as we will show,
the world financial System has been to the brink of meltdown and
breakdown about three dozen times since the world monetary crisis began
over 30 years ago with the November 1967 devaluation of the British pound
sterling. By now, all the available energy of the System is devoted to
preventing the wild speculative instability and volatility of the System from
destroying it, as they constantly tend to do. The growth of the speculative
bubble means that these recurring crises are more and more likely to initiate
the downfall, and not less and less likely to do so.

THE END OF THE BUSINESS CYCLE?

Even the editors of Foreign Affairs must have been aware that Kapstein's
crude argument, amounting to the classic "this time is different" or "new
paradigm" often heard in the last stages of a speculative bubble, could hardly
have been convincing. In their July-August 1997 issue, accordingly, they
published another article in the same spirit, buttressed this time by a more
detailed analysis, but arguing for a thesis just as absurd as Kapstein's: this
time the assertion was that not just financial panics are relics of the past, but
that periodic contractions of business activity are also passé. If Francis
Fukayama could assert the "end of history" some years earlier, no one
should be surprised if the CFR now tries to consign both financial panics
and economic depressions to the dustbin of history.

The idea of the business cycle is mainly a mystification. Especially in

modern American history, what are usually labeled as business cycles
represent the results of British political-economic machinations occurring
within the context of virtual economic warfare. As we will discuss at some
length, severe panics and depressions generally take place because powerful
forces want them to take place -- and that someone is more often than not the
City of London finance oligarchy. Another way of saying this is to point out
that the depressions of the post-Napoleonic era have been crises either of a
world monetary system centering on the British pound sterling and British
debt structures, or (after 1944) of a world monetary system based on the
dollar in which the British capacity to create mischief was still quite robust.
So 1929 was not a cyclical crisis.

In "The End of the Business Cycle?" Professor Steven Weber, a political

scientist at Berkeley asserts that, given the globaloney economy of the late
twentieth century, "in the advanced industrial economies the waves of the
business cycle may be becoming more like ripples." Even professional
economists have commented on the weakness of what they call the current
recovery, but for Weber this is a harbinger of a new historical pattern. From
now on, he argues, the business cycle will be "dampened." Among the
factors contributing to the new era Weber lists the service economy, which
weakens trade unions, whose strength was anchored in manufacturing.
"Declining union power," Weber points out, "contributes to the development
of increasingly flexible labor markets, extending to downwardly flexible real
wages in some OECD countries, notably the United States." This mirrors
John J. Sweeney's point that of all the advanced industrial nations, the
United States is currently experiencing the most extreme decline in real
wages and growth of inequality in remuneration - a situation which itself
constitutes a crisis, but which Weber sees as a factor of stability. Pausing to
congratulate the Fortune 500 companies for reducing their full-time work
force by more than 30% over the last 15 years, Weber celebrates the rise of
the temps, whose numbers have grown by 19% over the last 3 years and who
now constitute no less than one tenth of the entire American work force. In
the fast-growing professional and technical fields, Weber asserts,
"paradoxically, permanent status as a temporary worker is becoming an
increasingly respectable career path."

It is under the subhead of "More Markets, More Money" that Professor

Weber skates on the thinnest ice of all. He attempts to argue that the new,
exotic, and very dangerous financial instruments called derivatives have
increased the stability of the international financial system:

The growth of other financial markets as well as mutual funds

and similar products has been phenomenal -- particularly, but
 not only in the United States. Concerns about derivatives
trading reflect that enormous growth. In developed countries,
trading in over-the-counter derivatives exceeded $8.5 trillion in
1993, along with more than $6 trillion in interest rate swaps
outstanding. Activity in standard financial instruments traded
on exchanges (currency futures, stock market index options,
interest-rate futures) doubled between 1992 and 1994. These
new financial products spread and diversify risk. And despite a
few heavily publicized losses on derivatives contracts in the
mid-1990's, these numbers will probably climb higher as
corporate treasurers and fund managers become better at using
these new tools to stabilize financial flows and protect
themselves against shocks.

Were there any dark clouds on Weber's horizon? He sees a secular decline in
world inflation, which he fears may bankrupt developing countries that
borrow money on the expectation that the task of repaying it in dollars
cheapened by inflation. Some countries, he feels, will have forced either to
default or to renegotiate their debt. "Does this signal another international
debt crisis?", he asks. Not to worry, replies Weber, the big banks have long
since quit making loans to the third world, so private investors and mutual
funds (which contain the life savings of the American middle class) will be
left holding the bag. Weber's conclusion is that "...debt rescheduling need
not spawn a systemic crisis as it did in the early 1980's."1

Weber's piece represents the apotheosis of the stateless, deregulated, hot

money financial system: "Global capital markets, " he writes, "are
increasingly efficient at linking capital to production, managing risk, and
1
Ironically, the same issue of Foreign Affairs that offered Professor Weber's desperate
optimism also hosted the somewhat more sober view of MIT's Professor Paul Krugman.
In a review critical of a book converging on the "end of the business cycle", Krugman
covers his own flank more cannily than Weber, noting that "anyone who reads the
business press knows that the mood these days is one of 'what, me worry?' optimism.
After six years of fairly steady growth with surprisingly quiescent inflation, every major
newspaper or magazine has either suggested or flatly declared that the business cycle is
dead -- that the recession of 1990-91 was the last such slump we will see for many years
to come...near the end of another long recovery, in the late 1960's, pronouncements that
the business cycle was dead were just as prevalent as they are today." Krugman believes
that the business cycle will continue, simply because the economics problems of the
future will be new, "and because the problems are new, we will handle them badly, and
the business cycle will endure."
providing shock absorbers that cushion economic fluctuations." He describes
the benefits of securitization of debt in glowing terms: "Investors can buy
repackaged pieces of risk and spread their holdings across countries,
industries, and time periods." He impatiently dismisses warnings of a
possible systemic crisis, and seems to belittle the recent emergencies that
have taken the world to the brink of meltdown: "The doomsday argument,
advanced by writers like William Greider, that complex markets might act in
synergy and come crashing down together is simply not supported by a
compelling theoretical logic or empirical evidence. Two and a half years
after the peso collapsed in Mexico, the striking aspect of that 'crisis' is how
limited the feared 'Tequila effect' turned out to be in both scope and
longevity." There are a couple of million unemployed workers in Mexico
who might want to take issue with that retrospective.

Weber's prose, like the 1920s irrational exuberance of Professor Irving

Fisher of Yale and Professor Joseph Stagg Lawrence of Princeton cited with
such consummate irony by Professor Galbraith in his celebrated book The
Great Crash, appears destined to illustrate the stubborn persistence of
human folly and vanity in some future account of the millennium crisis. We
can only hope that policy makers are not guided by such a distorted and
utopian outlook.

At the Federal Reserve, Greenspan, rather than consider reforming the

system, was readying his printing presses for the eventuality of a total panic.
On May 7, 1998, Greenspan a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve
Bank of Chicago: "With financial leveraging there will always exist a
remote possibility of a chain reaction, a cascading sequence of defaults that
will culminate in a financial implosion if it proceeds unchecked. Only a
Central Bank, with unlimited powers to create money, can with a high
probability thwart such a process before it becomes destructive." Others
were less confused. On February 8, 1996, Senator Edward Kennedy told an
audience at the Center for National Priorities that the United States and the
world had entered a "quiet depression."

THE WORLD FINANCIAL SYSTEM IS IN PIECES

At the Group of Seven meeting in Lyons, France, held on June 27-29, 1996,
IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus gave a talk on world financial
conditions to a seminar. Camdessus' remarks were summed up in an article
written by journalist Clovis Rossi for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao
Paulo, June 28, 1996. The title of the article was "Next Crisis is in the
Banks, says IMF." Rossi quouted Camdessus as saying that "the 'next
earthquake' in the world after the Mexican crisis will be in the banking
sector." "The world financial system is in pieces and it is urgent to tighten
the screws."

IT WILL START WITH A BANKING CRISIS

A few months later, at a September 28, 1996 Washington press conference

of the Inter-American Development Bank, Camdessus was asked where he
thought that "financial lightning" might strike next. "I suspect it will start
with a banking crisis," replied Camdessus. Camdessus also demanded the
urgent reform of Latin American banks so as to prevent repeats of the
Mexican banking crisis in other nations. "Ladies and gentlemen," croaked
Camdessus like the proverbial raven of ill omen, "Nevermore! Nevermore!
This just cannot be so!" At the 1996 annual meeting of the IMF in
Washington, Camdessus elaborated on this warning. He told the IMF board
on October 1 "to take urgent care of the Achilles' heel of the global economy
today, the fragility of national banking systems." Camdessus added that "in
many countries a banking crisis is an accident waiting to happen.... On the
basis of recent experience, let me tell you that this is something we truly
don't want to see repeated.... We must also avoid the systemic consequences
such a crisis can entail."

RECIPE FOR A DEPRESSION

The issue of economic depression, which it was for a long time taboo even
to mention, has belatedly begun to preoccupy elite opinion-makers of the US
Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment. The July 1996 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly ran a cover featuring a "Recipe for a Depression," with the
legend "mix falling wages, a push for zero inflation, and a bipartisan drive to
eliminate the budget deficit. Simmer." This cover called attention to a
featured package of two articles, the first entitled "The Forces Making for an
Economic Collapse," written by New School economist Thomas I. Palley.
Palley discussed the slow and anemic recovery from the Bush recession of
1990-91, the chronic weakness of consumer demand as families struggle
under massive accumulations of consumer debt, and the dangerously
deflationary impact of deficit-reduction measures like the proposed balanced
budget amendment. He also criticized the apparent deflationary obsession of
Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board, which was insisting on
combating the specter of cost-push inflation even when real unemployment
and underemployment were at a minimum of 14%. Palley pointed to the
impact of labor-market globalization under free trade and the declining
power of trade unions.

According to Palley, under NAFTA (the North American Free Trade

Accord, which includes the US, Canada, and Mexico), the US merchandise
trade surplus with Mexico, which was $5.4 billion in 1992, has turned into a
deficit of $15.4 billion. If, as NAFTA backers claimed, every billion dollars
of US exports translates in to 19,000 jobs, then NAFTA has already
destroyed 395,200 jobs, many of them in manufacturing. In an interesting
twist, Palley also listed the world-wide guild of professional free-trade
economists, with their deflationary bias, as a cause of the possibly looming
depression. As Palley summed up the situation:

The past twenty-five years have witnessed a persistent weakening of

structural conditions within the US economy. This weakening has
been predicated on changes in labor markets which have undermined
the position of American workers, polarizing income distribution and
increasing job insecurity. The effects of these changes have been
obscured by a debt binge by households and government, and by
favorable demographic factors. However, households now face
increasing financial constraints, government faces political
constraints, and the demographic situation is changing radically. At
the same time, in the face of increased capital mobility, wages
continue to decline and job insecurity widens. These are the grounds
for believing that the next economic recession could spiral into a
depression." [Palley, 58]

US BANKS ARE INSOLVENT

The British Tory Lord William Rees-Mogg is the former editor of the
London Times; he was a publicity man for Sir Anthony Eden's imperialist
policy in the Suez fiasco of 1956. His resentment against the United States
for refusing to rescue the British Lion from the Suez humiliation marks him,
like many of his British contemporaries, down to this very day. Lord Rees-
Mogg and his American annex James Dale Davidson have theorized about
the financial outlook in a recent book. They wrote in 1993:

We said that the 1990's would be a decade of depression. To a

greater extent than conventional wisdom would allow, this
forecast too, has come true. Britain is clearly in depression. The
Financial Times said on October 16, 1992, 'The British
economy is like a battered car on a steepening descent. The
same can be said of Scandinavia. New Zealand and Australia
entered slumps years ago and have not recovered.
Unemployment in Canada has reached 11.8% as we write, 30%
higher than it stood at the end of 1930." [Rees-Mogg, 13]

In Lord Rees-Mogg's view, the depression was already upon us. He cited the
crushing debt burden of the advanced sector:

Running huge debts to postpone a further decline in living

standards has been considered a policy success by the few
observers, like David Levy of the Jerome Levy Institute, who
acknowledge that the current environment is a depression.
Indeed, Levy worries that the government deficit may be too
small to offset the implosion of the private economy.... Those
who speak optimistically about a 'contained depression' beg the
question." [Rees-Mogg, 390-391]

Lord Rees-Mogg made no bones about that fact that some of the largest US
money center banks were unsound: "The lowest-rated American banks,
including the 'too-big-to-fail' banks, have $600 billion in assets, of which
only $500 billion appeared to be performing in 1992. The capital of these
banks is far less than $100 billion. They are insolvent." [Rees-Mogg, 398]

In the summer of 1997 Lord Rees-Mogg, partly because of the fall of the
Tory government and the ascent of a Labour Party regime (albeit a
Thatcherized one), became thoroughly pessimistic, and began to see Tony
Blair (despite his "Cool Britannia" image) as the new Ramsay MacDonald of
the current world economic depression. Let us concentrate on the financial
aspects of Rees-Mogg's forecast. He writes: "After 1929, everyone vowed
that there must never again be so great a Wall Street crash, and there never
has been. Yet such crashes have occurred in other advanced stock markets,
notably in the Tokyo market after 1989, that fell by about 70 percent from
the peak, about as large a fall as Wall Street suffered in the three years after
the 1929 crash. There is nothing in the organization of late-20th century
stock markets which makes a crash impossible; indeed, some people think
that the growth of derivatives makes a crash more likely. . . .the values on
Wall Street are now out of line with any historical precedent in the 125 years
of Wall Street statistics. There probably will be a major correction, and there
certainly could be a crash. If it happens on Wall Street, it will also happen in
London, though the London values are more moderate." [London Times,
June 26, 1997]

LIKE THE ROLLING CRISIS IN AUSTRIA, MAY 1931

Then we have the veteran economist Charles Kindleberger, Paul

Samuelson's colleague at MIT during the 1960s. Kindleberger was also
aware that something had gone wrong in world finance: "In 1994 especially,
a number of Latin American countries encountered trouble, the worst of
which was felt in Mexico.... the United States and Canada came to the
rescue.... The crucial and unanswerable question is whether in stopping the
crisis in Mexico, the financial authorities may have prevented a run on
emerging markets more widely, in a perhaps-fanciful analogy with the
rolling crisis that started in Austria in May 1931." [Kindleberger, 186-187]
The historical analogy is not fanciful but valid. But Kindelberger, like
Greenspan, seemed to think that as long as we have an international lender
of last resort, like the IMF or the BIS, any depression can be kept under
control. He pays no attention to the hyperinflation that can derive from the
monetizing of debt.

A CONTAINED DEPRESSION

Financial journalist Steven Solomon is the author of a useful insider account

of how central bakers have attempted to cope with recurring threats of
systemic crisis in the world financial system, a subject on which he is more
blunt than many of his colleagues. Solomon acknowledged the existence
during the early 1990s of a "contained depression", but quickly added that
the way out of this situation is a global economy administered by a cabal of
unelected central bankers, and not by national governments: "Like the stock
market boom and abrupt global crash on Black Monday [October, 1987], the
[1982-83] (less developed country or third world) debt crisis was a
manifestation of the dangerous debt explosions and revulsions unleashed by
the global capital regime. So too were the real estate overlending booms and
busts in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which made the
1990s 'contained depression' unique in the postwar era." [Solomon, 41] But
for the end of the nineties, Solomon saw a recovery in the US, thanks
primarily to the efforts of the Greenspan Fed. Solomon thought that the real
danger might come from a "curtailment of central bank independence in a
futile effort to boost growth through lower interest rates, or to trade
protectionism. Either could abort the world recovery prematurely and
possibly topple the faltering world economic and monetary order."
[Solomon, 493]

What will be the outcome of the great speculative episode of the 1990s?
Historically, every boom had led at length to a bust. Economist John
Kenneth Galbraith responded in a recent book that "...one thing is certain:
there will be another of these episodes, and more beyond. Fools, as it has
long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money.
So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are
captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for
centuries; thus in the long future it will be." [Galbraith 1990, 110]

One of the most perceptive economists in the world is doubtless the

Frenchman Maurice Allais, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in
Economics, which is awarded by the Bank of Sweden. Maurice Allais has
been a consistent voice for realism, and a critic of the global hot-money
finance system and of its ideology, the so-called doctrine of globalization.
Economists of the Anglo-American school like to present globalization as a
process of metaphysical inevitability. Allais is wise enough to show that
globalization does not have ontological status, but is rather the product of
the greed and blindness of certain power groupings or financier factions. "A
gigantic accumulation of debt is eating away at the core of the world
economy," wrote Allais in Le Figaro on November 29, 1993. "The pursuit of
global liberalization of the exchange markets . . . [is] at minimum
adventurous, and in reality very dangerous." In January 1994, Allais assailed
the globaloney gospel propagated by the World Bank and OECD in their
pamphlet "Trade Liberalization: Global Economy Implications," which he
categorized as "pseudo-scientific" and "totally erroneous." Allais
commented that "the same men at the World Bank, OECD, and GATT who
hold out the prospect of an increase in wealth of $213 billion per year
[through free trade] by the year 2002, remain absolutely silent about the
financial flows amounting to an average $1.1 trillion per day, 40 times more
than the amounts corresponding to trade payments. These financial flows
totally destabilize foreign exchange markets and make it impossible to apply
trade agreements in any reasonable way. The fact that experts from such
leading institutions practice such disinformation, consciously or
unconsciously, is unbelievable." Allais pointed out in the spring of 1996 that
"the globalization of the economy is certainly profitable for a group of
privileged persons. But the interests of these groups cannot be equated the
interests of humanity. Rapid globalization must produce general
unemployment, injustice, confusion, and instability. This is disadvantageous
for all nations and is neither unavoidable, nor necessary, nor desirable." [Le
Monde, April 9, 1996]

MELTDOWN CAUSED BY AN UNCONTROLLED DOLLAR PLUNGE

The 1994-1995 dollar dive that saw the battered greenback lose about 17%
of its value against the Japanese yen and about 13% against the German
mark was ostentatiously ignored or downplayed in many quarters, but it was
taken seriously by some. One was Paul Erdman, remembered by many as the
author of that engaging novel, The Crash of 1979, who dedicated a short
book to this latest season of shocking monetary instability. Erdman was able
to discover the potential for a systemic breakdown in the combination of
currency gyrations, derivative speculation, and the uncertainty of
international interbank settlement. Erdman warned that the "Herstatt effect"
of 1974 might now be repeated on a vast scale With foreign exchange
transactions worldwide over $1 trillion per day by 1990, the value of
Japanese fund transfers alone had reached 100 times the country's official
Gross Domestic Product. Erdman cited BIS figures showing that it took less
than three days for Japan's interbank funds transfer systems to generate a
turnover equal to Japan's total economic output for one year. The same
process also took about three days in the US, and four days in stodgier
Germany. Erdman described this "ballooning" of the value of world
financial transactions, citing Peter Norman of the Financial Times, who
wrote that "big UK clearing banks have at times found the equivalent of
their entire capital committed in temporary overdrafts by mid-morning. This
need not matter if business flows normally. But in the event of a failure the
authorities could be confronted with a chain reaction that could jeopardize
the world financial system. [Erdman, 72-73] Certainly no one could deny
that the ballooning of international financial transactions, which had reached
an estimated $5 trillion per day by the summer of 1997, contained the
obvious potential for a liquidity crisis and consequent panic.

As Erdman sumed up this latter eventuality: "Simulations carried out on the

CHIPS system, one of the two large interbank transfer systems in the United
States, have suggested that an unexpected failure by a big participant could
result in nearly half of all institutions being unable to settle transactions,
with perhaps a third of them being left in limbo. And because the dollar is
the currency in which the vast majority of global financial transactions are
settled, if the American clearing system goes down, so does the world's. The
risk of a meltdown caused by an uncontrolled plunge in the dollar, which
could set off a chain reaction that would start in the foreign exchange market
but then spread throughout all derivative markets, is definitely there."
[Erdman 75] This was clearly one of several potential Achilles heels of the
entire System.

VOLCKER: A SYSTEM IN DISARRAY

One of the most celebrated protagonists of postwar financial and monetary

affairs is at the same time associated with an almost apocalyptic pessimism
regarding the dollar. We refer to Paul A. Volcker, a former official of the US
Treasury and the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of
Governors. Volcker was present at the destruction of Bretton Woods at
Camp David on August 15, 1971, and must bear significant responsibility
for today's world economic depression, as we demonstrate further on in this
book. Volcker knows from personal experience that when a dollar fall
acquires momentum, the decline can be extremely difficult to stop, even
when other governments try very hard to be cooperative. After Volcker's
Plaza currency deal in 1985, the dollar lost 41% of its value against the
Japanese yen -- rather more than the central bankers had wanted. [Volcker,
269] One of by-products of braking that fall of the dollar was the October
1987 world stock market panic.

The lability of the dollar is amply chronicled in Volcker's memoir Changing

Fortunes, a kind of monetarist duet sung together with Toyoo Gyohten,
formerly of the Japanese Finance Ministry at the Woodrow Wilson School
in Princeton. In this memoir, Volcker admits his deep "concern about an
excessive depreciation of the dollar." [Volcker, 279] Volcker cites a 1984
Federal Reserve memo which, he says, summed up his great fear for the fate
of the greenback. That memo commented that "we have reached a rather
uncertain equilibrium with a large budget deficit and a large current account
deficit, both financed in large part by borrowing overseas . . .the capital
inflow can shift very quickly if confidence in the dollar should diminish.
Such a loss of confidence in the dollar could be triggered for example by
fear of the re-emergence of US inflation or a shift in the preferences of fickle
investors." But Nixon's capitulation of August 15, 1971, counseled by
Volcker, had placed the country at the mercy of such "fickle" investors in
the first place. These risk factors remain emphatically with us.

When he was at the Fed, Volcker was constantly haunted by the fear that the
dollar would suddenly disintegrate. "Sooner or later," he writes, "I thought
there would all too likely be a sickening fall in the dollar, undermining
confidence...." [Volcker, 180] He laments that President Reagan did not care
about a dollar dive. In this connection Volcker has supplied his own epitaph
as a policy maker: "Increases of 50 percent and declines of 25 percent in the
value of the dollar or any important currency over a relatively brief span of
time raise fundamental questions about the functioning of the exchange rate
system. What can an exchange rate really mean, in terms of everything a
textbook teaches about rational decision making, when it changes by 30
percent or more in the space of twelve months only to reverse itself? . . .The
answer, to me, must be that such large swings are a symptom of a system in
disarray." [Volcker, 246] The world financial system described by Volcker
is clearly crisis-prone and ultimately unworkable. Volcker's colleague
Gyohten calls the current arrangement a "non-system" and he stresses that it
"was not the result of anyone's choice." Rather, the global economy "was
inevitable when the Bretton Woods system became unsustainable. What is
wrong with the current non-system is its lack of stability and predictability
in exchange rates, which seems to hurt the stable growth of trade and
investment." [Volcker, 303-304] So we have been living for thirty years
amidst the ruins of Bretton Woods. It is surely time to restore a functioning
world monetary mechanism.

MONETARY MELTDOWN

Another analysis involving systemic breakdown as a consequence of dollar

and other monetary instability comes from Judy Shelton of the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University in her 1994 book, Monetary Meltdown.
Here the starting point is the post-1971 currency chaos, which the author
contrives to present as a result of Keynesian theory, even though it was the
arch-monetarist Milton Friedman who was the loudest advocate of the
abolition of government-set currency exchange rates. Shelton surveys the
"breakdown in orderly currency relations around the world" and wonders if
we are "slated for a new round of beggar-thy-neighbor exchange rate
policies" reminiscent of the competitive devaluations pioneered by the
British during the 1930s. With governments now officially excluded from
the exchange rate business, Shelton wants them to intervene anew, but only
so as to exclude themselves once again, this time via the institution of
"honest money" in the guise of fixed parities, but with a brutally deflationary
gold coin standard, an idea she says is backed by Robert Mundell, Jack
Kemp, Lewis Lehrman, and others.

Shelton asks: "...in this nuclear age . . . shouldn't we take evasive actions to
halt the process that begins with currency turmoil and protectionist exchange
rate policies and ends with political confrontation and the possibility of
military conflict? . . Can the syndrome be interrupted to prevent a
catastrophic outcome?" [Shelton, 12] What Shelton seems to have in mind is
less a catastrophic financial breakdown crisis per se than a process of
international conflict which escalates through trade war and economic war
into military hostilities. "Money meltdown," she says, "is a warning sign that
nationalistic economic policies are threatening to dissolve the trade and
financial relationships that undergird a peaceful world community."
[Shelton, 12] During the world financial turbulence occasioned by the
Russian default, Ms. Shelton appeared from Paris on CNBC to call for a new
Bretton Woods monetary conference to be prepared by an international
commission chaired by Greenspan. She also wanted the US to apply
conditionalities to the $18 billion refunding being sought by the
International Monetary Fund. One useful aspect of her remarks was the
demand that the United States subject the IMF to conditionalities about the
use of the funds; the cherished dream of the IMF bureaucrats has long been
to subject the United States itself to the Diktat of monetarist conditionality.

EMERGING MARKETS A CASINO

In October 1996 the German economic paper Handelsblatt carried an

analysis by Rimmer De Vries, the well-known former resident economist of
J.P. Morgan & Co. in New York. De Vries observed that "this time, unlike
two years ago with Mexico, if problem debtor countries like Thailand or
Turkey have a currency crisis, there will not be any billion-dollar rescue
packages. The crisis will simply be allowed to happen." This underestimated
the addiction of the IMF to the bailout approach to crisis management. But
in a timely warning for holders of US global economy mutual funds, De
Vries also warned that "what today is called 'emerging markets' by the
international credit markets, can only be likened to a casino. And the time
will come when the banks and investment funds responsible for this will
simply pull the rip cord."

L'HORREUR ECONOMIQUE

As the anaconda of economic globalization slowly tightened its coils of

speculation, downsizing, and marginalization around the struggling body of
humanity, thinkers of all sorts grappled with the need to comprehend the
incubus of the end of the twentieth century. One who attracted international
attention in 1996 was Viviane Forrester, the author of a longer essay entitled
L'Horreur Economique. Mme. Forrester became a celebrity as a prominent
critic of the bateau ivre of the new economic order, revered by students and
other protestors against the Balladur-Juppé-Chirac policy of sacrificing the
welfare of France to the all-consuming Moloch of the Maastricht treaty, with
its monomaniacal 3% limit for budget deficits. The title of her book is drawn
from a verse by Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), the French late romantic poet.
Mme. Forrester, who had previously been a novelist, believed that world
civilization has entered a time in which most people are superfluous, simply
no longer needed by the rapacious and profit-obsessed ruling caste of
financiers with laptops who spend their time trading "options on options on
options" in international financial markets: "Pour la premiere fois -- she
writes -- la masse humaine n'est plus materiellement necessaire, et moins
encore economiquement, au petit nombre qui detient les pouvoirs...."
Employment, she feels, is historically over, and it is only because of the
cowardice of politicians that society maintains the pretense that unemployed
persons should be forced to find jobs, when there are no jobs. "On ne sait" --
she writes --"s'il est risible ou bien sinistre, lors d'une perpetuelle,
indéracinable et croissante penurie d'emplois, d'imposer à chacun des
chômeurs decomptés par millions -- et ce, chaque jour ouvrable de chaque
semaine, chaque mois, chaque année -- la recherche 'effective et permanente'
de ce travail qu'il n'y a pas." Dismayed by permanent mass unemployment in
Europe, Mme. Forrester is of course too fatalistic, since high jobless rates
are the result of identifiable government and corporate policies, and not of
any fatal laws of economics as such. In reality, there is an abundance of
productive work that needs to be done, but which is blocked by the financial
system. But Mme. Forrester performs a useful public service when she
warns that if high unemployment persists, it will be only a question of time
before fascist demagogues (she points to the racist Jean-Marie LePen) come
forward proposing the Final Solution for this new surplus population.
Permanently high unemployment levels may elicit calls from financiers for
the elimination of the useless eaters. In the global economy, the value of
human life has indeed been cheapened. Mme. Forrester also succeeds in
expressing some of the mutilation and degradation of humanity during the
saison en enfer called globaloney. Her chilling message is that the outcome
of the post-industrial utopia is not likely to be leisure and comfort, but rather
genocide.

ONE BILLION UNEMPLOYED

The reality of world unemployment and underemployment is most stark.

According to a September 1998 report from the UN's International Labor
Organization, world unemployment was headed for 150 million persons,
reflecting 10 million who had lost their jobs as a result of the crises of 1997-
98. The ILO also reported that the number of persons either lacking full-time
jobs or earning less than the minimum necessary for survival was between
750 and 900 million, or about 30% of the world population. Here was
another eloquent indictment of globaloney.

1.5 BILLION HUMAN BEINGS ON LESS THAN $1 A DAY

According to a June 1999 report of the World Bank, about 1.5 billion
persons on this planet were eking out their existence on a per capita income
of less than $1 per day. The World Bank defines $1 per day as a kind of
poverty line; only if you get along on less are you considered truly poor in
globalized terms. According to the report, those living below this poverty
line had increased by a stunning 200 million persons as a result of the 1997-
98 Asian financial crisis. To get an idea of how poor you really are on $1 per
day, we should recall that the average person in the United States requires a
total of about $90 in goods and services to get along each day, and the US is
hardly a bed of roses.

At the same time, the inequality of property ownership had reached

nightmare proportions. In a report released in mid-July 1999, a United
Nations subsidiary found that the 200 richest individuals controlled assets
which were greater than those possessed by 40% of the world's population.
By this accounting, the top 200 plutocrats own more than the bottom 2.4
billion or so.

PBS television commentator Tony Brown comes to a broadly coherent

conclusion about world property distribution in his recent book, Empower
the People. Brown's finding is that 356 individuals control 45% of the
wealth of this planet. Thus, Brown points out, these 356 fat cats have more
money than perhaps 3 billion at the other end of the scale.

Given these conditions, there appears to be no defense against the charge

raised in this book that financial globalization is a euphemism for an
oligarchy/plutocracy of the most pernicious sort.

THE DEPRESSED WORLD ECONOMY OF THE MID-1990s

The so-called "global economy" of the 1990s turns out to be a euphemism

for a new and more acute phase of a world depression which has been going
on since 1982. Only a purblind ideologue could argue that the global
economy (or: globaloney economy) has been successful or beneficial for the
people of the world. Under globaloney, Europe has taken the prize for mass
unemployment, while the United States leads in the decline of living
standards; Japan has experienced permanent recession and banking crisis.
The old Soviet economic sphere, the COMECON, has lost up to two thirds
of its factory and farm production, while Latin America has undergone a
sharp contraction in jobs and living standards. In Africa, life expectancy was
spiking downward. Southeast Asia, after a phase of expansion, is now
beginning to pay the piper. The winners, by contrast, are tiny cliques of
financiers and oligarchs.

If we examine a data series as fundamental as world crude steel production,

we find stagnation during most of the 1990s at levels inferior to 1989. World
steel production reached 785.9 million tons in 1989, but then fell for several
years, touching an interim 1990s low of 722.7 million tons in 1992. After
that, steel output hovered around 750 million tons, with 752 million tons in
1996.

For a time after World War II, the world economy was supported by the
forward momentum generated in the United States. For two decades after
1945, economic progress was maintained by the reconstruction of Europe
and Japan. Now, as we look across the world, there are no positive factors
left, and no factors of stability. The US has been in productive decline for
almost 40 years, since the 1958 recession. Japan has a banking crisis.
Germany is drowning in unemployment and debt. Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet sphere are being decimated by IMF shock therapy. Latin
American is experiencing a violent contraction. Southeast Asia is rapidly
beginning to fall apart. Africa is chiefly the theater of famine, civil war, and
genocide. There is nothing left. The world speculative bubble has no visible
means of support. It is a vagrant world.

GERMANY: MORE JOBLESS THAN WHEN HITLER SEIZED POWER

All European countries have been in recession throughout the 1990s, with
brief periods of weak and ephemeral recovery. The case of Germany is
highly instructive, since it also provides a barometer for the state of the
entire world economy. For many years in the recent past, Germany has been
the world's largest exporter, often exporting more than Japan, a country with
almost twice its population. Now Germany, with a national debt of about
DM 1.5 trillion at the end of 1995, has one of the heaviest per capita debt
loads in the world. In January 1997, it was officially announced that
Germany had 4.66 million unemployed -- or 12.2 percent. To this figure
must be added 320,000 part-time workers, 260,000 participants in
government make-work programs, 1 million trainees and re-trainees who
have dubious job prospects, and almost 2 million who have dropped out of
the official government unemployment system and are working in the black
economy, drugs, crime, and so forth. This makes a grand total of 8.138
million Germans who do not have a normal full-time job. New jobless
claims in January 1997 over December 1996 -- about 510,000 -- also
constituted the biggest one-time increase since the government began
keeping official jobless figures during the 1920s.

Compare today's 8.138 million to the unemployment figure when Adolf

Hitler seized power in Germany: then it was 6.1 million. Today's German
unemployment, with a comparable population, is one third greater than in
the depths of the Great Depression. There are true pockets of despair in
eastern Germany, where youth unemployment is between 40% and 50%.
According to Wilhelm Noelling, the former governor of the central bank of
the German federal state of Hamburg, Germany is already in a "Maastricht
depression."

Since the German economy is central to the European economy as a whole,

we see that all of Europe is in depression, with more than 16 million official
unemployed in the EU countries. Under current policies, there will be no
European economic recovery. The deflationary Maastricht Treaty for
European monetary union prescribes that no country can join the new
European currency, the so-called euro, if its yearly budget deficit is more
than 3% of its "gross domestic product." Entrance to the Euro is also barred
to countries whose public debt is more than 60% of their yearly gross
domestic product. The country's rate of inflation must not exceed 3.3% The
country's long-term interest rate must not exceed 9.3%. The country must
have managed to show its exchange rate stability by joining the Exchange
Rate Mechanism and remaining there for a prescribed time. By contrast, the
unemployment rate can be sky-high, and the standard of living can be falling
at any velocity - the country can still join the euro.

THE GNOMES OF LONDON

The Maastricht Treaty also creates an unelected, unaccountable private

central bank which is beyond the reach of national governments and beyond
the reach of the elected European Parliament in Strasbourg. Maastricht
expressly forbids the issuance of subsidized credit or low-interest credit,
which happens to be the only way to get out of depression. In the autumn of
1995, the attempt of the French regime of the neo-Gaullist Prime Minister
Alain Juppé to observe the Maastricht austerity criteria elicited resistance
from many levels of society in the form of the most extensive general strikes
since 1968. At the time, Juppé tried to deflect the blame to British finance.
Speaking in Avignon in mid-October, Juppé announced that "I do not want
to cut the deficit in order to please the market, those people I'll call...the
gnomes of London." Juppé specified that the gnomes of London were "the
modern version of the gnomes of Zürich...speculators who take surplus value
out of the economy...earning their living by creating tensions and difficulties
for others."2

In May 1997, German pro-austerity Finance Minister Theo Waigel

announced that falling German tax revenues made it unlikely that Germany
2
For the gnomes of Zürich, see Chapter IV.
itself could meet the infamous Maastricht convergence criteria. A year later,
the discrepancies were papered over by accounting tricks. The grim
European panorama extends to reputed strongholds of banking like
Switzerland. Remember the fabled soundness of the Swiss banks? Guess
again. According to a 1997 official report released by the Swiss Banking
Commission, between 1991-1996, Swiss banks lost a total of 42.2 billion
Swiss francs, a sum approaching $30 billion. Most of the losses had come in
Swiss real estate since the mid-1980s speculative bubble burst in 1991.

THE EX-USSR

In the larger countries of the ex-USSR, including Russia and Ukraine, the
"transition to a market economy" promised by the IMF turned out to be one
of the most colossal disasters in modern history. In Russia, "economic
reforms" like price deregulation and the privatization or selloff of state
property were carried out by President Boris Yeltsin, Prime Ministers Yegor
Gaidar and Viktor Chernoyrdin, privatization czar Anatoly Chubais, and
outside advisers Anders Aslund and Jeffrey Sachs. The policy was called
shock therapy, and it was fully backed by Camdessus and the IMF. In
launching this folly in October 1991, Yeltsin promised that the worst would
be over by the end of 1992. But even after the end of Yeltsin's catastrophic 5
year plan at the end of 1996, there was no end in sight to the unfolding
disaster.

Over the initial five year period of shock therapy, Russia's Gross National
Product went down by 52%. IMF shock therapy turned out to be worse than
Hitler: during the 1941-1945 onslaught of the Wehrmacht, the Soviet
economy lost only 24%. During the 4 worst years of the Great Depression in
America, GNP sank by just over 30%. Russian industrial production was
down by 55%. This is again worse than 1929-1933 in the United States,
when industrial production went down by just under 54%. Most dramatic,
and most fraught with evil portent for the future, was the decline in
investment, which was down by 78% by 1995 and kept falling.

Russia experienced a bout of hyperinflation during the first year of shock

therapy in 1992, with prices rising by a rate of 1,354% over the entire year,
and touching a momentary yearly rate of 2,318% by the end of December. In
that dark December, Moscow prices were rising by about one per cent per
day, conjuring up the specter of Weimar. After that, average yearly inflation
subsided somewhat to 896% for 1993, 302% for 1994, 190% for 1995, and
48% during 1996. But real incomes kept dropping. During 1996, it was
estimated that real incomes in Russia were down by about 46%. Inflation
may be back to 300% by early 1999.

In the chronically troubled Russian farm sector, the grain harvest dropped
from 99.1 million tons in 1993 to 81.3 million tons in 1994 and a disastrous
63.5 million tons in 1995. This was the worst result for Russian grain
production in thirty years. 1996 was not much better with a harvest of 69.3
million tons. The 1998 harvest was the worst in 40 years, with only 48.6
million tons of grain officially reported. This was about half of the level of
1997. By 1994, Russian production of all kinds of food was estimated to be
about half of what it had been during the last years of the Soviet era. Tractor
production was down by 87%. Textile production was down by 85%. By
October 1998, 15 million Russians -- one out of every ten -- were officially
unemployed. An estimated 40% of the entire Russian population was below
the very austere official poverty line. Those who were getting the minimum
wage were receiving the equivalent of $5.50 per month, and wages were
many months in arrears.

This economic implosion produced an unmistakable demographic impact:

between 1992 and 1995 the Russian population declined by 728,000
persons, with a rising death rate combining with a falling birth rate to do the
damage. In 1996 alone the birth rate dropped by an additional 5%. Speaking
at a Woodrow Wilson Center forum in Washington DC on December 9,
1997, Dr. Murray Feshbach reported that the population of Russian was
declining at a rate of 1 million persons per year. As causes for the decline,
Feshbach singled out communicable diseases -- both infectious and parasitic
-- and the material and psychological toll exacted by the economic crisis.
The further social effects of shock therapy, especially the formation of a
criminal elite in politics and business, have been strikingly chronicled by
Stanislav Govorukhin in his book, The Great Criminal Revolution.

In the case of Ukraine, the economist and member of the national parliament
Dr. Natalya Vitrenko reported that the gross domestic product of the country
had fallen by 58% between 1990 and the end of 1996. The decline was 10%
during 1996, so there was no sign even that the collapse was slowing. The
58% loss of GDP turned out to be worse than the collapse of production in
Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, which totaled minus 56%.
Submitting to the IMF thus turned out to be worse than losing a world war.
Dr. Vitrenko estimated that of the 22 million jobs existing in Ukraine at the
end of the Soviet era, 8 million had been destroyed. 71% of the Ukrainian
population had a real income of less than $1 per day or less than $25 per
month. 27% had incomes between $25 and $50 per month. Only 2% of the
population got an income over $50 per month. The IMF puppets responsible
for this carnage were President Leonid Kuchma and Prime Minister Pavlo
Lazarenko. Ukraine was also suffering from an acute demographic disaster:
the total population of the country fell from 52.2 million in 1992 to 50.5
million in mid-1998, a decline of 1.7 million or 3.25%.

LATIN AMERICA

After the brush with national bankruptcy in 1994-1995, the Mexican

government was required as a precondition for international lending to
impose a very severe austerity regime. This austerity produced a violent
contraction in the levels of production and employment in the entire
Mexican economy. Over the 1995, the austerity program produced more
than 1 million new unemployed. By the end of 1996, Mexico had reached
almost 50% unemployment, up from 41% in 1991. Productive employment
-- as distinct from service employment -- has declined by a third since the
eve of the first Mexican debt crisis in 1981. The Mexican manufacturing
sector had declined by about one half over the same 15-year period. Mexico
had a real international indebtedness of $214 billion, much more than the
official figure. Bailout funds borrowed from the United States early in 1995
were repaid, but only by taking out loans from other borrowers. To avoid the
worst of the contraction, Mexico needed an open-ended debt moratorium,
the nationalization of its central bank, and exchange controls to prevent the
flight of domestic hot-money capital. But Mexico got none of that. Other
Latin American countries have been battered since December 1994 in a way
similar to Mexico.

El Financiero of Mexico City reported that between 1994 and 1998, the
number of indigent persons suffering from malnutrition in Mexico had risen
from 20 to 26 million. According to this report, another 40 million of
Mexico's 96 million population were living in extreme poverty, while
another 20 million were surviving on incomes insufficient to buy a even a
third of what the UN Economic Commission for Latin America identified as
the rock-bottom market basket for labor. This would mean that 86 million of
Mexico's 96 million people were living in poverty. 3

ASIA

For a number of years, Japan has been in the throes of its worst postwar
downturn. Between April and July 1997, Gross Domestic Product declined
by a sickening 11%, indicating a severe contraction in domestic economic
activity. The Hashimoto government, inspired by monetarist criteria,
responded to its large budget deficit (now estimated at 7% of GDP) by
sharply increasing the tax bite, an austerity policy that only made matters
worse. The background for these events was provided by the ongoing
Japanese banking crisis, which , as noted, centers on some $1.5 trillion in
bad real estate loans left over from the 1980s bubble economy. Japanese
banks reported aggregate losses of $17 billion for the first 6 months of their
1997 fiscal year.

In South Korea, the beginning of 1997 saw the bankruptcy of Hanbo Steel,
the country's second-largest steel company and a leading chaebol or
conglomerate. Hanbo succumbed to a debt burden of about $6 billion, which
was 22 times the company's equity. The demise of Hanbo also undermined a
number of South Korea's leading banks, who were left holding the bag for
this large debt. The impacted banks included Korea First Bank, Cho Hung
Bank, the Korea Exchange Bank, the Seoul Bank, and the government-run
Korea Development Bank. The Hanbo debacle was the opening of a
protracted financial-political crisis in South Korea which featured the
bankruptcy of the largest of the leading industrial groups, including Kia and
other giant firms. Kia was nationalized and Korea First Bank received a
government bailout.

Then began the collapse of the myth of the so-called "Asian Tigers" or NICs
- "newly industrialized countries" - featuring Hong Kong, Thailand,
Singapore, and Malaysia. At the beginning of March 1997, the largest and
most prestigious finance company in Thailand, the $3.8 billion Finance One
PLC, went bankrupt. From this obscure event commenced the unraveling of
the entire world, something only deregulated globaloney could have made
possible. The Thai government implemented financial emergency measures
to prevent a total national panic and crash. Trading in all bank and financial
institution stock was halted by the central bank, the Bank of Thailand.
3
El Financiero, September 2, 1998.
Finance One was quickly merged with the country's twelfth largest
commercial bank, and a government bailout was carried out. The stock
market fell to one half of its 1996 peak, and $700 million fled the Thai
finance companies. IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus quickly
appeared on the scene, and called on ASEAN, the association of southeast
Asian nations, to save Thailand by bailing out the international hot-money
speculators. Camdessus complacently told the Thais: "What you are doing is
exactly what you must do to avoid the recurrence of a Mexico-like crisis."
As we have seen, this was bad advice. The Bank of Thailand affirmed its
readiness to act as a buyer of last resort for the commercial paper and
promissory notes of all finance companies.

One barometer of an incipient new and sharper phase of world decline in

real economic terms was that world steel production fell by 0.2% during
1996, reaching 750.8 million tons. The decrease in production was largely
attributable to the European Union and second-place Japan, which was down
almost 3%. China became the world leader in steel production, increasing its
output by 10.1%, becoming the only country to exceed 100 million tons of
yearly steel output. The US was the third largest steel producer with 94.4
million tons of output. Among the IMF shock therapy victims, central
Europe was down almost 10%, while the USSR successor states were down
3.3%

"A WORLDWIDE FINANCIAL EXPLOSION - YOU HAVE BEEN

WARNED"

A couple of days before Halloween 1996, the London Times carried a

remarkable column by City of London writer Anatole Kaletsky. The column
warned that a "worldwide financial explosion" is at hand. "The great bull
market may not yet be over. But it is suddenly in mortal danger," wrote
Kaletsky. "Bonds round the world and the Anglo-Saxon currencies have
entered the kind of wild speculative period when even aggressive investors
may be well advised to stand aside -- and stock markets cannot ignore a
shock in bonds and currencies." "You have been warned," was Kaletsky's
conclusion. Well-known Deutsche Bank investment guru Kenneth S. Courtis
later told the German business daily Handelsblatt that, because of the
Japanese banking crisis, world financial markets were at "five minutes to
twelve" already during the spring and summer of 1995. Courtis noted that
"world markets are spectacularly leveraged around this yen-dollar deal....
When a market is this lopsided, and it suddenly starts to go the other way,
everyone's going to rush to get out the door at once when it blows."
[Handelsblatt, November 4, 1996]

IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE

A singular warning against excessive speculation came from Alan

Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Speaking on December 5,
1996 at the American Enterprise Institute, a stronghold of free enterprise
ideologues, Greenspan asked: "How do we know when irrational exuberance
has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected
and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?"
Greenspan went on to admonish market operators that "a collapsing financial
asset bubble" would necessarily harm the overall economy. Much attention
was focussed in the aftermath of this speech on the "irrational exuberance"
section. Much less attention was given to the question of the "prolonged
contraction" on the Japanese model, which is of course much scarier.
Greenspan's delphic language referred to the collapse of the Japanese bubble
economy in 1990-91, followed by the present $1 trillion plus banking crisis.

Towards the end of February 1997, speaking before the Senate Banking
Committee, Greenspan embroidered this warning with further comments:
"There is no evidence...that the business cycle has been repealed. Another
recession will doubtless occur some day.... We have had 15 years of
economic expansion interrupted by only one recession -- and that was six
years ago. As the memory of such past events fades, it naturally seems ever
less sensible to keep up one's guard against an adverse event in the future....
However, caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in
equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised
the question of sustainability," especially because of "very high earnings
growth and continued rising profit margins." But later in 1997 Greenspan
began to toy with the "New Paradigm" argument, which claims that the
globaloney world economy has freed itself of the depressing old baggage of
recessions and what not. More seasoned observers noticed that the "New
Paradigm" blather was simply a new edition of the eternal slogan of the
speculator fearing the inevitable retribution of the crash: "This time it's
different." In June of 1998, Greenspan hailed "the best economy in fifty
years."
BLACK FRIDAY WARNING FROM BEIJING

In mid-December 1996 the Chinese government newspaper People's Daily

suggested that a new world stock market panic might be imminent. Although
markets were now at dizzy heights, wrote People's Daily, "a drastic rise is
bound to lead to a drastic fall, and there is no exception to this in stock
markets at home or abroad . . . .The overheated stock market in China
reminds us of the 1929 stock crisis in the United States [when] people of all
strata were talking about stocks." The article went on to discuss the Japanese
bubble economy of 1986-1990, the New York crash of October 1987, and
the Mexican panic of 1994-95. In November 1994 Chinese Premier Li Peng
had been asked whether the Chinese currency would soon be made
convertible. "If our currency is convertible, another Black Friday crash in
the US would hurt China," Li had replied at that time. As the Asian currency
crisis of 1997-98 unfolded, it became evident that China was well served by
the residual protectionist measures left in place.

PESSIMISM IN DAVOS, 1997

Every year in February important leaders of world banking and industry

gather at Davos, Switzerland, on top of the Magic Mountain known to
readers of Thomas Mann. Fred Bergsten of the Institute for International
Economics in Washington set the tone for the 1997 proceedings with his
warning of "potential major shocks to the world economy; any of them could
hit in 1997. The most immediate and urgent problem is Japan." The
Pollyanna view was that the Japanese banking crisis had been last year
(1996), but that a US banking crisis might be on the agenda for 1997. Still
others were terrified of the effects of the January 1, 1999 European monetary
union. The European Monetary Union "might crash," thought Ulrich
Cartellieri of Deutsche Bank. Gone was the arrogant optimism of earlier
years that the "System" would be able to deal with all challenges that might
emerge.

The Davos elitists were disturbed by the appearance of John J. Sweeney, the
new president of the revived AFL-CIO. Before an audience long inebriated
by globaloney, Sweeney warned of the dangers of attempting to import the
"highly costly, very toxic" American model of labor docility. The
destructive trends in the global economy, argued Sweeney, derive from
"corporate choices, not economic laws. Too many companies rewarded by
government incentives have taken the low road in international competition.
They are cutting their workforces, their wages, and benefits. They are
fighting against working people and their unions. They scour the globe in
search of places where working people have low wages and no rights. This
road has been paved by conservative administrations that cut back on the
protections afforded working people, consumers, and the environment. They
joined the assault on unions and labor rights. They passed trade agreements
designed to protect the rights of those who invest their money, while
ignoring the concerns of those who invest their time and labor." But the
finance oligarchs remained wedded to these methods.

DOMINO EFFECT ON INTERBANK SETTLEMENT

During the Davos proceedings, Onno Ruding of Citibank posed the question
of systemic meltdown: "In their crisis of 1990 US banks took appropriate
steps. Japanese banks and the Japanese government have yet to take such
steps. There is a real danger that a bank or other failure could have a domino
effect on the interbank settlement system. What happens if, say, a Japanese
bank in New York or London has a liquidity crisis at a time of day when
Tokyo is sleeping? Would the problem get out of control in the few hours
before Tokyo opened its business day?" A good question; Citibank itself has
been to the brink so often during the last ten years that the precipice must
feel like home.

A CRISIS OF OVERPRODUCTION?

At the beginning of 1997, William Greider published his One World, Ready
or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, an attempt to survey the new
world order of rentier economy and the universal runaway shop. [Greider
1997] Greider's book provides much information, but also significant
confusion. An example is Greider's habit of treating the US Federal Reserve
as if it were a part of the United States government. Greider has spent
enough time with Paul Volcker to know that the Federal Reserve is a private
owned and privately managed institution which attempts to control the
elected and constitutional government, rather than being controlled by it. To
his credit, Greider tries to offer an overall theory of why the globaloney
capitalism of the 1990's is so crisis-ridden. Unfortunately, Greider concludes
that the global system is subject to crises of overproduction, of a glut of
things to buy on the world market relative to effective demand.

For Greider, the central contradiction of the prevalent system is "...the global
revolution's inclination to create new productive supply faster than the
available demand can consume the goods. Too many auto factories chasing
too few car buyers." [Greider 1977, 233] "The wondrous new technologies
and globalizing strategies are able to produce an abundance of goods, but
fail to generate the consumer incomes sufficient to buy them." [Greider
1997, 220] Greider cites Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute
to the effect that the United States is losing ground today because this
country plays the role of the "market of last resort," condemned to absorb
the excess capacity of all other countries in order to prevent a breakdown of
the entire world system. [Greider 1997, 206] This US role leads to a weak
labor market and downward pressure on real wages here, while workers in
other countries get to keep their export-dependent jobs. (Prestowitz and his
institute, Greider explains, speak "for US multinational manufacturers.") In
the opinion of Greider and Prestowitz, US trade deficits, US foreign
indebtedness, and the socioeconomic impact of excessive imports absorbed
by the world's "buyer of last resort" are the key factor in a coming crisis.
Greider plays up Prestowitz's forecast that "The trade deficits will provoke a
moment when you have to say stop...Nobody knows when the moment is,
but the longer you postpone it, the more indebted we become. Sooner or
later, we are going to have to stop importing. But the other countries are
refusing to import more. That's the point of breakdown. Sometime in the
next five or ten years, we are looking at some kind of crisis." [Greider 1997,
209] Another of Greider's authorities, Christopher Whalen, adds: " We are
headed for an implosion. If you keep lowering and lowering wages in the
advanced countries, who's going to buy all this stuff? You look around and
all you can see is surplus labor and surplus goods. What we don't have is
enough incomes. But the only way people find out there are too many
factories is when they wake up one morning and their orders are falling. If
this keeps up, we're going to face a lack of demand that's worse than the
1930's." [Greider 1997, 221]

The notion that capitalist crises are essentially crises of overproduction is an

old one, which has been carried forward in British economics from Parson
Malthus to Lord Keynes. Malthus, it will be remembered, warned the
capitalists that no one would be able to buy their production if they did not
support a state church with a well-paid clergy, and added that a "Church
with a capacious maw is best." Keynesian make-work schemes had
essentially the same inspiration. But the reality of today's world is not
overproduction or a glut of commodities on the world market. Today's world
is a world of underproduction and tragic underconsumption. Today's world
is a world of hunger and want, far worse than the Bretton Woods world of
1944-1971. World per capita production of the vast range of industrial and
agricultural commodities is stagnant or falling. The United States has
perhaps the fastest-falling standard of living of the traditional OECD
countries, but we have no monopoly on declining conditions of life. Living
standards are falling like a rock in the old COMECON states, in Africa, and
in Latin America. Europe and Japan are also in decline, while Southeast
Asia is falling fastest of all.

From his mistaken idea of overproduction, overcapacity and the

unsustainability of US trade deficits, Greider derives the threat of a systemic
world financial crisis. Greider is better than many writers when it comes to
recognizing the relative autonomy of financial markets to over-speculate and
multiply paper IOUs, without reference to the underlying realities of
production: he identifies a "basic elasticity in the value of financial assets
that allows financial markets, in extreme circumstances, to become unhinged
from the tangible realities of commerce... Financial prices, whether one
thinks they are sound or illusory, are rising much faster than the economic
activity upon which they are presumably based." [Greider 1997, 230, 232]

Overproduction and over-speculation combine for Greider to produce the

threat of breakdown: "The evidence of recent years -- recurring bubbles of
private and public debt that go bad and abruptly collapse -- strongly suggests
that it is finance capital that is overreaching reality . . . . The growing
imbalance of industrial overcapacity ultimately means that the capital
investors must be disappointed too, since they are busy investing in more
factories than the world really needs. Sooner or later the marketplace will
discard many of those surplus factories. When that happens, the capital
invested in them fails, too" [Greider 1997, 233] Greider is lucid enough to
see that the Japanese banking crisis of summer 1995 had taken the entire
world system to the brink of catastrophe. In those days, he says, "the world
was, in fact, flirting with a large, historic crisis -- the threat of a general
deflation like the 1930's -- and major governments were more nervous than
they revealed. If Japanese banking collapsed, it would likely bring down the
world system." [Greider 1997, 254] "Adhering to its own principles," he
says, " the rentier regime was flirting visibly with catastrophe, a monetary
disorder the world had not experienced in sixty years: a full-blown deflation
of prices, collapsing values for both financial assets and for real goods and
labor." [Greider 1997, 305] We should note in passing that those who
approach the study of the global system from the point of view of production
and the runaway shop are likely to be more impressed by the deflationary
tendencies, while those who study the ballooning of the financial aggregates
come away thinking of hyperinflation.

Greider's conclusion on the globaloney system is pessimistic, as he lets

megaspeculator George Soros sum it up: "I cannot see the global system
surviving. Political instability and financial instability are going to feed off
each other is a self-reinforcing fashion. In my opinion, we have entered a
period of global disintegration only we are not yet aware of it." [Greider
1997, 248] Greider's own final financial forecast sounds like this:
"Alternatives to further deregulation of global finance are seldom discussed
in the US press or politics and are automatically derided by influential
economists and bankers. The orthodoxy reigns confidently despite gathering
signs of systemic stress...The future will eventually reveal whether dire
warnings such as mine are justified, whether the optimism of finance capital
is well founded or another tragic episode of manic, misplaced hopes."
[Greider 1997, 258]

As the crisis unfolded, Greider's Malthusian-Keynesian prejudice led to

more serious consequences. In October 1998 he was still talking about "the
fundamental problem of overcapacity that already exists worldwide," and
demanding that "somebody somewhere must close lots of factories."4 But
this was what the globalized bankers themselves were demanding, and what
the crisis was tending to accomplish. An executive of ING Barings told the
Far Eastern Economic Review in October 1998 that "to achieve equilibrium,
78% of all manufacturing capacity in Indonesia, 77% of that in South Korea,
and 64% of that in Malaysia and Thailand will have to shut down."5 Wall
Street Journal ideological overseer Robert Bartley (one of the clique around
Kenneth Starr) wrote that China and the former Asian tigers all suffer from
"overinvestment and overcapacity. Instead of taking its lumps and enduring
some creative destruction, China is engaging in a huge round of state-
financed investment." "The lesson for developing countries in Asia and
elsewhere," Bartley added, "is that it's useless to try to dodge the bullet of
creative destruction through capital controls or extravagant fiscal stimulus."
4
William Greider, "The Global Crisis Deepens," The Nation, October 19, 1998.
5
Far Eastern Economic Review, October 1, 1998.
Greider's Malthusian prejudice thus leads him to a deplorable convergence
with some of the most ruthless spokesmen of the world finance oligarchy.

THE $55 TRILLION HORROR SHOW

Another alarm came from the Hollinger Corporation, the well-known British
intelligence outlet, through one of its flagship newspapers, the London
Sunday Telegraph. The occasion for this comment was the announcement of
a $144 million derivatives loss by the National Westminster Bank, one of
London's big clearing banks. On March 9, 1997, in Neil Bennett's City
Editor's Comment, one could read the following:

I had dinner with Tony Dye last week, the PDFM fund
manager, who has famously taken a £ 7 billion bet on a market
crash.... In the wake of NatWest's derivatives scare [a £ 90
million loss], he conjured up a scenario that would give small
children nightmares. The total value of derivatives in the world
today is $55 TRILLION. That is $55,000,000,000,000 to the
layman - a tidy sum and twice as large as the world's gross
domestic product. . . .Every bank has vast derivative liabilities.
Barclay's, for example, admitted in its results that it had
derivatives worth 922 BILLION pounds at the end of last year,
up more than a quarter on 1995. If a domino effect rippled
through the world's derivatives markets, it could knock over
some very big institutions. This is where the nightmare turns
nasty. Who would bail the banks out? Governments and central
banks of course. But governments are already today's largest
debtors, which does not make them the ideal candidates to
rescue the financial system. They could only do it by printing
money. That is the sure path to hyperinflation and sky-high
interest rates. The value of money would be destroyed and
savings and pensions along with it.

The figure offered here for world derivatives exposure is much too low, but
there is no doubt that a central bank bailout of worthless derivatives would
indeed generate the greatest hyperinflation of all time.
DERIVATIVES MELTDOWN

Although Kindleberger ignores, and Rees-Mogg denies, any threat of

hyperinflation, Neil Bennett is able to see it as a clear and present danger. To
underline their concern, the editors of the London Sunday Telegraph
repeated their warning on March 16, 1997: "The City's worst nightmare, a
meltdown provoked by a crisis in derivatives markets, suddenly looks less
like a lurid chapter from a paperback, and more like a future event... the
financial world is asking whether this latest debacle is a NatWest problem,
or a warning of a potential, systemic nightmare for the burgeoning world of
derivatives." Around the same time, the London Daily Telegraph was
warning that a market crash was inevitable. One article commented as
follows: "It is almost certain -- though bullish dealers in the City may
wishfully deny it -- that share prices will take a tumble some time this
year.... A stock market crash? But surely things have never looked rosier on
the rosy pages of the Financial Times. In the City, the mood has not been so
euphoric since the mid-1980s. But nothing is more certain, in the world of
financial markets, than this: what goes up must, sooner or later, come
down.... The only question is when the crisis of the 1990s will come, and
how big it will be."

DERIVATIVES NIGHTMARE SCENARIO

According to the Hollinger people, derivatives are the big factor of Anglo-
American financial instability: "The nightmare scenario today, is that
something similar could happen in New York and London. For now it is the
British and American banks, their portfolios bulging with 'derivatives,' that
look dangerously exposed. NatWest has just found out how perilous that
market can be.... So don't be too confident that the bankers have learnt the
lessons of history. And don't forget another reason for being uncheerful:
many governments have been running unjustifiably large budget deficits. In
the event of a downturn, that could mean a fiscal crisis to compound the
monetary crisis." This analysis was on firm ground as far as it went.

Also during the late winter of 1997, Fed boss Greenspan addressed a
meeting of the Atlanta Federal Reserve district officers, telling them "There
have been occasions when we have been on the edge of a significant
breakout," bankerspeak for a systemic crisis and meltdown. But, claimed
Greenspan on this occasion, the Fed response has so far "turned out to be
adequate to stem the atomic erosion."

Parts of American academia picked up the cudgels to defend derivatives.

One was professor Burton G. Malkiel, the Chemical Bank Chairman's
Professor of Economics at Princeton University. The most recent edition of
Malkiel's book A Random Walk Down Wall Street was published in 1996,
but the preface is dated March 1995, meaning that Professor Malkiel would
have had an opportunity to ponder the Orange County and Barings
bankruptcies, both of which he does mention. But even in the light of these
experiences, he denies the potential for a systemic crisis triggered by a
derivatives crash. Wrote Malkiel: "Hysteria seems especially out of place
when people proclaim that the large losses triggered by derivatives could
threaten the stability of the world financial system. While enormous leverage
and extraordinary potential losses from derivatives will continue to receive
banner headlines, a number of international study groups have concluded
that a spreading world financial crisis caused by derivatives is highly
unlikely. Speculators who take large risks will continue to risk ruin, and
some financial institutions -- even large ones -- will continue to fail. But a
systematic undermining of world financial stability caused by derivatives
trading does not deserve to be on the top of anyone's worry list." [Malkiel,
305] Malkiel went on to advise the small investor to buy options to hedge
index mutual funds, to use index options and futures for hedging, and even
to write options as a part of portfolio management. But small investors need
to be warned that any time you write an option, you risk infinite losses that
can utterly wipe you out. They should beware of Professor Malkiel's advice,
which appears destined to be inscribed on the walls of the same Princeton
pantheon of punditry where we find the assurances of his illustrious
predecessor, Professor Joseph Stagg Lawrence, one of the famous optimists
of early October 1929.

A VERY DEEP DEPRESSION

Not everyone viewed Greenspan as infallible. The Fed boss thought full
employment, rising wages and economic growth over 2.5% per year were all
highly dangerous because they might interfere with speculation -- a good
summary of the outlook of those who command the System. One critic of
Greenspan was Harvard economics professor and former Clinton
administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Some months after leaving
office, Reich warned of a possible new depression in an interview with
Martin Walker of the London Guardian. Reich suggested that all is not well
with the much-admired US economy. "When the bottom half of the
workforce gets low-wage and insecure jobs, and when you're not investing
both publicly and privately, what do you have five years from now, but
watered-down Republicanism?" In Reich's view, the villains are central
bankers and financiers who push deflationary austerity at the expense of the
common good. "Social inequality," Reich went on, "is widening fast,
insecurity is rampant, and our savings are being invested all round the world,
rather than here. Corporate chiefs got raises of 50 percent last year, but not
ordinary people, and they are living in gated, guarded communities, in a
divided society.... Nations are defined by their implicit social contracts, and
to sacrifice that on the altar of central bankers, is in my view a great failure."
Reich concluded with comments on Europe: "Joining the Euro may be fine
in the long run. But to move so quickly, and impose so much fiscal
austerity, risks turning a situation of high structural unemployment into an
even worse crisis.... It is the very opposite of what one would want in policy
right now. The recovery has not yet taken hold in Europe, and if Europe
goes on an austerity binge, and then the U.S. follows suit for fear of
inflation, then I would not be surprised if we all head into a very deep
depression." [Guardian, April 22, 1997] Reich evoked the long-taboo
specter of economic depression in another interview a few days later with
the London Observer, warning that the Federal Reserve has "forgotten the
specter of the Thirties depression." The Fed's policies have increased
poverty in the U.S, said Reich.

FEDERAL RESERVE: UNELECTED AND UNACCOUNTABLE

Another recent somber prognosis for the US economy came from James
Medoff, Reich's colleague in the Harvard economics department, and from
co-author Andrew Harless. The Medoff-Harless analysis sees the United
States as The Indebted Society, falling deeper and deeper into crisis, in a
kind of deflationary spiral they described as follows:

. . . the lender-friendly policies of the Indebted Society push it deeper

into debt. The power of lenders, and the economic ideas that have
flowed from this power, produce policies designed to minimize the
risk of increased inflation.... As a result, lenders become more
important, and their power increases. As the Indebted Society goes
deeper into debt, its interest burden increases, and it must borrow
 more to service its existing debt. Consequently, it goes even deeper
into debt. The deeper the Indebted Society and its members go into
debt, the less their resources can support that debt. As the debt
increases relatively to those resources, so does the risk that the debts
cannot be repaid. Creditors therefore demand higher interest rates to
compensate then for higher risk. The debts then become more difficult
to service, and the cycle of debt upon debt is intensified. [Medoff and
Harless, 159-160]

Although the authors do not spell it out, it is obvious enough that this cycle
leads towards default and bankruptcy. Medoff and Harless look around for
resources that might be mobilized to produce more, thus allowing for an end
to borrowing and a reduction of debt. They recognize that these resources do
exist, specifically in the form of the swelling ranks of the unemployed and
underemployed. Their conclusion is that "...America does have slack
resources, and the decision not to use those resources is deliberate. That
decision is being made by unelected and unaccountable officials at the
Federal Reserve and is being encouraged by the vast majority of economists
at America's universities." But in the end our authors shy away from any
direct political challenge to the Federal Reserve System, proposing instead
such palliatives as cash bonuses to Fed directors if overall national economic
performance, including unemployment, were to improve. But one suspects
that the bondholders could always offer larger incentives than government
ever could.

The Federal Reserve and its foreign opposite numbers in the world system of
private central banks think that robust economic growth, full employment,
and rising wages are all dangerous. The French economist Alain Parguez has
coined phrases for this state of affairs, which he calls the "international
rentier economy" and the "rentier welfare state". Parguez and Mario
Seccareccia have argued that "governments are entering into debt and
borrowing heavily from individuals or financial institutions just to pay
interest income to what is largely the same class of high income earners or
rentiers at usurious rates set by...the respective countries' central banks."
[Parguez] This certainly applies to the United States, where the biggest
component in federal budget deficit during most of the 1990s has been debt
service on the national debt.

WHITE HOUSE WORKING GROUP ON FINANCIAL MARKETS

After the 1987 stock market crash, the US government assembled a special
financial crisis pre-planning group consisting of the Secretary of the
Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the Chairman of the
Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Chairman of the Commodity
Futures Trading Corporation. This group has been occupied for a decade
with the review of crisis scenarios (like the one at the beginning of the
Appendix) and with the development of contingency plans. These
contingency plans have been codified and placed in the hands of the top
officers of stock markets across the country. The SEC emergency plan is
officially titled Executive Directory for Market Contingencies, and is
unofficially known as the "red book." The CFTC has an equivalent
emergency handbook for the futures markets.

According to one account, "The Working Group's main goal...would be to

keep the markets operating in the event of a sudden, stomach-turning plunge
in stock prices -- and to prevent a panicky run on banks, brokerage firms,
and mutual funds. Officials worry that if investors all tried to head for the
exit at the same time, there wouldn't be enough room -- or in financial terms,
liquidity -- for them all to get through. In that event, the smoothly running
global financial machine would begin to lock up . . .worries about the
financial strength of a major trader could cascade and cause other players to
stop making payments to one another, in which case the system would seize
up like an engine without oil." In plain English, they are looking at the
question of CHIPS breakdown raised above. Fed boss Greenspan is said to
have given his "irrational exuberance" speech to the White House Working
Group behind closed doors at the end of 1995, a full year before he warned
in public about excessive speculation.

Among the contingencies studied by the White House Working Group are "a
panicky flight by mutual fund shareholders; chaos in the global payment,
settlement, and clearance systems; and a breakdown in international
coordination among central banks, finance ministries, and securities
regulators...." [Washington Post, February 23, 1997] The White House
group has extensive contact with the London financial community, and also
with GLOBEX, the world-wide futures trading system owned by the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange. At the very minimum, such extensive focus
on possible financial calamities suggests that the US Government does not
believe that world financial markets are "shockproof." But the approach
suggested by press accounts may soon prove to be the opposite of what is
needed, especially in the face of incipient banking panic.

BIS: "WE SIMPLY DO NOT KNOW"

On June 9, 1997 the private central bank of private central banks, the Bank
for International Settlements of Basel, Switzerland, issued a sibylline
admission that the world financial system was careening out of control and
toward crisis. The BIS first sheepishly admitted that many of the financial
and economic events of 1996 had been "surprising" from the point of view
of its theoretical forecasts. Can these surprises be explained? The BIS
replied: "One part of an honest answer is that we simply do not know. Rapid
technological change and deregulation, which today profoundly affect all
aspects of the global economy, increasingly cloud our sense of what is
possible and reasonable....There are many economic processes that we do
not fully understand." The BIS offered a disconcerting survey of this
"overbanked" world, where "rents from established franchises" are
increasingly "threatened." There is the problem of "bank fragility in Asia,"
along with that of "restructuring" in Ibero-America. Underlying the whole
picture is the "downside" that "liberated financial sectors are prone to more
costly misadventures," including "the risk to 'gamble for resurrection' . . . .
When the bubble bursts, banks and their customers will face major
difficulties." The BIS repeated what is already well known: namely that the
great threat of breakdown to the international financial system is located in
the netting, settlement, and payments system, which today has to handle $5
trillion of daily turnover in the international currency, derivatives, and
interbank clearing pipelines. "It has also been recognized for some time that
failures in payment and settlement systems for large-value transactions
constitute a potential source of systemic fragility," said the BIS. "While we
have not yet experienced the economic losses that might be associated with a
major failure in payments systems...a few close calls in recent years were
wake-up calls." To avoid these pitfalls, the BIS wanted "a world with no
barriers to universal banking" and a "framework which will preserve the
financial system, regardless of the kinds of shocks or the degree of asset
price inflation to which it might be subjected." The BIS, we see, was far less
sanguine than Mr. Kapstein. The bewildered paralysis of the BIS reflected
here is an encore performance of the BIS's inability to do anything to stop
the central European banking crisis of 1931-33.

William H. Gross of the PIMCO funds, billed as "the Peter Lynch of bonds",
brought out a new book entitled Everything You've Heard About Investing Is
Wrong! in which he advised his readers to prepare emotionally for the
"coming post-bull market," which the author predicted would become
known as the "era of 6%." Investors, recommended Gross, would have to
bite the bullet and learn to live with those modest yields. Soon this
perspective might look like paradise.

Milton Friedman argued that the International Monetary Fund was obsolete
and ought to be abolished on libertarian grounds. Former Treasury Secretary
William Simon asserted logically enough (from his point of view) that since
"the market" was now setting currency parities, there was no more need for
the International Monetary Fund, which therefore ought to be abolished as a
big-government dinosaur. Simon pointed out that his predecessor at
Treasury, George Shultz, had already gone on record in 1995 in favor of
liquidating the IMF. Back then, Shultz had told the American Economic
Association that the IMF has "more money than mission." Shultz had
wanted to "merge this outmoded institution with the World Bank, and create
a charter for the new organization that encourages emphasis on private
contributions to economic development."6

GROUP OF THIRTY: A ONE IN FIVE CHANCE OF SERIOUS

DISRUPTION

A little more than a month after the BIS report was issued, the London
Financial Times pondered the recent warnings on the lability of the world
financial system that had come from Greenspan, from the BIS, and also from
Gerald Corrigan, the man who had been the head of the New York Federal
Reserve Bank during the late 1980s. (Corrigan, as the Financial Times
editorial page noted, had "warned that the growing complexity and
integration of financial flows would make it much harder to manage shocks
such as the 1987 stock market crash.") As the FT saw it, the common note of
these warnings was that "the frothiness of markets could have systemic
consequences." To these three Cassandras the Financial Times added a
fourth, the financial think tank that calls itself the Group of Thirty. This
body had issued a report dealing with "limiting systemic risk in a world
where the larger financial institutions and markets have outgrown national
accounting, legal and supervisory arrangements." The finding of the Group
of Thirty, which even the Financial Times must concede is too complacent,
6
William E. Simon, "Abolish the IMF," Wall Street Journal, October 23, 1997.
estimates "...the likelihood of a serious disruption of the international
financial system at one in five over the next five years..." The "practitioners"
surveyed were confident that they themselves and their counterparties would
infallibly be spared. And they hastened to add that although disturbances
were indeed possible, "any shock is not expected to spread far beyond the
point of impact." [Financial Times, July 15, 1997] And in any case, opined
the report, governments will be forced to bailout improvident speculators if
they are big enough: "...since many global players are likely to be deemed
too big to fail if threatened with insolvency, taxpayers of the world are
heavily at risk." Even as this was being released, the 1997 Asian crisis, the
biggest world economic and financial upheaval since 1931, was building
towards its explosion.

30. ASIA BOILS OVER7

During the summer of 1997, a series of "emerging market" currencies which

had pegged themselves to the dollar went into crisis. The currencies included
the Czech crown, the Thai baht, the Malaysian ringgit, the Philippine peso,
and the Indonesian rupiah. These currencies had gotten into severe difficulty
because of the dollar's momentary appreciation against the yen and mark:
the currencies in question had been carried so high by the dollar that they
had priced themselves out of other export markets. After some years of
export surpluses, they developed balance of payments problems. When this
situation was noticed by Soros and the other hedge fund operators, the
currencies came under heavy speculative attack through short selling and
other techniques. The Prague authorities tried to defend the crown with
interest rates of 75%. In July 1997, Thailand was unable to keep servicing its
estimated $110 billion of foreign debt. Thailand was obliged to submit to the
draconian monetarist dictates of the International Monetary Fund, which
entailed a humiliating loss of national sovereignty for a people whose claim
to fame has historically been that they never accepted subjection to foreign
colonialists.

Soros' speculative offensive may have been motivated by political

considerations as well as by his desire for windfall profits. By targeting the
currencies with dollar pegs, he was in effect seeking to undermine the
economic links between the United States and its Asian partners and erode
what was left of the formal dollar zone. Perhaps the beneficiary was to be
7
The numbering of the crises refers to the table in Chapter IV.
the euro, whose backers clearly aspired to terminate the dollar's role as the
world reserve currency. In addition, with Asia depressed and the Japanese
yen in crisis, the euro would be more important, and would be able to buy up
assets at fire-sale prices. In any case, a very large part of the hot money used
to attack the Asian dollar pegs came from institutions based in Britain and
the European Union.

MAHATIR INDICTS SOROS

The government of Malaysia formally protested the speculative attacks on

the ringit masterminded by Soros and his Quantum Fund. In August 1997,
Malaysia was unable to make scheduled payments on its $50 billion in
foreign debt. Foreign Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi complained to US
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that southeast Asian currencies
"continue to be bedeviled by currency fluctuations caused by hostile
elements bent on such unholy actions." "It is the height of international
criminality that the fate of millions could be subject to the mercy of a few
unscrupulous traders," said the Malaysian minister. In response to these
charges, the US State Department reached a new low, with spokesman Nick
Burns defending Soros as "an honorable individual who has done a lot of
good things around the world" and sniffing that the Malaysian protests were
"inappropriate." Soros is under investigation in Italy and Croatia, and has not
been forgotten by the British widows and orphans whom he despoiled by
helping to force a pound devaluation in September 1992. Soros is widely
resented in eastern Europe, Ukraine, Russia, and related areas. By endorsing
the most predatory international speculators of this type, the United States
government was sowing a whirlwind of hatred which may be reaped through
the needless suffering of individual Americans under future circumstances
now impossible to predict, but easy to guess at.

Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahatir Bin Mohamad renewed his

indictment of Soros at the 1997 annual meeting of the International
Monetary Fund, which was held in Hong Kong, a city which had recently
been ceded back to China by the British. Addressing the annual meeting of
the World Bank on September 20, 1997, Mahatir made the following
remarks:

We now know that even as Mexico's economic crash was

manipulated and made to crash, the economies of other
developing countries too can be suddenly manipulated and
forced to bow to the great fund managers who have now come
to be the people to decide who should prosper and who should
not . . . .Everyone gains from 'prosper-thy-neighbor' policies,
while only one side gains from 'beggar-thy-neighbor' mindsets .
. . . But the currency traders have become rich, very, very rich,
through making other people poorer. These are billionaires who
do not really need any more money. Even the people who
invest in the funds they operate are rich. We are told that the
average return is about 35% per annum. And we are told that
we are not worldly if we do not appreciate the workings of the
international financial market. Great countries tell us that we
must accept being impoverished, because that is what
international finance is all about. Obviously, we are not
sophisticated enough to accept losing money so that the
manipulators become richer. We are also warned that these are
powerful people. If we make a noise or we act in any way to
frustrate them, they would be annoyed. And when they are
annoyed, they can destroy us altogether, they can reduce us to
basket cases. We have to accept that they are around, that they
will always be around, and that there is really nothing we can
do about it. They will determine whether we prosper or we
don't . . . I mention all these, because society must be protected
from unscrupulous profiteers. I know I am taking a big risk to
suggest it, but I am saying that currency trading is unnecessary,
unproductive and immoral. It should be stopped. It should be
made illegal. We don't need currency trading. We need to buy
money only when we want to finance real trade. Otherwise we
should not buy or sell currencies as we sell commodities . . .
We like to think big. We even have great ideas for bringing
wealth to other developing countries. We proposed the
development of the Mekong Valley, beginning with the railroad
from Singapore to Kunming, because we know that
transportation will stimulate economic development. It is a big
project, but small projects make little impact on the economy . .
. . But we are not going to be allowed to do this, because you
don't like us to have big ideas. It is not proper. It is impudent
for us to try, or even say we are going to do it. If we even say
that when we have the money we will carry on with our big
projects, you will make sure we won't have the money by
 forcing the devaluation of our currency.

This was the most courageous and far-reaching critique of the globaloney
economy of the late twentieth century so far offered by a head of
government. It was clear that Mahatir was acting as the spokesman for an
informal group of developing countries and Asian countries, and that his
critique enjoyed sympathy in certain quarters of the Chinese government, as
well as in traditionalist circles in Japan. His speech had conjured up the
long-overdue world revolt against the globaloney tyranny.

On the following day, September 21, 1997, the financial corsair George
Soros attempted a reply to his persistent antagonist. It is significant that
Soros was unable to answer without himself citing the immediate danger of
a world financial "bust":

We do live in a global economy . . . .But global capitalism is

not without its problems . . .I have seen many ebbs and flows
and booms and busts. I fully recognize that international capital
markets have become much more institutional in character and
demonstrate much greater resilience, but I cannot believe that
the present boom will not be followed by a bust until history
has proven me wrong. The risk of a breakdown is greatly
increased by the fact that our theoretical understanding of how
financial markets operate is fundamentally flawed . . . . Dr.
Mahatir's suggestion yesterday to ban currency trading is so
inappropriate that it does not deserve serious consideration.
Interfering with the convertibility of capital at a moment like
this is a recipe for disaster. Dr. Mahatir is a menace to his own
country...If social services are cut when instability is on the
rise, it may well engender popular resentment and lead to a new
wave of protectionism both in the United States and in Europe,
especially if and when the current boom is followed by a bust
of some severity. This could lead to a breakdown in the global
capitalist system, just as it did in the 1930's....

Soros' tirade is a clinical specimen of the globaloney mentality. The

globalized system is headed for a breakdown, he says, but you must on no
account attempt to head this off by regulating it. Greenspan's response to the
Long Term Capital implosion (discussed below) had the same irrational
quality.

SELL STOCK NOW!

As the Dow Jones Industrial average passed the 8000 mark in July 1997, a
number of America's mass-circulation magazines began to express their
nervousness over whether stocks were overpriced and might soon be
subjected to a "correction." In mid-1996, Business Week had celebrated "Our
Love Affairs with Stocks" on its front cover, proclaiming "Never before
have so many people had so much riding on the market," although hedging
its hype with the question, "Should we worry?" 8 A year later, it was time to
worry. Money magazine's August 1997 issue showed on its cover an average
investor sitting perilously at the crest of what looked like Prechter's tidal
wave. The headline read: "Don't Just Sit There... SELL STOCK NOW!"
Further reading revealed that the magazine's recommended tactic involved
the liquidation of only a modest 20% of stock portfolios in favor of bonds
and cash.

During the same week, Time offered its readers an account of "Wall Street's
Doomsday Scenario," detailing the preparations afoot among brokers,
mutual fund managers, and government agencies for dealing with an
approaching meltdown or other event marking the end of the bull market.
Despite the trading curbs and pauses instituted by the New York Stock
Exchange, warned Time, "another meltdown is quite possible. And that
hasn't been lost on a number of institutions quietly preparing for the worst.
Some of the nation's largest mutual-fund companies, like Vanguard and
Fidelity, have detailed battle plans should the market fall apart." Time feared
mutual fund redemptions, but placed great stock in the Fed's ability to lower
interest rates, and stressed the need to keep market functioning in an orderly
way. Merrill Lynch's energency plan included setting up a crisis staff on the
32nd floor of its Manhattan headquarters. Vanguard planned to mobilize a
"Swiss army" of 1,000 brokerage temps who would try to prevent panic
among shareholders. At Fidelity, phone jacks were poised to fall from the
ceiling of the cafeteria to service phones manned by temps ready to urge
shareholders not to sell.9

8
"Our Love Affairs with Stocks," Business Week, June 3, 1996.
9
Time, August 4, 1997.
SYSTEMIC RISK THROUGH SETTLEMENT RISK

One obvious vulnerability of the present world financial system which has
emerged from the discussion so far is the high potential for liquidity crisis,
especially in case of gridlock in the interbank netting, settlement, and
payment system. By the fall of 1997, it was a member of the Board of
Directors of the Swiss National Bank, the central bank of the nation whose
official title is Confœderatio Helvetica, who was pointing to this explosive
potential. Speaking on October 14, 1997, Professor Bruno Gehrig stressed
the danger of a "chain reaction" because of the heightened "settlement risk"
in today's interbank payment systems. Gehrig cited the 1974 bankruptcy of
West Germany's Herstatt Bank (see Chapter IV), noting that "the core of the
problem is still the same." The problem, according to Prof. Gehrig, is the
time lapse between the settlement of the first leg of a foreign exchange
transaction, and the settlement of the second leg, which may come after an
interval of hours or even days. What happens if a counterparty goes bankrupt
during this interval? Prof. Gehrig prudently points out that this implies "a
credit risk for the bank amounting to the full value of its payments," and "a
liquidity risk" as well. This means that there is also the threat of a general
banking panic: "These already worrisome risks, as seen from the perspective
of a single bank, in the meantime pose a systemic risk and therefore a danger
for the functioning of the financial markets." Referring to a more recent
cataclysm of the world banking system, Gehrig also recalled the "severe
clearing problems" which had been created by the collapse of Baring
Brothers bank in 1995. Gehrig summed up his argument saying that "many
banks are completely unaware that they are routinely being exposed to risks
in foreign exchange trading which are bigger in value than their transactions
of several days. The amount of risk, even with respect to only one counter-
party, can therefore surpass the stock capital of the bank." Banks are not
doing enough to shield themselves and efforts "effectively to contain the
systemic risks are...not sufficient;" "here is the danger of a chain reaction
and collapse of payment systems. . . . The systemic risks have reached an
intolerable level." Many banks, concluded Gehrig, seem to be relying mainly
on "the erroneous belief" that they are "too big to fail." 10

The liquidity risk that is closely linked to settlement risk was emphasized
around the same time by London Sunday Times columnist Paul Durman,
who interviewed the bearish British hedge fund manager Tony Dye, whom
10
Neue Zuericher Zeitung, October 15, 1997.
we have already met as the financier who had issued a warning of a
derivatives crisis in the late winter. Dye was again worried about derivatives
panic, especially regarding index future contracts on the FTSE, the
Financial Times Stock Exchange Index which is the principal blue-chip
barometer of the London market. Dye once again saw a derivatives shock
endangering the entire system: "The scale of derivatives trading hints at the
extent of leverage in financial markets -- large economic interests
underpinned by only small down payments. When markets turn, many over-
leveraged investors will have to raise cash quickly in order to meet their
commitments. The wave of forced selling that ensues is the classic way in
which financial markets become unstable and crash."11

During the weeks and months leading up to the Hong Kong crisis, a mood of
fey frivolity had crept over financial circles. The editors of Euromoney
magazine devised a game based on an imaginary future financial meltdown,
and invited "50 experienced financial professionals" from the City of
London to come and spend a few days playing simulated crisis set at the eve
of the euro era. Euromoney felt that in the exercise, "that was meant to show
a way out of a global meltdown..the surprise outcome was the fierce rivalry
between financial centres." Notably, wrote Euromoney, "'those bloody
Germans' ...formed a united front for self-preservation in the crisis.12 Earlier
in the month the same magazine had run another euro-crash scenario by
David Lascelles, who was also the author of "The Crash of 2003, an Emu
fairy tale." By now many establishment publications were talking openly
about the risk of a crash -- in somebody else's stock market. One was the
London Financial Times, which noted on October 11, 1997 that "by almost
every measure, such as price earnings ratios and dividend yields, US stocks
are very highly valued by historic standards. And the 'Q' ratio, of companies'
share prices to their underlying assets is now well above its peak in 1929 just
before the crash." On August 9, the London Economist had run a cover
showing a high-flying kite labeled "Dow" with the words "Lovely while it
lasts."

But the finance oligarchy was also taking steps to secure its control of those
assets which would represent wealth in the post-disintegration world. The
gold price was pushed down towards $300 by the scandalous decisions of
governments to sell off large parts of their gold stocks. These stocks were in
effect being privatized, sold to venture capitalists for a fraction of what they
11
London Sunday Times, October 12, 1997.
12
Euromoney, September 26, 1997.
would fetch on a non-rigged market. In July 1997 the Australian central
bank announced that it would sell 167 tons (5.4 million ounces) of its bullion
reserves. In October the Swiss central bank, famous for maintaining a de
facto gold standard, said that it would also begin liquidating its gold stocks.
It was an outrageous scandal. Why sell public property at severely depressed
prices? And why now? The gold sales had some of the flavor of Russia's
distressed-merchandise privatization under the IMF's shock therapy. Now
the Swiss were also going to be shocked.

OCTOBER 27, 1997: ASSAULT ON THE HONG KONG DOLLAR

During the second half of October 1997, the hedge funds and currency
speculators turned their attention once again to the Hong Kong dollar, which
by that time was the only southeast Asian currency still capable of defending
a "peg", or relatively stable exchange rate, with the US dollar. During the
week ending October 24, 1997 the Hang Seng index of leading Hong Kong
stocks collapsed by 25%. The monetary instability which had plagued
Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, and Malaysia was now
focussed on Hong Kong. When the British had returned Hong Kong to
China in the previous summer, they had left behind a bloated speculative
bubble economy and a dangerously overvalued real estate market, which in
turn had weakened the local banks. The speculative attack was timed to
coincide with the visit of Chinese President Jiang Zemin to the United
States; the speculators were happy to embarrass Jiang and make him lose
face.

Interest rates in Hong Kong ratcheted up to 300% per day as automatic

defense mechanisms kicked in. Certain Asian currencies like the Taiwan
dollar were also hit hard. On October 23 the Brazilian stock market fell by
more than 8%, confirming widespread fears that this immense country was
in a crisis of its own. $10 billion in hot money fled Brazil, where the
government responded by raising interest rates to 43%, strangling the
domestic economy; big ticket purchases immediately fell by more than a
third. By the end of this week, Wall Street was also beginning a decline. On
Monday, October 27, the Dow Jones Industrials lost almost 555 points, the
biggest point drop ever, but at 7.18% only the twelfth worst day in the
history of the DJIA. The so-called circuit breakers designed by the 1988
Brady committee were activated for the first time, with a 30 minute trading
halt when the Dow reached minus 350 at 2:35 PM, and a 60 minute timeout
when the Dow crashed through minus 550 at about half past three. Luckily
for the stockjobbers, the second pause meant that the trading day came to an
early halt. This crash came just a few days after the tenth anniversary of the
all-time record crash of the Reagan market on October 19, 1987. Strictly
speaking, this time the market break was more comparable to the 190-point
mini-crash of Friday, October 13, 1989, which had pared almost 7% from
the Dow in the last two hours of trading. That had also been the twelfth
worst day when it occurred. But back then, the world economy could still
count on the propulsive effect of intact economies in Germany and Japan,
and financiers could look forward to penetrating the Soviet sphere. This time
it was different; this time the strength of the world economy had been
mortally sapped by years of globaloney.

At the close of the trading day, Treasury Secretary Rubin came out on the
steps of his office to attempt a reassuring statement. His comment revealed
the area which we have identified as the greatest concern: "Our
consultations," he said, "indicate that the payment and settlement systems
and other market mechanisms are working effectively." In an interview with
Newsweek, Rubin again mentioned the financial "infrastructure." The great
fear was that some important institution would become insolvent, and that its
default would cause the interbank netting and payment systems to jam up,
resulting in chain-reaction bankruptcy all around. That, Rubin hastened to
tell the public, had been avoided.

On the following day, the Brady system of drugged markets (discussed in

Chapter II) proved its mettle. Colossal amounts of liquidity were pumped
into the markets by the Federal Reserve, especially through the Chicago
S&P 500 contract. IBM led a number of firms in announcing that they would
buy back large quantities of their own stock, a trick that had been
popularized during the crash of a decade earlier by then-White House chief
of staff Howard Baker. The Fed, remembering that a prime cause of the
1987 crash had been selling of stock by Fidelity and other mutual funds to
procure cash that might be needed for a wave of mutual fund redemptions,
this time pre-emptively offered unlimited borrowing to mutual funds so they
could keep their stock positions and still pay off whatever little people might
want to take their money off the table. Financier Warren Buffett, who had
announced some time before that he was pulling cash out of stocks and
putting it into Treasury securities, now made a well-publicized move back
into the market. Out in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank
helped to stabilize the bourse by buying up its own shares. All of this
generated a significant updraft, and helped the Dow on Tuesday, October 29,
1997 to recoup 337 points or 4.7% on all-time record volume of almost 1.2
billion shares. This shameless exercise in market-rigging was presented for
the edification of a gullible public as the result of a bold stand by America's
small investors, who refused to panic. After all, assured the commentators,
Hong Kong was a hole in the wall, and Wall Street remained the center of
the universe.

After the fall of October 27 and the rebound of October 28, there remained
for some time the question of whether any of the world's important banks or
brokerage houses had succumbed. The prices of US Treasury securities had
risen during the late October turbulence as a result of the so-called "flight to
quality": a number of financiers, sensing that a stock market crash was in the
cards, bought bonds. One of them, it appears, had been Soros, whose bond
profits were reported to have partially offset his very large losses on stocks.
The threat to US government bonds was also clear enough: it came from
forced liquidations of US Treasury paper by cash-strapped Asian central
banks and financial institutions. All in all, it was estimated that Asian central
banks had sold off $14 billion worth of US Treasury bonds in late October
and early November. (It was estimated that a total $621 billion in Treasuries
were held abroad, prevalently in Asia, with the Bank of Japan holding $210
billion, the Bank of Korea $30 billion, and the Hong Kong Monetary
Authority $88 billion.)

31. NOVEMBER 1997: JAPAN13

Japanese banks traditionally hold large portions of their assets in the form of
stock in Japanese corporations. If the Tokyo stock market goes too low,
dropping below the 16,000-17,000 range, some Japanese banks begin to be
threatened by insolvency because of the erosion in the current vale of their
stock holdings, which must be periodically marked to market. The workings
of this Japanese link between stock prices and banking crisis were illustrated
in the wake of the Hong Kong panic, when the Nikkei average reached a 28-
month low on Friday, November 14, 1997. Between August 1997 and the
middle of November of the same year, the Nikkei average of 225 stocks had
lost about one quarter of its total value, and even more in dollar terms.

During the second week of November, Japan's Sanyo Securities went

13
The numbering of the crises refers to the table in Chapter IV.
bankrupt. Sanyo had been the seventh largest financial broker in Japan. The
Sanyo bankruptcy was the first time that a brokerage house had gone belly
up in Japan during the entire post-1945 era. Sanyo had boasted the largest
trading floor in Asia, but it succumbed to its more than $3 billion in debts.
Then the 1997 market break claimed another important victim. On Friday
November 14, the Financial Times hinted that a big Japanese bank was
moribund: "Brokers allege that one of Japan's biggest banks has already
fallen below the minimum set by the Bank of International Settlements." On
November 17, 1997 it was announced that the tenth largest commercial bank
in Japan, the Hokkaido Takushoku Bank, was going out of business. This
bank, known as Hokutaku for short, was brought down by bad real estate
loans left over from the 1990 collapse of the bubble economy. "We had to
reach a judgment that we would not be able to continue our operations," said
a communiqué from the bank. Hokutaku had assets of $76 billion. The non-
performing loans were almost $7.5 billion, or 13% of the bank's total of
outstanding loans. Rubin wrote a letter to his Japanese counterpart
Mitsuzuka in which he expressed serious concern about the viability of the
Japanese banking system.

The liquidation of Hokutaku focussed attention on the parlous financial

situation of Yamaichi Securities, one of Japan's leading brokerages. During
the second week in November 1997, the bond rating agency Standard &
Poors downgraded Yamaichi's bonded debt to BBB, citing the brokerage for
"inability to counteract unfavorable market conditions." For a time Yamaichi
struggled to survive by shutting down its operations in Europe and America,
while cutting its payroll by 26%, from 7,484 to about 5000. But financial
analysts complained that this was too little too late. Yamaichi was one of the
Big Four Japanese brokerages, the others being Nomura, Daiwa, and Nikko.
When Yamaichi finally went bankrupt in late November 1997, it was the
biggest bankruptcy in Japan's postwar history. After its demise had been
announced, Yamaichi was the belated target of the biggest panic run in the
postwar history of Japan, as investors pulled out $93 billion, or just over half
of Yamaichi's total accounts, in a week or two. Brokerage houses of the
middle rank, including Kankaku and New Japan, announced downsizing
plans of their own. Nippon Credit Bank said it was cutting its staff by a
third.

At this point, the Japanese stock market rallied on reports that Prime
Minister Hashimoto had raised the possibility of using public funds to bail
out the Japanese banking system, perhaps along the lines of what Bush did
for the bankrupt American S&Ls. This news propelled the Japanese market
up by 8%. But when Hashimoto denied that he was about to undertake such
a politically risky operation, the Tokyo market began falling again. By early
1998, the "risk premium" paid by the Japanese banks in the interbank market
(meaning higher interest rates paid to counterparties because of the
uncertainty of dealing with Japanese banks groaning under bad debts) had
risen from 5 basis points to 35 and then to 116 basis points -- 1.16%. This
was a terrible handicap for these banks. The danger now was that Japanese
banks would begin to liquidate their portfolios of US Treasury securities,
leading to a panic crash of the Treasury bond market. By mid-November, the
Russian stock market was down 40% from its August peak. The Bovespa
index of Sao Paolo showed the Brazilian market down by 38% since
October 22, 1997.

32. SOUTH KOREA: #11 GOES UNDER14

In South Korea, the world's eleventh largest economy, the central bank gave
up its attempt to keep the won within a band of fluctuation in relation to the
US dollar. The depreciating won broke through the "Maginot line" of 1000
to the greenback. After declaring that capitulation to the IMF was
unthinkable, the Seoul government announced on November 21, 1997 that it
was obliged to submit to the IMF conditions in order to obtain a loan.
"Let's...share the pain and turn this misfortune into a blessing," said South
Korean President Kim Young Sam.15 An intelligent Korean civil engineering
student quoted in the same report commented, "We'll have to sacrifice our
economic sovereignty in return for an IMF bailout."

And so it came to pass. The IMF, the central bankers, and the finance
ministers saw clearly enough that South Korea was unquestionably big
enough to bring down Japan, and that Japan in turn was more than big
enough to bring down the United States and Europe. South Korea was not
capable of meeting the scheduled debt service payments on its $170 billion
of foreign debt. So South Korea was granted a bailout package of $55
billion, the biggest in IMF history. But to obtain this money, Seoul was
forced to pledge to junk all the procedures that had permitted the
reconstruction and development of the country after the Korean War. As the
Financial Times noted with some satisfaction, "the rescue plan was finally
14
The numbering of the crises refers to the table in Chapter IV.
15
Washington Post, November 22, 1997.
agreed when the Korean government gave up a dogged struggle to preserve
the main elements of its dirigist economic structure." Henceforth the
Republic of Korea would be subjected to "market principles instead of state
directives" and would be compelled to "yield to investor discipline,"
meaning submit to the depredations of well-connected predators like Soros.
South Korea was going to be opened up to foreign financial operators -- as if
the crisis had not been caused by an overdose of precisely that! One
investment banker gloated that "South Korea is one of the last transitional
economies to market capitalism."16 One of the very last national economies
capable of sustained economic dynamism was being scuttled by the greedy
monetarist ideologues of the fast buck.

The IMF announced a $57 billion bailout package for South Korea on
December 3, 1997. But the IMF standby loan was made contingent on what
the IMF termed a "stabilization program." The globaloney economists had a
special rage against South Korea, and they clearly wanted to subject that
country to the classic Andrew Mellon treatment of mass liquidations and
insolvency. When the South Korean authorities nationalized two insolvent
banks instead of letting them go bankrupt, and when Seoul provided funds
for Daewoo to take over troubled Sangyong Motors, the international
financiers were incensed at what they seemed to think was South Korea's
refusal to abandon dirigism. The financiers also claimed that South Korea
had concealed the true extent of its debt problem. Things were complicated
by the fact that South Korea was in the midst of a presidential election
campaign, in which the IMF was under attack. IMF director Camdessus had
tried to get all the presidential candidates to sign an oath of fealty to the IMF
conditionalities, but Kim Dae-jung declined, and was rewarded with an
improvement of his poll numbers as a result. But after Kim Dae-jung had
won the election, he began intoning the IMF litany of "sweat and tears" in
his inaugural address of Feb. 25, making a self-fulfilling prophecy that
"consumer prices and unemployment will rise. Incomes will drop, and an
increasing number of companies will go bankrupt." This equation of
economic reform with immiseration and insolvency amounted to a
concession of defeat before the race had even started; such economic
pessimism, as the Russian experience suggests, is the hallmark of the IMF's
stubborn incompetence and inability to produce positive results.

Spokesmen for the financiers demanded the most drastic measures against
Korea. Peter Kenen, a Princeton professor of international monetarism,
16
Financial Times, November 4, 1997.
called for the IMF to renege on the entire bailout package and force Seoul
into chaotic national bankruptcy. "At this stage, frankly, I think it would be
better to say we'll put up $50 billion for troubled countries that are the
victims of Korean default and make an object lesson of the Koreans for their
cavalier way of handling all this," raved Kenen, who had apparently
forgotten that the true beneficiaries of this bailout were, as always, the US
banks and the US Treasury. Deflation prophet Edward Yardeni offered his
view that "the truth of the matter is that Korea Inc. is already bankrupt. All
that's left to do is file the papers. This is a zombie economy."

In early December, as later become known, South Korea had $6 billion cash
on hand, as against $150 billion in international obligations coming due over
the short term. South Korea was set to default within the space of five
business days -- despite the fact that its industrial plant was among the most
modern, and its work force among the most skilled, in the entire world.
What counted under globaloney was not the fundamentals, but the
deregulated panic. If South Korea had defaulted, the country's ability to
continue to import oil might soon have been terminated, leading to a general
blackout for a nation which relied on oil-fired plants for 90% of its
electricity. South Korea was thus just a few weeks away from chaos; if this
scenario had been consummated, as it still might be, Korea might even have
been unified under North Korean auspices -- a nightmare for that country,
and the world. But since the Cold War was over, the financiers no longer
cared about such issues.

A quick fix was therefore imperative. The haggling over the South Korean
bailout was still going on when Christmas Eve arrived in Washington.
Treasury Secretary Rubin, announcing an interim, preliminary $10 billion
quick fix for South Korea to stave off default and world panic over the days
ahead, remarked that he "wouldn't spend a nickel to help private investors or
private creditors," a sound bite he liked so well that he repeated it on several
subsequent occasions. Rubin assembled the package, and South Korea
moved back slightly from the brink. Some observers, perhaps grasping for
straws, were mightily impressed by the "not a nickel" rhetoric, but it was
eyewash. As Erik Hoffmeyer, the former governor of the Danish central
bank, told the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken on January 7, "there is a
very great risk that the money which flows to South Korea will only be used
to pay the loans of the most nervous creditors. Now, does that make sense?"

If South Korea had succumbed, this financial shock might have proven
sufficient to set off a stock market and banking panic in Japan. And if Japan
were to fall, the next domino would be the US Treasury market and with it
the entire US financial edifice. That might restore London as the undisputed
financial capital of the world. And surely London knew that, even if
ideologues like Kenen did not. South Korea was an Asian domino big
enough to detonate an immediate systemic crisis. Despite all this, gold was
at a 12-year low, due largely to announced and rumored gold sales by central
banks. These maneuvers amounted to support operations for all sorts of
dubious financial paper.

YARDENI: DEFLATION AND OVERPRODUCTION CRISIS

In the wake of the October-November 1997 turbulence, a number of

observers finally began to see the threat of all-out world economic
depression, although they often attempted to avoid such terminology.
Business Week wrote about the "threat of deflation." The starting point of
this argument was once again the Malthusian thesis of a crisis of
overproduction, along the lines developed by Greider. "Today, for the first
time in years," wrote Business Week, "there is worldwide overcapacity in
industries, from semiconductors to autos...production everywhere is running
ahead of consumption." The main inspiration for this view seemed to come
from Edward E. Yardeni, the chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell,
who was telling Wall Street that deflation, and not inflation, was now the
danger. Business Week observed that because of deflation, "in the worst
case, a wave of business and personal bankruptcies sets off a chain of
failures throughout the entire financial system. Investment and growth
collapse." The threat was especially acute for highly leveraged companies
which had taken on too much debt, and would end up trying to pay back that
debt with more expensive dollars than those they had borrowed. "The Great
Depression of the 1930s was exactly this sort of deflationary spiral. From
1929 to 1933, prices fell by 10% annually. Even moderately leveraged
companies went under, the banking system was devastated, unemployment
soared, and the economy and the stock market went into a deep swoon that
was only ended by World War II. The biggest danger for the global
economy today may be the prospect of a sustained deflationary downturn in
East Asia." 17

The editors of Business Week may not know it, but they are acting out the
17
Business Week, November 10, 1997, 55.
old vulgar Marxist cliché that the capitalists always deny that a crisis is
coming, but when the crisis finally arrives, they parrot the Malthusian thesis
of a crisis of overproduction, citing the empirical evidence of warehouses
filled with goods that cannot be sold. The capitalists then cancel investment
plans and cut production in order to raise the falling prices they think are
causing the problem. ("In today's age, you cannot get price increases,"
complained CEO John Smith of General Motors.) In doing this, they
exacerbate the depression. Business Week wanted President Suharto of
Indonesia to cancel "huge, money-wasting investments, including a national
car project." Taking this advice would make the future far worse for
Indonesia. This article was scary enough to attract the attention of the
London Economist, in its "Will the world slump?" issue, which countered
that "inflation, not deflation, remains the bigger risk." 18 Robert J.
Samuelson, for his part, finally conceded that there might be "a gathering
storm." 19 Better late than never.

The cause of a world economic depression like the current one is always
insufficient production and insufficient consumption, along with the
unbridled expansion of speculation and debt. The Financial Times began
citing "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, which reflects a
cultist prophecy that the end of the millennium will be marked by a
paroxysm of chaos and evil, opening a dark age. From Yeats came the
following satanic verses:

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

CNBC, the financial news network that broadcasts on American cable

television, featured an interview a few days after the crash with Mr. Arch
Crawford, the publisher of the Crawford Perspectives newsletter. Mr.
Crawford attributed the financial turbulence to two main groups of factors.
The first was the unfavorable alignment of the moon and the planets, which
was impelling investor sentiment in the wrong direction. He also advanced
an explanation based on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SADS), which
induces a depressive mentality during those weeks of the year when the
18
Economist, November 15, 1997.
19
Washington Post, November 19, 1997.
daylight hours are the shortest. According to Mr. Crawford, studies have
shown that a preponderant proportion of stock market declines have taken
place within 2 months of the autumnal equinox, and this market break was
also a creature of such twilight. The danger was that it was the twilight of
civilization itself.

INFLATION OR DEFLATION ?

In addition to the warnings of deflation that began to appear in the autumn of

1997, there were also emphatic warnings of immediate world-wide
hyperinflation caused by the combined impact of the IMF bailouts along
with the money-printing activities of central banks, especially the Japanese
one but also the Fed, who were seeking to play the role of lender of last
resort for otherwise insolvent banks, insurance companies, and brokerages.
In reality, the interval from October 1997 to October 1998 has turned out to
be a period of very marked worldwide deflation, in the sense that the dollar
prices of most basic commodities as measured by barometers like the
Commodity Research Bureau index have declined by about 20%. On the
other hand, a number of currencies, most notably the Indonesia rupiah, have
exceeded the 50% yearly inflation rate which seems to be the academic
economists' yardstick for hyperinflation. The Russian ruble was also headed
in the same direction. After October 1997, asset price inflation continued in
the United States for some months, in some cases until July 1998. This
tendency was advertised by the London Economist, whose front cover of
April 18, 1998 read "America's Bubble Economy." "But it is asset -price
inflation, especially in the United States, that now poses a potentially bigger
and more imminent threat to the global economy," the Economist elaborated,
suggesting that the US was really sicker than Japan.

Those warning of hyperinflation would have been well advised to specify

precisely which currencies were likely to hyperinflate. When hyperinflation
destroyed the German mark in 1923, the British pound sterling was the
obvious beneficiary, since pounds could purchase German assets,
production, and labor at severely depressed prices. Similarly, the incipient
hyperinflation in Indonesia provided an opportunity for foreign venture
capital using dollars.

ASIAN MONETARY FUND

As the Asian currency and banking crisis gathered momentum, Japan
proposed what would have been (and might still become) an important step
towards world monetary reform. This was the Japanese idea for an Asian
Monetary Fund, a regional financial cooperation organization to offer
protection to currencies under speculative assault. This would have been at
minimum a regional monetary agency operating outside of the control of the
IMF. It might have quickly become a regional alternative to, and even
adversary of, the IMF. When the idea of an Asian Monetary Fund was first
suggested by the Japanese government, US Treasury Secretary Rubin was
vaguely supportive. Then the IMF began flexing its muscles, and Rubin was
eclipsed at the Treasury by Undersecretary Larry Summers, an exponent of
the brutal IMF line. Summers sharply attacked the Asian Monetary Fund and
Japanese Ministry of Finance official Sakakibara, who was arguing for this
idea. When South Korea appealed to its traditional allies, the United States
and Japan, for emergency financial assistance, Seoul was told that it had to
submit to the IMF first, accepting whatever disastrous and meddling
conditionalities that might entail. By the time the 18 heads of state of the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group met in Vancouver,
Canada on November 23-24, the Asian Monetary Fund had gone a-
glimmering. Instead, the proceedings were dominated by endorsements of
the so-called Manila Framework, a crisis management scheme hatched by
finance ministers in the Philippine capital on November 18; this scheme
provided only for a "cooperative financing mechanism" to provide money to
supplement IMF loan packages, and called for all efforts to be subservient to
the IMF.

January 1998 began with the bankruptcy of Peregrine Investments of Hong

Kong, one of the largest investment houses in Asia. The bottom-fishers at
Zürich Investment Group had considered buying a stake in Peregrine, but
concluded that the firm was already in desperate condition. Peregrine said
that the final blow to its survival had come from the fall of the Indonesian
rupiah, which was already severely depressed, and which fell a breathtaking
48% on just one day, January 22, 1998. Henry Kaufman, the "Dr. Doom" of
the 1970s who was now the head of his own Wall Street bond firm, was
making a comeback, and warned in Toronto on January 13 that the IMF was
incapable of braking the slide into a "financial holocaust." Under these
auspices, the Davos Conference of January 29-February 3, 1998 was, apart
from the Chinese and AFL-CIO interventions, more of a magic mountain
than ever. The 1998 Davos theme was copied from the November 1987 ads
placed in newspapers by stockbrokers who sought to anesthetize their jumpy
customers by announcing: "The Worst Is Over!" Unfortunately, these
finance oligarchs should have known better, and the worst was only
beginning.

SPRING 1998: NO CONFIDENCE IN THE IMF

The IMF bailout packages for the Asian countries proved quite
controversial, and opened a phase of unprecedented criticism of that
organization. Eisuke Sakakibara (the Mr. Yen of the Japanese Finance
Ministry) in a March 2 interview with Mainichi Shimbun of Tokyo, called
for a new world monetary conference: "I believe that many world leaders
may well be starting to contemplate the idea of a financial agreement along
the lines of the Bretton Woods agreement." He added that "many people are
now realizing that both the International Monetary Fund's checks and its
solutions are insufficient."

The London Economist of January 10, 1998 ran a cover story showed pills
inscribed "IMF" bubbling like Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water, with legend:
"Kill or Cure?" The article noted that the ongoing crisis had mightily
energized critics of the IMF: "The Fund's many critics are once again in
good voice. They are a motley chorus: right-wingers in the United States
who cannot bear to see tax-dollars spent on foreigners (whose only thanks,
after all, will be to steal more American jobs); surviving left-wingers
everywhere, who regard capitalism as evil and the IMF as its instrument;
other clever types who feel it is insanely stringent." Were the $57 billion
bailout of South Korea and the $43 bailout of Indonesia justified? The
Economist was skeptical, perhaps because the bailouts in question were to a
large extent bailouts of Japanese and American, rather than London, banks:
"Invoking the risk of 'systemic' breakdown is the most obvious way to
justify the IMF's intervention. Without an emergency injection of dollars, it
is argued, companies in South Korea and the rest would default on their
debts. This would cause distress elsewhere, especially in Japan, where
stagnation could turn into outright depression. From there the crisis could
spread to the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world, as banks fail,
credit disappears, stockmarkets crash, and economies collapse. This is the
nightmare that has driven governments, notably America's, to support and
indeed insist upon the Fund's course of action." The Economist judged that
these dangers were all exaggerated, and preferred to focus on the "moral
hazard" problem, which occurs when the presence of a lender of last resort
encourages risky and irresponsible practices by banks, lenders, and
companies: the Economist insisted on "the hidden costs of bail-outs. In a
market-based system of finance, the risk of losing your money is not an
avoidable nuisance but a fundamental requirement."

More realistic was Business Week, which is read by American businessmen,

and which quoted Sakakibara's comment that "This isn't an Asian crisis. It's
a crisis of global capitalism." The Business Week line took the systemic
crisis quite seriously, and recommended increased government activism to
stave off disintegration: "…another round of deep devaluations in Asia could
force Latin American to follow suit. That would deliver a second whammy
to US exports, corporate profits, and stocks. Capital investment would drop,
and consumers -- seeing much of their mutual-fund wealth disappear --
would spend less. The West could slip into economic stagnation, Asia into a
long recession. With 'globalization' no longer delivering the goods and social
turmoil breaking out, big developing countries such as China might
postpone free-market reforms for years."20 One subhead noted: "One more
big shock -- a Chinese devaluation, another Nikkei plunge -- could clobber
world trade for years." Business Week wanted an emergency task force of
global leaders to solve the regional crisis, possibly with a world summit
meeting, the exposure of all bad debt, and fast currency stabilization "before
hyperinflation hits" the Asian region.

THE CFR CRITIQUE OF THE IMF

The position of the Wall Street/State Department interface on these matters

was articulated by Martin Feldstein.21 Feldstein's thesis: "The IMF's recent
emphasis on imposing major structural and institutional reforms as opposed
to focusing on balance-of-payments adjustments will have adverse
consequences in both the short term and the more distant future. The IMF
should stick to its traditional task of helping countries cope with temporary
shortages of foreign exchange and with more sustained trade deficits."
Feldstein faulted the IMF for wanting to give Asia the Russian-style shock
therapy treatment. The main accusation was that the IMF was going wrong
by treating Indonesia and especially South Korea in the same way that the
IMF had treated Russia -- violating sovereignty by dictating a total
20
Business Week, January 26, 1998.
21
"Refocusing the IMF," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1998, pp. 20-33.
transformation of all economic policy down to minute details. For Feldstein,
the IMF's excesses grew out of its recent history, especially in dealing with
the post-communist countries. He saw the IMF as "acting in Southeast Asia
and Korea in much the same way that it did in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union" while "applying the traditional mix of fiscal policies (higher taxes,
less government spending) and credit tightening (implying higher interest
rates) that were successful in Latin America." But these may not be what is
needed in Asia. The IMF was now going too far: "…the IMF's role in
Thailand and Indonesia went far beyond the role that it played in Latin
America. Instead of relying on private banks and serving primarily as a
monitor of performance, the IMF took the lead in providing credit . . . .The
conditions imposed on Thailand and Indonesia were more like the
comprehensive reforms imposed on Russia, including the recent emphasis
on reducing Russian corruption, than like the macroeconomic changes that
were required in Latin America."22 For South Korea, wrote Feldstein, a
quick fix to provide cash to meet short-term foreign debt payments would
have been enough, rather than the IMF's attack on the entire chaebol
structure.

One senses that Feldstein was genuinely worried that if the South Korean
bailout failed, then Japan would go down and the US would be next. It was
in this context that he discovered such notions as sovereignty and moral
rights, concepts that were not much talked about during Russian shock
therapy. Feldstein observed that much of what the IMF wanted to wipe out
in South Korea represented institutions and practices that were alive and
well in western Europe. In other words, the Russian experience had made
the IMF so addicted to the most extreme laissez-faire, unbridled capitalisme
sauvage that the IMF now needed to be reminded that it simply will not do
to treat South Koreans etc. as if they were in the same category with the
defenseless Russians. That was no doubt be interesting news for Russians,
who had been put through the IMF meatgrinder with no regard whatever for
their sovereignty or moral rights. Feldstein's comments is political dynamite
for the Russian front. The owl of Minerva was taking flight at dusk,
revealing much of the real essence of the system at the very moment that the
system was crashing down.

CHINA: A NEW DEAL TO FIGHT THE WORLD DEPRESSION

22
Martin Feldstein, "Refocusing the IMF," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1998, pp. 20-33.
By far the most rational response to the severe world-wide turbulence of late
1997 came from the People's Republic of China. The Chinese leaders,
turning away from the myths and tragedies of the Mao period, were now
pursuing an economic policy inspired by Confucius and Dr. Sun Yat-sen.
With Zhu Rongji's replacement of Li Peng as Prime Minister, the aftermath
of the 1989 Tien An Men repressions had been relegated to the past.
Speaking at the 1998 Davos Forum, Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Li
Lanquing affirmed China's commitment to internal improvements,
infrastructure, public works, and great projects as part of a comprehensive
program totaling $750 billion. This was to include the Three Gorges Dam,
other water projects, railroads, highways, steel plants, housing, and much
more. The Chinese press was full of calls for a policy in the spirit of
Franklin D. Roosevelt. "China's reforms and development need a Chinese-
style New Deal," wrote the influential Outlook magazine of March 13, 1998.
A few days later, China Daily reported that new Prime Minister "Zhu
Rongji, the man who stemmed China's inflation without stifling growth, is
poised to launch the Chinese version of Roosevelt's New Deal this year . . . .
Zhu has made it clear that massive investment will be channeled into
infrastructure, echoing Roosevelt's bid to revive the American economy in
the 1930s." Zhu had five areas for economic reform, including grain storage
and delivery, investment and funding, housing, medical care, and science
and technology. This campaign was a central point in President Jiang
Zemin's address to the Ninth National People's Congress in Beijing on
March 19; although Jiang was still using the long-standing formula about
"socialism with Chinese characteristics," it appeared that what was meant
was a New Deal with Chinese characteristics. According to some Chinese
officials quoted in the Western press, the Chinese program actually carried a
price tag of $1 trillion; it was evidently the greatest business opportunity of
all time. All that was missing was the diplomatic effort towards a New
Bretton Woods conference, in which point China evidently had decided to
defer to the United States.

While the rest of the world violently contracted, China hewed to a growth
target of 8%, especially impressive since most of this was real physical
growth. For the first half of 1998, China reported 7% growth, but President
Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji kept repeating that, with an
improved second half, 8% yearly growth was still within reach. This was the
year of disastrous flooding in China, with an estimated $20 billion in
damage, and the response of the government was to increase credit by about
1 trillion RMB during the closing months of 1998. On August 31, People's
Daily featured an article endorsing the American New Deal in more detail
than previously. The piece was entitled "Background on Franklin
Roosevelt's New Deal," and focused on FDR's response to the banking crisis
of 1933 (see Chapters VI, VII, and XI below), and on his dirigistic policies
in the various spheres of the economy. Chinese readers were being prepared
to understand the crisis gripping the entire world.

THE G-22 AND THE NEW ARCHITECTURE

During late 1997 and early 1998, US Treasury Secretary Rubin called
repeatedly for a "new financial architecture," although the exact content of
this phrase was not defined. Hopes for reform came to be attached to the
Group of 22, a hybrid group made up of G-7 wealthy nations along with
some emerging markets countries. The G-22 was called for a time the
Willard Group, after the Washington hotel where in had been meeting in
early 1998. The G-22 met in Washington at the Madison Hotel on April 16.
Rubin's speech portrayed the Asian crisis as a global crisis, and he repeated
his "not one nickel" for the private banks policy. He made modest proposals
for greater transparency and oversight on derivatives. He criticized hedge
funds and speculators for having torpedoed the economies of the Asian tiger
nations. But the British were hostile to any attempt to curb the speculators or
re-introduce exchange controls, and Germany and France were not interested
in any new architecture, since these countries imagined that they already had
their future blueprint in the form of the euro, which once again proved its
remarkable capability for hog-tying the European states in the midst of the
crisis. There was no specific talk of a new Bretton Woods. Three task forces
were told to come back in October with reports on various aspects of the
crisis. The G-22 subcommittee meeting in Tokyo on July 29 began
developing early warning mechanisms for national financial distress --
somewhat late in the day.

PARALYSIS OF THE BIS

Just as it had during the world monetary crisis of 1931, the Bank for
International Settlements continued to punt. On June 8, this private central
bank of private central banks published the consensus line of the central
bank governors on the unfolding world breakdown. BIS Managing Director
Andrew Crockett, writing in the BIS Annual Report, threw up his hands,
conceding that the Asian contagion represented "the first crisis in the
postwar period featuring the combination of banks as the principal
international creditors, and private sector entities as the principal debtors.
Principles of how to manage and resolve a crisis of this sort were not known
in advance and, indeed, are still under discussion." Although thus
temporizing himself, Crockett attacked the Japanese for their "decade of
temporizing." Not to be outdone, the IMF refused to call for any curbs on the
hedge funds, which had manifestly detonated the worst crisis since 1931.
The IMF's World Economic Outlook, issued on April 13, asked the pertinent
question, "Should hedge funds be subjected to greater regulatory and
disclosure requirements?" The answer was, of course, a resounding no. Just
as in the 1930s, the central banks would prove capable only of
recriminations, but impotent when it came to putting forward a solution.

THE SOUTH KOREAN CONTRACTION

As a result of the Soros-led speculative attack, South Korea was soon

experiencing a capital flight in excess of $1 billion per day. George Soros
was putting out the watchword, "Sell Korea," and the stock market was now
down 60% and the won down 40% from their pre-crash levels. South Korea
was in the midst of a violent contraction of production, employment, and
living standards, similar to the American experience of 1929-31. In the
spring of 1997, South Korean companies were going bankrupt at the rate of
2,000 per month. James Wolfensohn of the World Bank tried a Diktat of his
own, telling South Korea "no public funds for bailing out industry." On May
27, 300,000 South Korean workers staged a strike against the mass layoffs
dictated by the IMF. Since the crisis began, household consumption in the
country had declined by 10.5%, the worst collapse in the history of this data
series going back to the end of the Korean War.

THE PHILIPPINE GOVERNMENT BANKRUPT

The new Philippine president Joseph Estrada bluntly stated in his State of
the Nation address on July 27, "Our economy is in bad shape, and the
national coffers are almost empty. The government cannot fulfill the needs
of the economy. In short, the government is bankrupt. He cited a foreign
debt of $51 billion and a budget deficit of $2.1 billion, frankly lamenting: "I
thought we had a lot of money. They were saying we were economically
stable, the new economic tiger of Asia. It turned out we're not a tiger, but a
puppy."

33. INDONESIA: THE IMF TOPPLES SUHARTO23

Indonesia owed the international bankers $150 billion. As part of the price
enacted for the initial aid package of October 1997, the IMF had specified
that 16 banks had to be shut down, including one owned by Suharto's son.
This was a micro-managed Diktat with a clear political overtone, and it set
off a nation-wide banking panic, with depositors running to get cash out of
their accounts, and withdrawing $2 billion in just a few hours. By the end of
November, two thirds of all Indonesian banks had experienced panic runs.
The central bank responded by printing money as best it could, leading in
turn to an international attack on the rupiah at the end of December, with
capital fleeing to safe havens abroad. The Economist of February 21, 1998
focused on "Asia's Coming Explosion," highlighting the situation in
Indonesia, the fourth largest in the world. "There is now at least an even
chance that this nation of 200m people will shortly erupt in murderous
violence . . . the chief victims of the violence will be the ethnic Chinese who
make up 3% of the population but own much of the wealth, and …this will
put pressure on them and, most important of all, on China itself, to respond
in some way. . . an explosion in Indonesia will bring on a new, darker phase
of Asia's economic crisis -- which could in turn bring political change
elsewhere " President Suharto was seen by the Economist as "gripped by
self-delusion." His main crime seemed to be a desire to peg the rupiah to the
dollar.

THE SPECTER OF STAND-STILL AGREEMENTS

In February, President Suharto informed President Clinton that "the current

IMF program has not been a roaring success. . . Where is the alternative?
Because what you've got here now isn't working." Suharto was calling the
fall of the Indonesia rupiah "insane." Steve Hanke, the Wall Street Journal,
and others wanted Indonesia to imitate Argentina by instituting a currency
board, a committee of foreign bankers who would dictate the dimensions of
the country's money supply. Indonesia, through whose archipelagoes one
third of all world maritime trade passes, was approaching internal anarchy.
23
The numbering of the crises refers to the table in Chapter IV.
In early April, IMF official Stanley Fischer was in Jakarta to supervise the
IMF's 117 points of oversight. Indonesian Economics Minister Ginandjar
spoke of the status of Indonesia's foreign debts. He said that Indonesia's
policy was "not a moratorium. But it's often called a stand-still." With that
we were back to 1931 and the stand-still agreements, amounting to
temporary forbearance by foreign creditors, arranged by Schacht when the
banks of central Europe blew out.

The overthrow of Suharto was a replay of a scenario which the IMF has
frequently played out in third world nations: the IMF demands the abolition
of subsidized prices on basic consumer goods - typically the price of staples
like bread or rice. Riots break out at once, and the government is
overthrown. In the case of Indonesia, the removal of subsidies was dictated
by the IMF in an agreement signed with the Indonesia government on April
13. In that deal, the IMF exacted a pledge to end virtually all remaining state
subsidies by October 1, 1998. The state sector, including the state oil
company Pertamin, were to get no further investment. Instead, the entire
state sector was to be placed on the auction block under distressed
merchandise conditions. The government rice import and provisioning
board, BULOG for short, was marked for extinction. The austerity measures
were extorted by the IMF as the price for continued disbursements of $40
billion in still-pending aid. The government reluctantly announced that it
would terminate government price subsidies on rice, palm oil, gasoline,
public transportation, and same other basics. Prices on these items went up
between 25% and 71%, and electricity rates jumped by 20%. At this point,
middle-class college students protesting the Suharto regime were joined in
the streets by aggressive gangs of looters, and repression of the riots by the
army left 500 dead. Although the mass discontent occasioned by the price
increases was real, the timing of the riots had the choreographed appearance
of a typical CIA "people power" insurrection of the type seen in the
Philippines in 1985, or the MI6 "rent-a-mob" toppling of the Shah of Iran.
Despite the fact that he had just been re-elected for another term in office,
Suharto the tendered his resignation; he was succeeded by his running mate
in the recent election, B.J. Habibie, who promised to work with the IMF. By
the time of the political crisis, the rupiah had fallen from the June 1997 rate
of 2,500 to a dollar to almost 13,000 -- a devaluation of about 85%.
Malaysia's Mahatir, speaking at a forum in Tokyo on June 2, demanded to
know, "Can it be that all the assets of that huge country, with 220 million
hard-working people, are suddenly worth only one-sixth of its previous
value? What, indeed, is the worth of a nation, if someone can devalue and
even bankrupt it?"

"WE ARE DYING"

Before the fall of Suharto, the price of rice and other foods had increased by
up to 300% in many parts of Indonesia. A wage freeze had been imposed in
1997, and overall inflation was running at 50% per year. During the first
hundred days after the fall of Suharto, the price of rice more than doubled,
while inflation exceeded a 70% yearly rate. The looting of rice stocks by
desperate people became one of the key factors in the breakdown of public
order. An August 31, 1998 report of the UN's International Labor
Organization forecast that 66% of Indonesians would fall below the poverty
line in 1999, a level of immiseration the country had left behind during the
1960s. 37% were already below the poverty line as of the first half of 1998,
and 48% would enter poverty before the end of 1998. Indonesia's poverty
measurement a diet providing fewer than 2,100 calories per day. The report
said that 5.4 million Indonesians would lose their jobs during 1998, with
official unemployment rising to 7%, or 6.7 million persons. One member of
the research team blurted out that 20% of the 92 million person workforce
were already unemployed.24 By August 1998, Indonesia had inflation of
100%, and had suffered a 30% contraction in economic output. US Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright certified on July 30 that "no nation has been hit
harder by the financial crisis than Indonesia, traditionally a source of
stability and growth within the region." According to orthodox monetarist
economics, a devaluation of 85% should have made Indonesia the world's
export superstar and returned it swiftly to prosperity. Instead, Indonesia was
collapsing, too broke to buy the components and semi-finished commodities
needed for its exports. On August 11, the Banque Indosuez of Paris told
Bloomberg Financial News that Indonesia had "defaulted on a foreign debt
payment falling due that week. Even though the report was instantly denied
by the Indonesia government, this blip was enough to restart panic selling of
Indonesian assets in many quarters.

The tragic situation of Indonesia was starkly depicted in the report of

Indonesian Finance Minister Bambang Subianto the the International
Institute of Finance on October 4, 1997. The minister said, "We are dying."

24
Kompas/Straits Times, September 1, 1998.
A FINANCIAL MOUNT ETNA

Other countries were also writhing under IMF conditionalities. In Thailand,

the newspaper The Nation was forced to pose the desperate question of
whether Thailand could be saved or not. Among the 50 economists who
participated in the debate, more than one wanted to revive great projects of
infrastructure, such as the project promoted during the 1980s by Pakdee
Tanapura and others for a canal across the Isthmus of Kra, to relieve
pressure on the Straits of Malacca and create a development corridor in
Thailand itself. On July 31, Ukraine obtained a loan of $2.2 billion from the
IMF, accepting conditionalities for money which would go to pay August
debt service requirements. The Straits Times of Singapore informed its
readers that, back in January, it had invited in a group of economists to
evaluate the IMF's performance in dealing with the "Asian contagion." The
initial question posed was whether the IMF were "the amputating god or
angel of mercy. Six months later, the paper had concluded that the IMF was
indeed an "amputating god." On July 20 Malyasian Special Functions
Minister Tun Daim Zainuddin told a seminar that the IMF has "failed, and
failed miserably" in dealing with the Asian crisis. For Mexico City's
Excelsior, Indonesia was the "cruel mirror" in which the emerging market
victims of the IMF could contemplate their own future destiny; columnist
Neme Salum expatiated on the "Hitlerian nature of the IMF." Italian
economist Paolo Savona compared the post-1971 monetary arrangements to
Sicily's famous volcano "Mount Etna, where once in a while a crack opens
and swallows a gorgeous slice of land." Among the Asian states there was a
wave of barter deals, in which jets, cars, rice, electronics and other
commodities were exchanged among Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and
South Korea outside of the financial system -- a sure sign that the world
monetary arrangements were failing in the most basic way.

THE SPRINGTIME OF WALL STREET AND BELTWAY EUPHORIA

Despite this grim world situation, the springtime of 1998 was marked by the
gloating of the Clinton administration over the first US budget surplus in
three decades, an unemployment rate of 4.1%, and the new highs of the
stock market. Stoked by flight capital exiting the stricken markets of Asia
and Latin America, the Dow peaked on July 17. For the lesser fry, the party
had ended earlier: the Russell 2000 index of small-cap stocks reached its
peak back in April. According to Salomon Smith Barney, the average NYSE
stock fell 24% in the 11 days after the July 17 top, while the average
NASDAQ issue fell 35% and small cap stocks fell 43%. The Dow was
maintained with the help of the Brady drugged market system described in
the following chapter.

World Bank official Jean-Michel Severino told a conference in Melbourne,

Australia on June 16, "We are probably at the end of the first cycle of
the crisis and we are entering into a deep recession, or you could even
use the term depression. This depression could be very long-lasting."

Then true global panic began to clutch the human heart in its icy claws.

SOROS SINKS THE RUBLE

During the month of May, the Russian stock market took a 44% dive. On
June 3, a billion-dollar GKO auction produced a 54% coupon yield, and
even this was considered a moral victory. The putrid Russian banking
system also began to generate concern. The Toko Bank failed, and the stock
price of the Sberbank, which was the centerpiece of the national savings
mechanism and the largest holder of GKOs, was mercilessly hammered. The
Moscow interbank market was approaching breakdown, with the potential
for chain-reaction bankruptcy for all Russian banks. US Deputy Treasury
Secretary Larry Summers, one of the svengalis of shock therapy, was forced
to admit that "Russia's problem has the potential to become. . . .central
Europe's and the world's." Treasury Secretary Rubin seconded this analysis,
telling CNN: "There is also the risk once again of contagion if Russia really
has substantial instability and difficulties that can spread to central Europe
and that they can spread further." Contagion was now the euphemism for
panic. The terminology was reminiscent of the Vienna banking crisis of
spring 1931, with the GKOs in the role of the "mass of kited bills" against
which President Hoover inveighed at that time (see Chapter VII).

Part of the difficulty was that the only visible means of support for post-
1991 Russia was the sale of oil and raw materials on the world market. The
prices for oil and metals were now at two-decade lows, meaning that
Russia's foreign exchange was becoming very scarce. The fall in the world
oil price in 1986 had helped to doom Gorbachev; a repeat of the oil price
collapse now threatened to finish off his successor. "What's the issue?"
asked shock therapist Boris Nemtsov on June 29. "Will we succeed in
avoiding a bankruptcy of the Russian Federation or not? That is the issue."
The answer soon proved to be default. On July 13, the IMF announced an
emergency 2-year loan package of $22.6 billion, supposedly designed to
stabilize the ruble. $11.2 of this was the IMF's own money, with much of the
rest from Japan and the World Bank. The Russian stock market rose by 28%
between July 13 and July 15, but it proved to be a mugs' rally.

On August 13, the banquerotteur à la baisse George Soros opined in the

London Financial Times that Russian finances were "in a terminal state,"
and demanded a devaluation of the ruble by 15-25%. Holders of GKOs
started to panic, and the yields on GKOs, which move in the opposite
direction to their prices, rose from the previous day's close of 137% to
210%, a high rate for the government paper. The Moscow business journal
Kommersant described this ploy by Soros as "the trigger, but certainly not
the cause" of the catastrophe which now ensured for Russia. Foreign banks
issued urgent margin calls to Russian banks, since foreign loans to the
Russians secured by Russian securities as collateral were now insufficient to
cover the value of these loans. Ironically, it was just a month after the IMF
bailout package for Russia, which had been touted as a solution for all such
problems. Thanks in large part to Soros, August 13, 1998 became Moscow's
Black Thursday, the day when Moscow's interbank clearing system, the
local equivalent of CHIPS, CHAPS or BOJ-Net, jammed up and froze
completely. Just before Black Thursday, Prime Minister Kiriyenko had
started talking about the need to stimulate production -- in itself a departure
from the shock therapy litany, according to which production would always
take care of itself. On August 19, Central Bank Chairman Dubinin was
obliged to confirm that the entire $4.8 billion initial IMF tranche, which had
been transferred to Russia in July, had already been spent in fruitless
currency support operations and in a $1 billion buyback of GKOs.

34. MOSCOW, AUGUST 17, 1998: BEGINNING OF THE END FOR

GLOBALONEY25

On August 17, 1998 the Russian government imposed long overdue capital
controls and exchange controls. Prime Minister Kiriyenko announced that
the government would attempt to defend a ruble parity of about 9.5 to the
dollar with the help of the new measures; this amounted to a devaluation of
25
The numbering of the crises refers to the table in Chapter IV.
34%. Principal payments on $40 billion in foreign loans to Russian banks
and other firms were banned for 90 days, meaning that Russia was officially
in default. Soon the default covered Russia's $180 billion in foreign
obligations. GKOs and OFZs reaching maturity between August 17 and
December 31, 1999 were restructured by ukaz into long-term obligations.
Payments by Russian banks to foreign creditors were banned for 90 days.
The dozen top Russian banks were ordered to form a payments pool to
ensure the liquidity of the interbank market. There was no immediate formal
default on scheduled debt payments pledged specifically by the Russian
government to foreign entities, but this followed de facto within less than
two weeks. The default on GKOs meant that State debt instruments were to
be converted: Russian holders of GKO government bonds might get 31
kopeks for every ruble, while foreign holders would get only 11 kopeks on
the ruble. For Russia and the world, it was a great watershed, the end of an
era. According to press reports, foreign investors had signed forward
currency contracts with Russian banks in the amount of some $100 billion.
This mass of kited derivatives was used by foreign holders of GKOs and
OFZ state securities to hedge against changes in the value of the ruble. If the
Russian banks had been forced to honor these contracts (stipulated before
the August ruble collapse), these banks would have been bankrupted. But
the controls instituted on August 17 blocked payment on these futures
contracts.

The IMF-Sachs-Aslund Russian shock therapy of 1991-92 had marked the

worldwide victory of predatory financier capitalism. But now the
ascendancy of globaloney was finished; laissez-faire was over in Russia, and
protectionist forces around the world were recovering enough to contemplate
re-regulation as an antidote to the nightmare of speculation. Credit Suisse
First Boston, J. P. Morgan, and Deutsche Bank and other big losers howled,
threatening various reprisals. Visa International froze the credit cards issued
by Russian banks. But if they wanted to treat Russia like a banana republic,
they had to remember that Russia had nuclear bananas. A return to regulated
currency markets had been advocated by economists like Leonid Abalkin
and Sergei Glazyev, a former minister was currently an advisor to Yegor
Stroyev, a leader of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian
parliament. Another leading Russian protectionist was Taras Muranivsky of
the Moscow State University for the Humanities.

On August 17, Prime Minister Kiriyenko had stated "The deteriorated

situation forced us to retreat to the second line of defense in order to fulfill
the program that we adopted. It is this that will be discussed with the
international finance organizations." On that same day, Camdessus arrived
with an IMF delegation. But this time there was no new bailout. The IMF
bailout strategy was in a shambles. "There is nobody left who can play
fireman; central banks cannot do it any longer," lamented Bundesbank board
member Reimut Joachimsen, the representative of Rheinland-Westfalia on
the Bundesbank Council.26

STALINGRAD FOR THE IMF

On Friday, August 21, Prime Minister Kiriyenko told the Duma that Russia
was about to enter a new and very serious financial crisis. On August 26,
German Finance Minister Theo Waigel angrily declared that no help for the
stricken Russian Federation would be forthcoming from the IMF, the G-7, or
the European Union. "Russia must do it by herself," snapped Waigel. If
Russia had no hope of Western largesse, reasoned the speculators, she would
have no incentive to remain solvent, so they started to take what money they
could and run. First they sought dollars, and the ruble rate declined by 12%
compared to the greenback, but soon this department of currency trading
was shut down. Then they sought German marks, and here the trading pits
stayed open, declining by 41% on that one, fateful day. On August 27, 1998,
the automatic convertibility of the Russian ruble, the bedrock of all shock
therapy and free market reform, was suspended. On September 12, Russia
failed to make a scheduled payment on restructured debt arrears dating back
to the Soviet era and owed to the Paris Club of creditors. Russia was
supposed to pay $462 million, but managed to scrape together only $115
million. The new Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, stressed that his
government "will pay all our debts. . . .Russia does not refuse to carry out its
obligations." But Russian default was now complete all along the line.

Anti-nomenklatura Russian economist Tatyana Koryagina observed around

this time that "the world economy has reached the point where -- if
economic liberalism is a dead-end street, it has hit the concrete wall at the
end of the street. This liberalism will explode the entire economy and then
there will be global chaos, which will be economic fascism. A 'New World
Order' is economic fascism, when a huge number of people are thrown into
desperate poverty, and only the speculators make any profit. We are on the
verge of a particular sort of anti-financier revolution -- a revolution against
26
Corriere della Sera, August 27, 1998.
financial speculators."

Angry depositors were lined up outside Russian banks for weeks. One of the
banks hardest hit was the SBS-Agro, the largest commercial retail bank with
2,200 branches, 5.7 million depositors, and 1,500 corporate clients. The
boss of SBS-Agro was Aleksandr Smolensky, who had gone from petty
hustling under the Communist regime to elbow his way into the restricted
clique of self-styled oligarchs who were the power behind the Yeltsin
regime. Now, with irate savers besieging Smolensky's posh offices, his
insolvent bank was on the verge of being seized by the Russian government.
"Things are warped. It's a catastrophe,' said Smolensky. The Communist
Party was demanding the re-nationalization of key industries.

HEDGE FUNDS AND BANKS MAULED ON RUSSIAN FRONT

Among the big losers was Credit Suisse First Boston, which had long been
one of the most important participants in the market for Russian state
securities, the so-called GKOs. Now CSFB had to confess to trading losses
of $500 million on the Russian front, although rumors put the losses as $2-
$3 billion, enough to prove fatal, and perhaps enough to activate the fabled
system of Swiss financial self-defense, which aims above all at saving the
three largest banks in the Zürich Bahnhofstraße, of which Credit Suisse is
one.

American banks and hedge funds suffered heavy losses of their own on
Russian Treasury debt. The face value of the Russian Treasury debt was
about $40 billion, and was been written down to about $7 billion, for a loss
of $33 billion. Of that $33 billion loss, about one-quarter-- or $8 billion--
was sustained by foreign holders of Russian GKOs. Then there were losses
on investments in Russian stocks, losses on about $100 billion in Russian
derivatives, and losses on direct loans by Western financial institutions of
loans to Russian banks and industry. According to a late August report by
Morningstar, which monitors mutual funds, three emerging-market funds
which had between 10 and 20% of their investments invested in Russian
debt and bonds, had lost close to 30% for the year to date. The three were
Morgan Stanley Institutional Emerging Markets Debt A, Morgan Grenfell
Emerging Markets Debt, and the T. Rowe Price Emerging Markets Bond
Fund. Edmond Safra's Republic National Bank of New York announced a
$110-million charge in the third quarter, wiping out its earnings for the
period. Chase Manhattan was vulnerable to the Russian events because of its
$500 million in exposure; J.P. Morgan had slightly under $400 million;
BankAmerica, with $412 million; Citicorp checked in with $500 million;
and Bankers Trust had $1 billion. Goldman Sachs was reported to have
incurred losses. The Quantum Fund of George Soros, based in the
Netherlands Antilles, had lost $2 billion in Russia, some in bonds, but
mostly in stocks, according to chief investment officer Stanley
Druckenmiller. The Julian Robertson Tiger Fund later posted a $3.4 billion
loss, a hit equal to 17% of the fund's value -- despite the presence on the
Tiger board of directors of Lady Margaret Thatcher. Everest Capital, a $2.7-
billion hedge fund based in Bermuda, lost about $500 million. Omega Fund,
a $4.5 billion hedge fund run by Leon Cooperman, had a Russian debt
position of $135 million, most of which was lost. The High Risk
Opportunity Fund, a $450-million fund run by III Offshore Advisors, a West
Palm Beach, Florida hedge fund, held ruble-denominated debt of $850
million, and was reportedly wiped out. Estimates began to circulate in the
world press according to which Western investors in Russia could hope to
get 17-20 cents on the dollar out of their investments, at most. German
banks, whose exposure was know to be great, attempted to cultivate the
impression that their lending to Russia was covered by the Hermes system of
government-backed export credit insurance, named for the deputy minister
who designed it back during the Helmut Schmidt era. In this case, a large
part of the $56 billion in German bank loans to Russia would have to be
made good by the German taxpayer. But the exposure of German banks
included trade financing of Gazprom and other firms, and also excludes
German bank holdings of Russian GKOs, which were now worthless outside
of Russia. The Frankfurter Allgemeine commented on August 29 that "the
developments in Russia rather are, as is often the case in stock market
history," the "forceful prick with the needle, which will make the balloon of
illusions blow apart." On the following Monday, just as Clinton was flying
to Moscow to meet with Yeltsin and the Russian government, the Dow
tumbled 517 points in New York, the second worst daily point loss on
record. The very heavy selling was attributed to hedge funds liquidating US
assets to cover the huge losses they had sustained on the Russian front. The
hedge funds were the carriers of the contagion.

WORSE THAN 1917

Part of the Russian tragedy was that, under shock therapy, the country had
become dependent on imported food. Butter imports to Russia were likely to
fall by 20% and more in 1998, according to spokesman for the New Zealand
Dairy Board, which was demanding cash up front for all shipments. Fruit
imports to Russia, especially from the USA, were dropping by 30% to 50%.
Shortages of fruit, sugar, pasta, and flour were quickly emerging. Cargoes
bound for Russia were piling up on the docks in German and Baltic ports,
while Russian importers figured out whether and how they should pay.
Some types of raw materials exports accelerated, due to the 50% devaluation
of the ruble.27 A society to which Raisa Gorbachova belonged published an
appeal for the homeless children of Russia, who numbered over 2 million.
During Clinton's visit to Moscow, he met with opposition leaders, including
General Aleksandr Lebed, the military man turned politician. Lebed said
after the meeting, "I told him today that the situation in Russia is
catastrophic. The situation is worse than 1917... Now we have stockpiles of
poorly-guarded nuclear weapons." The business newspaper Kommersant-
vlast of August 18 had predicted conditions comparable to those of the
1918-1921 civil war of the red and white armies, when millions of Russians
were killed. The obvious failing of the Russian program was that it did
nothing specifically to re-start domestic production, put people back to
work, defend living standards, or promote world trade. Without these
components, the ghost of Hjalmar Schacht might soon haunt the Kremlin.

August-September 1998 was the moment when a rational US government

would have declared a comprehensive debt moratorium on all of Russia's
international payment obligations, and would have launched a New Lend-
Lease program of the type described at the conclusion of this book. Instead,
when President Clinton went to Moscow in the first week of September, he
demanded that the Russians stick to the IMF's Herbert Hoover economics,
the monetarist folly which had landed Russia in the crisis in the first place.
Clinton's refusal face reality was very ominous for the future of humankind.

In neighboring Poland, the immiseration became aggravated to the point that

the post-communist elite became concerned that the impoverished but
unbowed Polish working people, with their strong revolutionary traditions,
might be goaded into insurrection. The decline in standards of living was
specifically attributable to the so-called "Plan II," a new brainchild of
Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowicz, an annex
of the IMF and the resident enforcer of Poland's first round of shock therapy
back in the 1980s. Balcerowicz wanted to fire 120,000 miners and 40,000
27
Journal of Commerce, August 31, 1998.
steel workers. Despite 30% short-term interest rates, venture capital began to
flee the country, with $8 billion vanishing during just a few months.

The world depression was deepening: India, although somewhat insulated

from the currency dramas of 1997 by the fact that the rupee was already
floating, found that her exports had declined 8% during the first quarter of
1998. In May alone, exports had collapsed by 17.4%. By June, exports were
down 11% from the year-ago level. At this point India had about $25 billion
in foreign exchange, and the rupee was sliding inexorably lower. India had
been wise enough to resist some of the key points in the globalization
program: the rupee remained not fully convertible, the main commercial
banks remained in the state sector, there had been little privatization of
government-owned companies, labor laws still protected jobs, farmers still
received subsidies, and imports of consumer goods were discouraged. As a
result of this vestigial protectionism, India fared better than many other
Asian countries in 1998.

$18 BILLION FOR THE IMF?

After having earmarked $20 billion for Thailand, $45 billion for Indonesia,
$57 billion for South Korea, $23 billion for Russia, and $2 billion for
Ukraine, the IMF's coffers were severely depleted. The Russian bailout of
July 13, as we have seen, left the IMF -- with between $3 and $8 billion left
in its depleted till -- strapped for cash and highly vulnerable to new
outbreaks of panic. As Greenspan frequently stressed, the world finance
oligarchy saw a replenishing of the IMF as an immediate imperative. But
late in the evening of July 21, House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided not to
bring to the floor the funding authorization bill which would have given the
IMF $18 billion in taxpayers' money for new bailouts. GOP circles offered
verbiage about the need for delay to allow an evaluation of the effectiveness
IMF policies in treating the Asian and Russian crisis, but it was clear that
many Republicans were frightened of voting for a handout to the
international banker shortly before the November 1998 Congressional
elections. At this time, polls were giving the Democratic Party a fighting
chance to win the dozen seats needed to re-assume control of the House,
putting a certain end to Gingrich's career. Gingrich as tax collector for the
IMF made an inviting target. Gingrich undoubtedly thought that it would be
much safer politically to punt for the moment, and then to force Clinton to
assume the opprobrium of calling the Congress back after the November
election for a lame duck session to approve the IMF funding. But this time,
the bear blew first. . . .

The IMF funding had been held up primarily by Rep. Dick Armey of Texas,
the Republican Majority leader. Armey was an obscure economics professor
from Texas and an obsessive monetarist ideologue; he opposed the IMF for
all the wrong reasons, but may nevertheless go down in history as one of its
gravediggers. On July 17 and 18, press reports had told of Armey, for one,
giving up his efforts to block the IMF refunding. But opposition to the IMF
bailout went far beyond Armey as an individual. Gingrich's tenure as
Speaker must appear as extremely unsatisfactory from the point of view of
the international financiers. He had been expected to get legislation passed
to prop up the stock market by investing Social Security contributions in
common stocks, or even in mutual funds, but he had failed to do so. Now, he
had failed to rescue the IMF in extremis. On September 1, House
Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Livingston reportedly reversed
his earlier position and decided to oppose the $18 billion for the IMF.28 The
$18 billion for the IMF was finally contained in the appropriations bills
passed towards the end of October 1998. Giving this money to Camdessus
after the IMF had certified its own uselessness by way of the Russian
debacle was a sign that the US ruling elite had a very tenuous hold on the
real world.

These days, an $18 billion bailout fund can be consumed by just a week or
two of hedge-fund attack against a medium-sized country. The United
States government would have been much better advised to outlaw hedge
funds, while using the $18 billion as an economic development fund for
Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian state. The Wye River talks
between Arafat and Netanyahu, which were held just as this appropriation
was going through, showed that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations had
reached the extreme outer limits of what could be accomplished without a
US-sponsored Marshal Plan for the Middle East. Giving $18 billion to the
IMF was like throwing it down a rate hole -- worse, since it permitted the
IMF to exacerbate the world depression with its Herbert Hoover economic
prescriptions in the face of imminent disintegration.

JAPAN: THE PARALYSIS OF AN OLIGARCHY

28
Congressional Quarterly Monitor, September 1, 1998.
Japan remained the epicenter of the world financial and monetary crisis. By
the beginning of 1998, the country was reeling from the bankruptcies of
Hokutaku Bank and Yamaichi Securities, and business confidence was at a
new nadir. The Japanese government was promising world central bankers
and finance ministers that Tokyo would permit "no more defaults" -- a
wholly impossible task. The proper approach would have been a law
imposing a uniform and orderly freeze on all real estate and financial debt
associated with the Japanese bubble, with all this paper remaining in
suspended animation for the duration of the crisis. But Hashimoto came the
spell of Britain's Tony Blair, who was lionized on his visit to Japan, where
he preached breakneck liberalization at all costs. On January 12, with Blair
still in the country, a receptive Prime Minister Hashimoto appeared before
the Diet with a $500 billion bailout package for the insolvent Japanese
banking system. Hashimoto stated specifically that the purpose of his
measures was to prevent Japan from becoming the detonator of a "world
financial crisis" and a "world recession." Hashimoto wanted to add $130
billion to the Japanese deposit insurance fund, allegedly to protect savers,
but more likely to bail out stockholders and bond holders of the banks. A
new fund with the significant name "Special Budget for Crisis Management
in the Financial System" was created with an endowment of $100 billion.
The government-operated Postal Savings Bank, where many Japanese now
preferred to leave their money for safe-keeping, was instructed to make new
loans quickly to expand credit. $45 billion was earmarked for tax cuts for
households. It soon turned out that the Japanese banks felt that they would
lose face if they were to activate these arrangements for their own benefit;
perhaps they also feared panic runs sparked by hedge funds if they
announced that they needed government help. In any case, scant use was
made of the government bailout facility during the following months.
Hashimoto had proposed the biggest financial bailout in history, but it was
still a financial bailout, and it failed to save Hashimoto, much less the banks.

By strict accounting standards, Japan Inc. would have been insolvent at

midnight on March 31, 1998, but the word had gone out from the ministries
that "accounting leniency" was now in order, and so the banks were able to
survive. It was a replay of the forbearance enjoyed by the US banks during
the Bush years. Hashimoto insisted with going ahead with his "Big Bang"
liberalization of financial markets at the beginning of the new Japanese
fiscal year on April 1, 1998. Hashimoto would have been better advised to
re-regulate, instituting capital controls and currency controls to protect the
falling yen. The Japanese Central Bank became virtually independent of
government control, in a move that imitated recent changes at the Bank of
England. Financial markets were deregulated. The immediate effect of these
changes was to facilitate the flight of speculative capital out of the country.

On April 25, the Hashimoto government proposed a stimulus package of

$128 billion in government spending and related measures in the hope of
stopping deflation and pulling the country out of its slump. The money
supply was 51% larger than it had been twelve months earlier, but deflation
continued unabated. Certain circles tried to exploit the international financial
tension to engineer a break between the US and Japan. Eric Lincoln of the
Brookings Institution seriously proposed a campaign of petty affronts and
insults to Japanese diplomats to telegraph that the US "no longer regards
Japan as a global partner."

In May, Eisuke Sakakibara repeated that a New Bretton Woods approach

might be needed to reform the current world monetary arrangements. Soon,
Mita copiers went bankrupt, while Mazda and Mitsubishi were in trouble in
the auto sector. Kobe Steel and NKK were also in dire straits. Tao Steel
announced liquidation in early September, and Hitachi said that, with losses
of $1.8 billion projected for the current year, it was facing its worst financial
crisis since the war. The falling yen caused widespread consternation among
the other Asian nations especially. On June 11, Thailand's Deputy Prime
Minister Panitchpakdi warned that the skidding yen "might trigger a second
crisis" in Asia that would be worse than anything seen so far. Such a crisis,
he warned, "would pull the whole world into it. It would be like a black hole.
The second Asian crisis would mean the first worldwide depression."
On June 18, the United States and Japan joined in a half-hearted and
episodic support operation for the very weak yen. The New York Federal
reserve, acting for the Treasury, bought about $4 billion worth of yen,
raising the yen rate of exchange from 147 to 137 to the dollar. This was a
Rubin-Sakakibara co-production arranged in telephone conversations
between Clinton and Hashimoto. But it soon developed that there was no
comprehensive strategy.

HASHIMOTO HOOVERIZED BY THE CRISIS

The Japanese were referring to their predicament as the "Hesei depression,"

meaning the depression of the reign of Emperor Akahito. Norio Ohga, the
chairman of Sony, on April 2 derided Prime Minister Hashimoto as 'worse
than Herbert Hoover." By June, Hashimoto's popularity was down to 30%.
He was under attack from the City of London: on June 16, Anatole Kaletsky
of the London Times, picked up the line that he was "Herbert Hoover of
Japan," while claiming that Japan's "economic problems are so trivial and
the solutions are so obvious." Kaletsky wanted to activate the yen printing
presses. On July 12, Japanese voters massively repudiated the Liberal
Democratic Party and the Hashimoto government at the polls. In voting for
the Upper House of the Diet, the LDP lost 17 seats, while opposition parties
made large gains.

In August, a new government was formed under Prime Minister Keizo

Obuchi, a veteran wheelhorse of the Takeshita faction of the Japanese
Liberal Democratic Party. By this time, the mass of non-performing debt
burdening the Japanese banking system was widely estimated to have
climbed to about $1.5 trillion -- more than enough to scuttle the entire world
system, to which the Japanese banks were joined by a myriad of derivatives
contracts. At a time when decisive measures of debt moratorium and debt
reorganization were urgently required, Obuchi attempted to continue along
the accustomed path of the Japanese political-financial oligarchy. As
Finance Minister he appointed another senior LDP baron, the former Prime
Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Miyazawa, as Finance Minister in an earlier
government, had presided over the launching of the notorious Japanese
bubble of 1986-1991. Miyazawa was associated with the so-called bridge
bank scheme, which was based on a plan drawn up by marplot economist
Jeffrey Sachs -- the wrecker of Bolivia, Poland, and Russia, who now had
Dai Nippon as his quarry. The bridge bank (or "total") was a warmed-over
version of the Bush administration's Resolution Trust Corporation, which
bailed out US S&Ls and real estate interests after the orgy of real estate
speculation during the Reagan years. The first chairman of the RTC was
William Seidman (known these days for his weekly pontification sessions as
the senior commentator of the cable financial news network CNBC), who
hastened to Tokyo to share the secret of his "success story." But the RTC
had never been a success story: it was an outrageous bailout of speculators
funded by the American wage earner, with a bill to taxpayers that was
already somewhere between $100 billion and $200 billion, a figure destined
to increase at compound interest over many years to come. The RTC had
been a significant factor in the stagnation of US living standards during the
alleged Clinton recovery after 1993.

The special adviser to the Obuchi cabinet on financial strategy was Toyoo
Gyohten, the alter ego and partner of Paul Volcker, whom we have already
encountered. Gyohten, like Volcker, could be counted upon to act as a
"financial institutions conservative" -- attempting to save the banks and their
mass of bad debts at the expense of factories, living standards and the real
economy. Gyohten is associated with the "internationalization of the yen,"
something that might lead to currency blocs under the present circumstances.

The mentality of the Obuchi regime was a stubborn attempt to deny the
gravity of the crisis, and to avoid a radical break with established routine.
From the standoint of traditional Japanese ethics, failure to pay one's debts is
incompatible with personal dignity -- it represents a loss of face. It is
considered unethical for bankers to announce that they are writing off bad
debts, even if they have the loan loss provisions to be able to do so. To save
the bank and the debtor from both losing face, new low-interest loans are
extended, and the illusion of solvency and respectability all around is
preserved. The almost hysterical resistance to owning up to the enormity of
the insolvency led to a situation in which Japanese banks routinely hid the
extent of their bad debts, opening a vulnerable flanks for hedge funds, who
were free to spread wild rumors about imminent bank failures and to short
the stock of the banks they targeted. The Long-Term Credit Bank, struggling
to survive with its immense portfolio of non-performing loans, was a prime
example. On August 25, Finance Minister Miyazawa told the Diet that a
derivatives default by the LTCB alone "could lead to a Japan-triggered
global financial depression." (By mid-September, the LTCB was about to
be nationalized; its good loans were slated to be sold to Sumitomo, while its
bad loans would be taken over by the long-suffering Japanese taxpayers.
Yasuda Trust, Daiwa Bank, and Fuji Bank were not far behind.) This was
the transparency issue so widely touted by Wall Street -- although Wall
Street, needless to say, was far from ready to practice the Saran-wrap
accounting that it was preaching for the Japanese. On September 10, the
Kochi Shimbun reported that 19 of Japan's largest banks had potential
derivatives losses of ¥24 trillion -- about $180 billion. Denials of this highly
plausible report failed to restore confidence.

Japan was prodded in a more constructive direction by China, which felt

strains because the yen -- having fallen 20% since the New Year as a result
of the Japanese strategy of competitive devaluation -- was now far too low.
On June 25, the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated that "Japan, as a major
economic power, should assume greater responsibility at a time of Asian
economic difficulties. The yen should play a role of stabilizing Asian
economies and not become a destabilizing factor," which it clearly already
was. In the absence of a policy change, Japan was heading towards a short-
term deflationary collapse, perhaps triggered by the default of a large bank
or banks on derivatives contract with overseas institutions.

THE COLLAPSE OF FREE MARKET IDEOLOGY

By September, Krugman of MIT was proposing "the drastic step of

imposing currency controls" as a fall-back option for saving the System.29
Intelligent European opinion had never forgotten that capital controls are an
indispensable part of the modern state's armory of self defense. During the
second wave of the hedge funds' speculative attack on the European
Monetary System in 1993 (see Chapter IV), Maurice Allais had talked about
the obvious necessity of stopping this new piracy: "The entire West is now
in a fundamentally unstable financial situation," Allais told a Paris
newspaper. "Poorly considered decisions could the whole world into a
collapse, compared to which the stock market crisis of 1987 will seem
negligible, and which could be comparable to the Great Depression." In that
discussion, Allais warned that the "perverse effects of unrestricted currency
exchanges are very much underestimated." Allais cited the obvious remedy:
"In the immediate term, only European Community exchange controls
would give us the means temporarily to deal with the situation. . . .In fact, no
measure that would permit the speculators to succeed, and to enrich
themselves, is acceptable. . . .The current attack against the EMS, the only
coherent monetary organization in the world, is based on gigantic
disinformation. It is animated, supported, and orchestrated in an incredible
way by financial interests, whose origin governments should investigate."

Back in 1993, Jacques Delors -- who was at that time the President of the
European Commission -- had intervened in a debate on monetary issues in
the European Parliament to state: "I don't see why, on the international level,
we should not be studying ways to limit capital movements." [September 13,
1993] Delors spoke of the possibility of European Community regulations to
prevent wild speculation by means of controls on the movements of capital.
The monetarist side reacted to these moderate proposals with hysteria.
Delors was demonized by British finance officials as a leading figure in the
sinister "eurocrat" clique of Brussels. When Delors left office in June 1994,
he attacked the "brutal and purist neo-liberal ideology" for disregarding "the
29
Paul Krugman, "Saving Asia: It's Time To Get Radical," Fortune, September 7, 1998.
idea of the public good." Delors' monetary and infrastructure policies were
thereupon branded by Rees-Mogg as "insane" and liable to "cause a panic in
the European bond markets." But even in Britain, re-regulation has not died
out completely. Former Labour Party Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis
Healy has proposed a tax on financial derivatives. Healy pointed to the
"systemic risk" posed to the world financial system by the new instruments.

ZURICH GNOMES: BETTER POISON THAN GAU

The Neue Züricher Zeitung felt desperate enough to sacrifice the purity of
monetarist ideology in the interests of staying out of bankruptcy court. "With
the ruble collapse and the de facto state bankruptcy of Russia, the crisis
which has been boiling for a year is now threatening to turn into a global
GAU"-- Größten aller Unfälle, or worst possible calamity, wrote this paper.
"Like dominoes, one currency after the other, one financial market after the
other, is falling throughout the globe. The specter of a worldwide recession
is spreading." The editorial singled out the Chinese RMB, the only stable
currency in Asia. The reason for this stability was in the Swiss view not only
China's $140 billion in foreign exchange reserves, but also the fact that the
RMB is not fully convertible. Quoting Krugman on the need for "temporary
foreign exchange controls," the NZZ hastened to add that this proposal
comes straight from the "poison cabinet;" although these were "disgusting
perspectives for a world which was just about to remove the last remnants of
capital controls in the age of globalization," the Swiss finance paper
concluded that there was no alternative to a quick trip to the poison cabinet.30

HANKE BLAMES PLATO

Ultra-monetarist ideologue Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins responded by

claiming that "The idea of exchange controls can be traced back to Plato, the
father of statism. Inspired by Sparta, Plato embraced the idea of an
inconvertible currency as a means to preserve the autonomy of the state from
outside interference. It's no wonder that the so-called Red-Brown
(Communist-fascist) coalition in the Russian Duma has, in recent weeks,
rallied around the idea of exchange controls and an inconvertible ruble. This
also explains why the leadership of Beijing finds the idea so user-friendly.
The temptation to turn to exchange controls in the face of disruption caused
30
"Monetary Policy Out of the Poison Cabinet," Neue Züricher Zeitung, August 29, 1998.
by 'hot money' flows is hardly new. Tsar Nicholas II first pioneered
limitations on convertibility in modern times, ordering the State Bank of
Russia to introduce in 1905-06 a limited form of exchange control to
discourage speculative purchases of foreign exchange." Hanke also cited
Friedrich von Hayek's 1944 anti-New Deal tirade, The Road to Serfdom, in
an attempt to show that foreign exchange controls represented "decisive
advance on the path to totalitarianism and the suppression of individual
liberty" and "the complete delivery of the individual to the tyranny of the
state, the final suppression of all means of escape not merely for the rich, but
for everybody."31 The United States, of course, had imposed exchange
controls during most of the 1960s, but the ultra-monetarists tried to associate
them only with the bloodiest dictatorships.

DEBTOR IN POSESSION

Business Week showed a dose of realism in a call for a "New Deal on global
debt: it was "time for a global write-down" in the form of "debtor-in-
possession financing. DIP involves segregating the defaulted loans of a
bankrupt company, wiping the slate clean, and starting the borrowing
process all over. A restructured company gets new credit, the bank gets a
small percentage of its old unwise loans back over time, and everyone starts
to play the all-important growth game again. DIP is a desperation strategy
used only when corporations face ruin and banks stand to lose everything.
This is increasingly the plight of Russia, Asia, and parts of Latin America,
where de facto default may be the best choice among evils . . . . Ask any
Kansas farmer or CEO of a multinational in Chicago. World demand for
their products is plummeting, along with prices paid and profits made."
Noting that many banks face write-offs ranging from 30% in Hong Kong to
up to 80% in Indonesia and 90% in Russia, the magazine suggested that
even these banks would be better off exchanging bad debt for new long-term
paper. Japan would be a prime beneficiary of such an approach. "Only a
dramatic write-down can get the country moving again and pull Asia with
it." 32

Jacques Sapir of the Paris School of Higher Studies in the Social Sciences,
provided some sound advice for Russian policy makers in particular. "The
31
"The Siren Song of Exchange Controls", Wall Street Journal European edition,
September 1, 1998.
32
"Needed: a New Deal on Global Debt," Business Week, September 7, 1998.
only reasonable solution," he wrote, "is for the Russian economy to distance
itself from the markets . . .the Russian government should install extremely
strict exchange controls, reserving the buying and sales of currency only to
exporters and importers. Then, a limited convertibility must be installed via
an administrated exchange rate. This was, by the way, the situation in France
in the fifties." Sapir proposed to provide an injection of liquidity to end the
barter economy and ward off the emergence of local currencies in the
Russian regions. Sapir sensibly pointed out that "the Russian economy
cannot survive on raw material exports alone " The longterm Russian
interest was a "relaunching of industry," including consumer goods and
heavy industrial equipment for the public sector. Sapir was on firm ground
when he called for a change in overall economic doctrine for Russia: "The
moral discrediting of liberalism in Russia is today a key problem to the
social stability, or, on the contrary, the instability of the country. . .Russian
officials could well inspire themselves by what was done in Europe and in
particular in France, especially during the post-Second World War period of
reconstruction." 33 Laurent Joffrin of Liberation called for Russia to break
with the "market fundamentalists" and return to the path of statist guidance
of the economy.34 On the floor of the European Parliament in Strassbourg,
the German Christian Democrat Elmar Brok deplored the German and
European negligence which had allowed "Harvard professors" to "preach
unfettered liberalism" to the Russians, with European taxpayers now left
holding the bag.

Even British newspapers were suddenly open to the once-taboo topic of

monetary reform. On March 8, 1998,the London Observer had ridiculed the
notion of a New Bretton Woods conference. By Friday, August 28, the
leftish Guardian was publishing a commentary advocating the immediate
convening of a "new Bretton Woods" conference. The Guardian's Dan
Atkinson called for a return to the New Deal in response to the crisis: "The
money-changers are fleeing the temple of civilization. . . . With the 1990s
`triumph of capitalism' going up in flames, what would [Roosevelt] have
done today?" "Roosevelt, we can be confident, would have had little time
for bond dealers or derivatives traders . . . . He would have understood that,
as in the 1920s, banking and speculation are the problem, not the solution.
Roosevelt would have pressed for an international version of the Glass-
Steagall Act, limiting each bank to one country and forcing them to divest
their investment arms and other activities. No `global' banks for him. . . .as
33
Le Figaro, September 1, 1998.
34
Liberation, September 1, 1998.
the deflationary gale hit with full force, Roosevelt would have mobilized the
public sector to stand ready as employer of last resort. There would have
been no question of ordinary workers bearing the pain of `adjustment.'" "He
would have beefed up the financial regulators as he did 60 years ago, and
unleashed them on the guilty men: the rogue traders and insider dealers.
Lengthy prison terms could have been expected." Above all, FDR would
"have convened an international summit to reshape the institutions (World
Bank, IMF) that helped us into this mess in the first place, purging them of
their obsession with sound money and balanced budgets."

THE END OF FREE MARKET UTOPIA

Robert Kuttner, who had toiled over the years to salvage something of the
spirit of the New Deal in the Democratic Party, attributed the financial
turbulence to "the great illusion of our era -- the utopian worship of free
markets." After the collapse of communism, the world had been afflicted by
"an almost lunatic credulity in pure markets and a messianic urge to spread
them worldwide." The current wreckage was due to the depredation of
international speculators, but the "IMF perversely demands exposure to
speculators as a precondition of assistance. Kuttner warned that the
protectionist measures of Russian and Malaysia were not part of "a coherent
system of stabilization and development" and might therefore become
"isolationist and destabilizing." But surely the creation of a rational New
World Economic Order was the task of the United States, and not of the
smaller countries. Kuttner called upon "the economic priesthood of the
West" to revise its "ultra free-market" litany: "What we need is a program of
stabilization and reconstruction in the spirit of the post-World War II years,
with limits on speculative money flows and more development aid. . . .Let's
hope conventional wisdom shifts before crisis turns to catastrophe."

ALLAIS AFTER THE LTCM DEBACLE

Nobel laureate Maurice Allais responded to the August-September

acceleration of the crisis by calling for "deep and radical reforms" to deal
with the present crisis. Allais saw the two main problems of the financial
system as "the ex-nihilo creation of money, and short-term borrowing used
to finance long-term loans." He demanded that "monetary creation must be
relegated to the State and only to the State" and that "all monetary creation
other than that of basic currency by the central bank must be rendered
impossible." Allais condemned existing stock markets as "true casinos"
whose fluctuations "considerably influence the real economy." Allais
proposed to fight margin buying, program trading and index arbitrage,
suggesting that "the financing of stock exchange operations by the creation
of ex-nihilo means of payment by the banking system be rendered
impossible." He further recommended that the continuous intra-day
quotation of stocks-prices be eliminated, and replaced in each financial
market by a single quotation or fixing per day for each stock or bond, as a
way of suppressing the day-trading activity of hedge funds and others. He
urged that "the automatic programs of buying and selling be eliminated; and
speculation on indexes and on derivative products be ended." Allais noted
that the "international monetary structure" is characterized by "major
perversions," among which he enumerated "the instability of floating
exchange rates; the imbalances in current account balance of payments;
competitive devaluations; the development of a massive speculation on the
exchange markets; the worldwide utilization, as unit of value, of the dollar,
whose real value on the international level is extraordinarily unstable and
unpredictable; the fundamental contradiction between a total liberalization
of short-term capital movements and the autonomy of national monetary
policies." Allais proposed "a New Bretton Woods system," which he saw as
mandatory because "institutions which generate in themselves the germs of
their own destruction" must be reformed. Such a reform would have to
include: "the total abandonment of a system of floating exchange rates and
its replacement by a system of fixed, although eventually revisable,
exchange rates; exchange rates ensuring an effective equilibrium of balances
of payments; the prohibition of any competitive devaluation; the complete
abandonment of the dollar as currency of account, exchange and reserve at
the international level; the fusion in one body of the World Trade
Organization and of the International Monetary Fund; the creation of
regional organizations; prohibition of the large banks' speculating for their
own account on foreign exchange, stocks and derivative products; and
finally, the progressive establishment of a common accounting unit at the
international level with an appropriate system of indexation." 35 These
reforms were far more vigorous and comprehensive than anything proposed
by mainstream Anglo-American academics.

CHINA'S DEFENSE OF THE REN MIN BI

35
Le Figaro, October 26, 1998.
China was committed neither to devalue the ren min bi (RMB), nor to sever
its link with the US dollar. During 1998, the official Chinese line changed
from determination to keep the present value of the RMB fixed at least
through the present year to "maintaining the ren min bi's value through the
year 2000 and beyond." But, also during 1998, the available reserves of the
Bank of China declined by about $40 billion, indicating that China was
paying an immense price for currency stability, and might soon have to have
recourse to new methods. A great advantage for the Beijing government was
that the RMB was not fully convertible in the way that the Hong Kong dollar
was. The Chinese motivated their policy during the summer of 1998 with
statements like this one by central banker Liu Minkkang, Vice Director of
the People's Bank of China: "China is a responsible member of the
international community, and her policy must be to take into account other
nations' interests. A big devaluation of the RMB would be a blow to other
nations' economies, while a small devaluation would have no advantage. . . .
Imports [of semi-finished commodities and export industry equipment]
make up over 50% of the price of China's export of manufactured products.
Devaluing by 10% would yield a price cut of less than 5%, but would
immediately lead to increases in domestic prices and a negative foreign
reaction, and in the end would just cause sever damage to market
confidence. Thus, for China, devaluation is not a good measure."

The Chinese also argued that even if the Japanese yen fell further, this would
create no problems for China that needed to be solved by Chinese
devaluation. Japanese high-tech exports and Chinese foodstuffs and light
industry products did not directly compete, and cheaper Japanese capital
goods were a boon for the Chinese development strategy. During August,
the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) issued a
circular banning the widespread practice of hedging against a devaluation of
the RMB, a practice that had been undermining the currency. Foreign
companies frequently borrowed RMB to pay off foreign currency loans
before they matured, but no more.

THE HONG KONG BEAR TRAP

The autonomous Chinese administration in Hong Kong was also determined

to protect its own dollar peg. On August 14, 1998 the monetary authorities
of the Hong King region used a portion of their $96.4 billion exchange
reserves (the world's third largest after those of Japan and the Chinese
central government) to engineer a very effective short squeeze against the
international hedge fund operators, intervening in currency, stock, and stock
index futures markets at the same time. The short squeeze took place on a
Friday before a long three-day weekend. According to Hong Kong Financial
Secretary Tsang Yam-kuen said that his government had evidence that the
hedge funds were mounting a complex "double play" across the currency,
stock, and stock index future markets. The double play started from the
hedge funds' perception of Hong Kong as a city-state, small enough to be
pushed around. First, the hedge funds established very large short positions
against Hong Kong stocks. Then, the hedge funds dumped large amounts of
Hong Kong dollars by going short in the futures markets, driving the
currency down. This forced Hong Kong Hong Kong to defend its dollar by
raising its discount rate and other interest rates. Higher interest rates lowered
prices in the Hong Kong stock market, so the hedge funds could cover their
short positions and pocket a handsome profit. Officials surprised the hedge
funds with massive buying of both HK dollars and Hong Kong stock. "I am
certain that if anyone is speculating against the Hong Kong dollar peg, we
have the skill and strategies to handle it easily," asserted Tsang. "If
speculators want to attack the Hong Kong dollar, they will be punished as
usual."

The Hang Seng stock index, which had fallen by over 60% during the past
twelve months, managed an 8.5% rise, the biggest percentage gain in 23
years. Hong Kong thus was refusing to imitate the follies of Britain's 1931
"Singapore Defense" of the pound sterling (see Chapter VII). Hong Kong
temporarily banned short selling, and readied both criminal penalties for
unreported short selling and stiffer sentences for short selling in violation of
existing law. Behind Hong Kong stood the Chinese government in Beijing.
On the day before the Hong Kong operation, People's Bank of China Deputy
Governor had issued a clear warning to the hedge funds, reiterating that
"devaluation is not a good policy for China," and pointedly stating: "I would
like to tell speculators that China is a big player, and they had best not
miscalculate." A few days earlier, on August 8, a dispatch of the New China
News Agency datelined Hong Kong and redolent of Hsun Tzu's Art of War
had dismissed rumors spread by hedge funds about a coming devaluation of
the Chinese RMB as the "trick of 'making noise in the east while attacking
from the west' being attempted by speculators whose real target was to
generate panic in Hong Kong." The hedge funds had also launched a
whispering campaign about bank failures in the hopes of starting a panic run
on the Hong Kong banks.

Hong Kong Monetary Authority Chief executive Joseph Yam wrote to the
Financial Times that his goal had been "to tackle currency manipulation by
those who have built up large short positions in the stock index futures. . .
we do object to people manipulating our currency to engineer extreme
conditions in the interbank market and high interest rates to make profits in
the short positions in stock index futures. We have reason to believe there
has been such manipulation. . . . to deter currency manipulation, we took
action to tackle the matter at the source, and that meant making sure that
those engaging in this activity lose money." Anson Chan, the Hong Kong
Chief Secretary for Administration, stressed that the goal of Hong King's
measures was to defend its link to the US dollar against the speculators,
arguing that "cutting it would set off another wave of currency instability in
Asia. . . . Businesses engaged in those export activities need certainty in
exchange rates," he added. In Chan's view, when the British departed Hong
Kong in 1997, they left behind a bubble economy in real estate, but the
Asian panic had now collapsed real estate also with Hong Kong stocks.
Hong Kong had its own $30 billion infrastructure program to fight the
depression.

Hong Kong's envoy to the United States, Kenneth Pang, replied to the many
critics by protesting that "Hong Kong had "the freest market in the world"
where "Adam Smith is as revered as Mother Teresa." But Pang added that
"not all speculation is equal," and the hedge fund operators besieging Hong
Kong were "the kind of financial gamblers whose cold-bloodedness could
freeze mercury at 10 paces. . . .there comes a time when national
governments must defend the public good and their economies. Our actions
had nothing to do with Adam Smith and everything to do with responsible
economic stewardship. Governments cannot sit idly by while speculators
take delight in economic ruin."

The Financial Times menacingly headlined, "Hong Kong plays with Fire in
Attempt to Hit Speculators." Milton Friedman labeled Hong Kong's
measures as "insane." Hong Kong anti-government agitator Martin Lee
wailed that 'the invisible hand of Adam Smith has been replaced by the
invincible hand of the government." Interestingly, the City of London was
divided over the issue. The London Times broke ranks with the monetarist
purists and commented:
 Titanic struggles are being waged between speculators and the
international financial order. . . . In Hong Kong, self-help is
being tried. The authorities detected a speculative plot by hedge
funds, and Joseph Yam, sparky head of the Hong Kong
Monetary Fund, was allowed to use exchange reserves to buy
stocks and share index futures as well as the currency, putting a
treble squeeze on hedge funds. More than 45 minutes ahead of
a long weekend, this tactic was sensationally successful. . .
.Many Asian currencies, with the exception of China and Hong
Kong, have also been driven too low by speculation and the
withdrawal of capital. . . . The IMF. . .[is not effective because
it] does not allow for speculative raids aimed purely at
destabilizing markets. Hong Kong could offer a better second-
stage response. If it works, it should provide a model for cost-
effective international intervention in countries that lack the
reserves to do it themselves. If the hedge funds win, world
recession looks increasingly likely.

The Achilles heel of Hong Kong was that its banking system, like the British
banks which created it, was based on real estate loans. This was the time
bomb left ticking when the British departed in 1997. When property prices
fell in Britain, there was always a danger that the value of the land and
buildings held as collateral by the bank would no longer be enough to cover
the value of the loan, so the bank would demand more margin or else call in
the loan, bankrupting the borrower. The problem was that by July 1998,
property prices in Hong Kong were down 40% from a year before, and their
fall had not been arrested by a government freeze on all land sales until
March 1999. The outlook was for a further decline of 30 to 40% in late 1998
and early 1999. Falling real estate prices thus threatened to wipe out Hong
Kong's banks and capital at the same time.

A pitched battle between the hedge funds (including the Quantum Fund,
Tiger Fund, and Moore Capital) and the Hong Kong authorities developed
on August 28, with record turnover on the Hong Kong stock exchange; the
Hang Seng index ended the day down just over 1%, but there were signs that
the speculators had been severely punished by the government's $10 billion
war chest operations. "D-day in Hong Kong," was the headline of the Hong
Kong Standard the next day. The Hong Kong authorities were trying to
drive up the forward prices of stocks and Kong Kong dollars, putting the
squeeze on speculators trying to roll over into September and December
contracts.

The Confucian world was defending itself. In Taiwan, the government

issued a directive to banks not to sell shares of stock. On August 30, Taipei
newspapers reported that Taiwan had barred all securities and investment
trust companies from selling or buying hedge funds linked to Soros.
"Authorities have not approved sales of [Soros'] Quantum Group's funds in
Taiwan and anyone found illegally doing so will be severely punished,''
wrote the China Times. 36 The foreign exchange director of the Taiwan
central bank also hinted at a Hong Kong-style ambush against speculators
shorting the Taiwan currency and Taiwanese stocks.

MALAYSIA: EXCHANGE CONTROLS

Repeating his view that "the freemarket system has failed and failed
disastrously," Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammed ordered
exchange controls in defense of the ringgit on September 1, 1998. Mahatir
cited the financial self-defense measures already being applied by world
governments including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Russia. According to the
new regulations, approval was required for transfer of funds between
External Accounts. Transfers to residents' accounts were permitted only until
September 30, 1998; thereafter, approval would be required. Withdrawal of
ringgit from External Accounts required approval, except for the purchase of
ringgit assets. All purchases and sales of ringgit financial assets could only
be transacted through authorized depositary institutions. All settlements of
exports and imports had to be made in foreign currency. With effect from
October 1, 1998, travelers were allowed to import or export ringgit currency
of not more than 1,000 ringgit per person. There were no limits on the
import of foreign currencies by resident and non-resident travelers. The
export of foreign currencies by resident travelers was permitted, but only up
to a maximum of 10,000 ringgit equivalent. The export of foreign currencies
by non-resident travelers was permitted, up to the amount of foreign
exchange brought into Malaysia. Mahatir said that ringgit in circulation
outside of his country (offshore ringgit) had reached a value of "100 million
outside the country and that we can repatriate within one month. If they don't
of course the money is just waste paper. It's worth nothing at all. If they try
to bring it in, we will stop them and we will confiscate such money." He put
the larger offshore ringgit account at "more than 20 billion certainly, maybe
36
"Taiwan bars deals linked to Soros's funds,'' Reuters, August 30, 1998.
even 25 billion. But that money . . .has got no value. In order to give it value
they must hold a parallel account in a Malaysian bank." Mahatir quickly got
the attention of every "emerging market" in the world. And at a September 5
press conference in Tokyo, just before he left for talks with US Treasury
Secretary Rubin, Japan Finance Minister Miyazawa said that he had asked
Toyoo Gyohten, the special adviser to Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, "to
study the issue." Sakakibara later endorsed what Malaysia had done.

At the November APEC summit in Kuala Lumpur, Vice President Gore

(subbing for Clinton) caused a diplomatic incident by praising the often
violent protest movements of Southeast Asia. Gore sounded like a
spokesman for some phantomatic Hedge Fund Liberation Front. Was the
goal of US foreign policy now to make the world safe for hedge funds?
(Gore also showed himself to be exceedingly maladroit: his own 1996
election campaign had been largely financed by hot money from Asia. He
was now insulting and offending his own fund-raising base. The politician
George Bush had called "Ozone Man" had committed a grievous blunder.)

Mahatir had assumed the position once occupied by President Nasser of

Egypt: he was the leading statesman of the progressive Moslem countries.
The result of exchange controls was that Malaysia was not forced to join its
neighbors in groveling before the IMF. The Arab world, by contrast, was
unable to act as a protagonist in the crisis. Iraq was struggling to be free of a
murderous UN embargo, Algeria was in virtual civil war, Syria was a French
client state, and Egypt was immobile. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, the
recycling of Arab petrodollars represented the world's main liquidity pump.
But as Arab surpluses declined through the late 1980s and 1990s, this role
had been assumed more and more by Japan, which became the world's
leading financial surplus power. Now even states like Saudi Arabia were
more likely to be borrowing money than lending it. The Saudi oligarchy had
been making bad business decisions for more than a quarter of a century. At
the November 1998 Jakarta summit of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries, the Saudi delegation had foolishly maintained, against
all the evidence, that world demand for oil was destined to rise despite the
impact of the Asian economic collapse, and forced production quotas to be
set accordingly. By mid-1998, depressed demand left the world market
glutted with oil, despite attempts by the Saudis and others to cut back
production by 800,000 barrels per day.
LONDON FACTIONS

By early September, City of London insiders were reporting that the British
financial community was verging on civil war over the question of going
back to exchange controls and protectionism. The Times and the Daily Mail
were advocating currency controls and were supporting the Hong Kong
defense measures. The Financial Times and the Independent were
fanatically committed to the free market. The Swiss NZZ proposal to impose
currency controls in all the merging markets was seen in London as an index
of Swiss desperation. The German bankers' chorus of support for exchange
controls in Russia was seen as specific to Russia alone, although the German
banks were also very nervous. Some saw a revival by Germany of the 1989
Herrhausen plan for development investments in Poland and Russia,
reflecting Germany's post-1945 experience.

During the summer of 1998, John Grey of the London School of Economics
had gained world attention through his book False Dawn: The Delusions of
Global Capitalism. Grey depicted the carnage wrought by the free market in
Russia, Mexico, and also in the erstwhile laissez-faire paradise of New
Zealand. Grey attributed these policies to the "Anglo-American style free
market" doctrine, but made clear that within this the "Washington
consensus" was the dominant force. The responsibilities of Washington are
grave indeed, but the world cannot forget the central role played by the
British finance oligarchy in the demolition of the Bretton Woods system and
INthe introduction of the chaotic non-system which has evolved into
globalism, which is depicted in Chapter IV. We also cannot forget that the
pestilence of post-1979 Thatcherism -- a project to which Prof. Grey was not
wholly alien -- was an indispensable component in the current global brew.
However, Prof. Grey was certainly on firm ground in forecasting that the
current global panic will be more damaging than 1929-32. 37

OUTLAW HEDGE FUNDS

The Dow losses of 517 points on Monday, August 31, and losses of the
following days were widely attributed to panic selling by hedge funds who
were seeking to recoup, by fair means or foul, at least a part of the massive
losses they had suffered when the convertibility of the Russian ruble was
been suspended. Late on the afternoon of Friday, September 4 Ron Insana of
37
Guardian, September 8, 1998.
CNBC reported rumors that a large sell program had hit the stock index
futures market with about one hour of trading left in the afternoon, driving
the Dow down from -50 to about -150 during the last minutes before the
official beginning of the long Labor Day holiday. The bond market had shut
down some hours earlier. Insana reported that some on Wall Street thought
that this was a surprise attack by a hedge fund desperately seeking some
day-trading profits. When hedge funds begin sabotaging the functioning of
the Federal Reserve-Treasury Brady System of drugged markets (described
in Chapter II), we might expect the authorities to get very upset, and to begin
considering sanctions against hedge funds in general. It was high time for
the Fed and the Treasury to shut down the hedge funds.

But as summer 1998 turned to autumn along the Potomac, the US

government did absolutely nothing. Muriel Siebert, the first woman to found
a Wall Street firm, former New York State Banking Commissioner, and now
a leading discount broker and grande dame of the financial world, made a
sensible call for a minimal reform measure: speaking on CNBC, she called
for the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission to impose margin requirements on foreign currency
futures, which were still operating in a pre-1929 world of no margin
requirements whatsoever. Seconding her call, the DeHaan Foundation of
Naples, Florida pointed out that typical currency futures routinely involve
$65 or more of leverage for every $1 actually invested by the speculator. In a
sample case, "a hedge fund with $1 million invested could make $32 million
on a 50% price drop in a currency with currency futures." 38 But even this
was too much for the Washington set, who only had eyes for Monica
Lewinsky.

THE ARMAGEDDON SCENARIO SPREADS

Although the London Financial Times did not like exchange controls, it
demanded that the central banks stand ready to pump unlimited liquidity into
failing banks and brokerages to preserve the speculative bubble. The FT
wanted Greenspan to stop dithering and lower interest rates, pronto. To add
urgency to its call, the paper cited "an Armageddon scenario" by David
Zervos, chief strategist with Greenwich NatWest in London. According to
the nervous Mr. Zervos, "the value of international debt securities totaled
$3,600 billion at the end of March, much of it used as collateral (for example
38
Washington Post, September 20, 1998.
by hedge funds) on further loans worth around $30,000 billion. In addition,
the Bank for International Settlements believes that by the end of last year
there was another $30,000 billion in credit market exposure outstanding in
interest rate swap agreements. These provide another source of leverage by
allowing investors to swap fixed for floating interest-rate payments without
owning the underlying debt. This implies that on a conservative estimate
there is $60,000 billion in global credit market exposure." These figures are
low, as we demonstrate below. "Historically plausible increases in risk,
argued Mr. Zervos, "could suddenly reduce the value of these assets by
$1,500 billion. That could cause banks accepting debt as collateral to
put out margin calls. And, says Mr. Zervos, 'if there were a failure of one or
more large counterparties to meet the margin call, the resulting sale of
collateral and liquidation of swap positions could easily drive spreads further
and induce even more widening, more margin calls and a complete collapse
in the credit market.'" This outcome could be closer than you think,
suggested the paper, citing "rumors that one US investment bank had failed"
-- this was widely though to be the venerable Lehman Brothers. The spreads,
meaning the difference between the interest rates on Treasury bonds and
other bonds were indeed gaping wide, and the Financial Times wanted
Greenspan to open the cash spigot. Then, Armageddon arrived with the 1998
autumnal equinox for Long Term Capital Management LP.

37. LONG TERM CAPITAL: OPAQUE CRONY CAPITALISM39

Just before the Labor Day weekend, the US stock markets were in a rolling
crash, in which a 50 to 100 point loss was beginning to look like a relatively
good day. By the time the Dow had fallen almost 20% from its July top,
Greenspan began to perceive that his usual pro-rentier anti-inflation litany
(which he had repeated in July) was no longer enough to keep the evil spirits
at bay. In a September 4, 1998 speech at Berkeley, he now pronounced
deflation to be just as noxious as inflation: "In the spring and early summer,"
he revealed, the unelected FOMC "was concerned that a rise in inflation was
the primary threat to the continued expansion of the economy. By the time
of the committee's August meeting, the risks had become balanced, and the
committee will need to consider carefully the potential ramifications of
ongoing developments since that meeting" at its next session of September
29. " The Commodity Research Bureau index, in which raw materials are
heavily represented, was at its lowest level in 21 years. Gold was at $273 per
39
The numbering of the crises refers to the table in Chapter IV.
ounce, also a 20-year low. Oil prices were at their lowest level since their
historic 1986-87 bottom. (A day earlier, Robert T. Parry, President of the
San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, had told an audience in Boise, Idaho
that "falling US and foreign stock markets, as well as possible effects of
problems abroad on US corporate profits, could restrain consumer and
business spending in this country.") Greenspan offered reassurances that the
US economy was strong, without the "imbalances" that often mark economic
expansions. Greenspan was ignoring, among other things, the $200 billion
record US trade deficit of 1997, and with it the threat of an early dollar
crisis. The US, Greenspan conceded, "cannot remain an oasis of prosperity
unaffected by a world that is experiencing greatly increased stress." On the
Monday after Greenspan's speech, US markets were closed for the Labor
Day holiday, Tokyo saw a 5.3% Nikkei jump, up to 14,790, the second best
day of the year. Kuala Lumpur, prospering behind Mahatir's protective
shield, was up almost 23%. But the dollar ominously fell to 131.45 against
the yen. It was the classic central bank predicament of the Scylla of dollar
collapse and the Charybdis of stock market and banking panic. During the
next few days, the Bank of Japan lowered its overnight funds rate target
from one half of one per cent to one quarter of one per cent, citing the need
"to prevent the economy from falling into a deflationary spiral," meaning an
all-out economic depression. There were rumors that Fuji Bank, Japan's
fifth largest, had taken a massive $15 or even $22 billion hit in derivatives
speculation. The immediate result was to boost the dollar by more than 5
yen, the biggest one-day increase since 1982. On September 10, the Bank of
Japan lowered its discount rate from 0.50% to 0.25%. On September 23,
Greenspan told the Senate Budget Committee that the world crisis had
entered a "more virulent phase," with the implication that deflation was
more threatening than inflation; the Dow managed at 3.3% pop that day.

Even as Greenspan spoke that afternoon, the Fed -- in the person of

President William McDonough of the New York branch -- was acting as
lender of last resort for the syndicate of big banks that were scrambling to
save themselves by taking over Long Term Capital, the Merton-Scholes
high-leverage hedge fund, which was bankrupt with a reported $1 trillion in
derivatives outstanding. (Long Term Capital was leveraged at 500:1, but
what of that? J.P. Morgan was leveraged at over 600:1, with $6.2 trillion in
derivatives as against just $11 billion in equity capital.) The story was
broken by David Faber of CNBC on the afternoon of Wednesday,
September 23, 1998. As Roger Altman pointed out the following day on
CNBC, the Fed was setting a very ominous precedent: by promoting Long
Term Capital as too big to fail, the Fed was taking a principle which had
since May 1984 been applied only to banks (meaning big ones, like Conti
Illinois), and was now applying it to a very highly leveraged hedge fund
which had no FDIC-insured accounts. Within a few days, Union Bank of
Switzerland announced a $685 million loss, and Dresdner Bank said it was
$144 million to the downside. LCTM's total loss was about $4 billion. If US
banks went under, the FDIC would have to pay depositors, and the taxpayers
would soon have to bail out the FDIC. Would Soros' Quantum Fund qualify
for a taxpayer-funded bailout under this precedent? Was Soros also too big
to fail? If the precedent meant what Altman suggested, the fires of
hyperinflation would soon be burning, and it was time to buy gold. LCTM
had come close to shredding the 401 (k) accounts of a generation of
Americans by collapsing stocks and mutual funds: was Greenspan ready to
bail out those small investors as well? Between August 29 and October 19,
currency in circulation grew at an annual rate of 16.4%, and the M3 money
supply grew at 17% annually. Greenspan was using system repurchase
agreements, coupon passes, and open market operations to churn out
liquidity. The dollar softened and the gold price spiked upward: there were
reports that central banks were replenishing their gold stocks in the face of
the hurricane. Between late September and early October, the dollar
managed to fall ¥ 10 (or, in forex jargon, "ten big figures") in just 10 days.

The Fed's bailout of Long Term Capital once again raised the issue of crony
capitalism in America. One of LTCM's partners was David Mullins, the
former vice chairman of the Federal reserve Board, and thus a member of
the Greenspan monetarist clique. According to some accounts, Mullins had
been LTCM's point man in arranging the bailout by his former colleagues at
the New York Fed. Under the Fed bailout, LCTM's management were
rewarded by getting to keep their posts and their generous compensation
packages. This was the kind of sleazy transaction which American
economists loved to condemn when it took place in Third World countries,
but most of them were silent now. And since the entire bailout remained
cloaked in secrecy, Greenspan's and Rubin's repeated demands for
transparency on the part of the poorer countries were exposed as hypocrisy:
the hedge funds still had no reporting requirements whatsoever, and no
institution is as opaque as the New York Fed.

Greenspan had long pontificated that derivatives were under control; in the
spring of 1998 he had beaten back a proposal by Brooksley Born of the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission to study the threat posed to bank
solvency by derivatives. As for hedge funds, Greenspan had intoned that
they were already strictly regulated by their own investors. If Greenspan
were ready to debase the currency in order to bail out the likes of Long Term
Capital, he was violating the Federal Reserve Act (which mandates that the
Fed maintain sound monetary conditions), and could therefore be impeached
or otherwise ousted. A Fed-generated hyperinflation would surely provide
the political basis for a future nationalization of the Fed. In the meantime
Greenspan, who had in the past endorsed the S&L practices of Charles
Keating, was becoming a true Duke of Moral Hazard.

As for Brooksley Born, she had emerged during 1998 as the most competent
US official working on financial and economic questions. Her proposal to
draw up a report on the explosive destructive potential of derivatives elicited
hysterical opposition from many quarters Congressional backers of the
derivatives bubble even inserted a special provision into the budget late one
night which specifically banned Ms. Born from preparing such a report over
the first six months of FY 1999. Senator Lugar (R-Indiana) was indignant
that Ms. Born wanted to examine these "healthy and productive markets."
Without personal backing from Hillary Clinton, Ms. Born might not have
been able to resist the power of the derivatives lobby. The much-touted
transparency was for export only.

The Long Term Capital bailout ended the scandalous immunity from
criticism enjoyed by the incompetent, pro-speculator Greenspan Fed. Former
Fed official Lawrence Lindsay called attention to the international
blowback: the US had been demanding that Japan bite the bullet and let its
big banks go bankrupt (so that, of course, the hedge funds could bid 10 cents
on the dollar for Japanese assets at the bankruptcy auction, thus making
Japan pay for an entire phase of the depression.) Now, at the first sign that
the US banks might blow, the Fed was moving in with a massive bailout. 40
The hypocrisy and duplicity of Greenspan's line would not be lost on the
Japanese. Domestically, as columnist Robert Novak wrote, Greenspan's
moves "looked like the Fed caricature painted by populists for much of the
past century: impervious to the woes of businessmen and farmers in the real
economy, but ready for quick-action when high-flying investors are
imperiled. A former Fed vice chairman sitting as a principal of Long Term
Capital adds to the perception that the buddy system is at work." 41 And how
could it be otherwise, with the money power in the hands of the Federal
40
Wall Street Journal, September 28, 1998.
41
Washington Post, September 28, 1998.
Reserve Board, an unelected and unaccountable oligarchy?

Greenspan lowered the US federal funds rate by a quarter point at the

Federal Open Market Committee meeting of September 29, and acted on his
own to lower it by another quarter point on October 15, 1998. The
immediate goal of these rate cuts was to revive the junk bond market, which
had dried up because of the risk aversion of many speculators after the
Russian default and the LCTM collapse. Greenspan's stewardship was open
to harsh critique: fully 43% of American households had invested in the
stock market, often by way of mutual funds that were falling faster than the
underlying stocks. (see Chapter III). Many had bought their stocks de facto
on margin, using high-interest credit cards. Another way to buy on margin
was to use the credit card to pay for the groceries, while using the paycheck
to buy stocks -- with a broker call loan if you could get one, or without. This
entire castle of debt was now beginning to cave in.

US REAL ECONOMIC IMPACT

It was time to watch the world trade figures as they documented a violent
contraction of the goods-producing sectors of the entire world economy,
since it was this decline which threatened the lives of millions. Statistics
released by the US Commerce Department on September 20 showed that US
exports to South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia had declined by a striking 27.7%
between December 1997 and July of 1998. Exports to Japan were down
5.6%, and shipments to China were off an ominous 9.6%. July 1998 exports
were down by 1.3%, and were at a 17-month low. The US merchandise trade
deficit, as distinct from overall balance of payments, was headed in 1998 for
an all-time record of about $250 billion, far worse than the $150 billion
range which had been associated with the dollar crisis of 1987, and also
worse than the $200 billion ballpark levels of 1996 and 1997. A violent
1930-style contraction was on. The goods-producing sectors hit hardest were
the farm sector, industrial raw materials, and West Coast sectors which
relied on exports to the Far East. Much of the impact was in agriculture. By
mid-1998, it was estimated that net US farm income was falling from the
$60 billion of 1996 to about $45 billion for 1998, a drop of 25%. With half
of all US grain usually destined for export, the fall in Chinese and Japanese
demand was causing a 30% decline in US farm exports to Asia. According
to Senator Daschle, "In 1998, the average net farm income for Great Plains
farm family of four was approaching the poverty level."

Boeing was also suffering, since 40% of its orders for 747 jumbo jets usually
came from Asia. Layoffs were in the cards, and the stock price was
hammered. The same was true for Motorola, which relied on Asian markets
to sell its mobile phones; Motorola announced that it was letting go 15,000
workers worldwide -- 10% of its workforce. Motorola also cancelled plans
to build a $3 billion computer chip plant near Richmond, Virginia. The
company cited "the worst global downturn in semiconductor history." Toys
R Us began closing 90 stores, 40 in the US and the rest overseas, while
laying off 3,000 employee and taking a half-billion restructuring hit.

THE LATIN TIME BOMB

Brazil was a great power of the debt world. With almost $500 billion in
foreign debt, Brazil's debt was as big as South Korea, Indonesia, and Russia
put together. Could the System survive default on a cool half trillion? We
might soon find out. In May, Brazilian bonds were "stuck like glue to
Russians bonds" in a predictable linkage. August 21, 1998 was Black Friday
in the São Paulo financial markets; the falling stock market activated circuit
breakers for the first time since the previous October. When the decline
reached 10%, the Brazilian government ordered the National Bank of
Economic and Social Development to buy up stocks, and thanks to these
support operations, the damage for that day was limited to a mere 2.9% But
for August, the Bovespa index registered a loss of almost 30%, and capital
flight was an estimated $7 billion. By the end of the month, capital was
flowing out of Brazil at an average rate of $1 billion a day, and this
accelerated when Moody's cut the rating of Brazilian bonds. The central
bank under Gustavo Franco had about $70 billion on hand to defend the
real, but this was unlikely to deter the hedge fund onslaught. According to
Folha de Sao Paulo, the "markets" viewed $50 billion in reserves as the
magic number at which the currency would implode. Brazil's president
Henrique Cardoso, an Anglophile who professed total fealty to the IMF,
was trying to win another term in an election to be held on October 4. This
was a reminder that the Mexican crisis of 1994-95 had been partly
occasioned by reflation measures laid on to influence the outcome of the
presidential contest in that country. In mid-September, the cash-strapped
IMF tried to reassure investors by announcing that it was ready to help
Brazil. After the South Korea, Indonesian, and Russian debacles, it was not
clear how such reassurances could be effective. In mid-September, there was
an attempt to circle the wagons around Brazil with organized support. Brazil
doubled its interest rates to 49.75%, and Brazil and the IMF began talking
about a bailout; stock prices in São Paulo rebounded mightily for a few days
in another mugs' rally.

After Cardoso had been re-elected, the IMF began to assemble a bailout of
$42 billion, which was less than South Korea's, for a country with almost
three times more foreign exposure. Even as crisis management, it was hardly
an impressive gesture. Nevertheless, at the end of October, Cardoso
announced yet another round of murderous austerity in an attempt to fulfill
the IMF conditions.

In Mexico, a key focus of crisis was the Fund for savings Bank Protection
(Fobaproa). Fobaproa had been created with $65 billion in funds, but it now
faced insolvency and needed a bailout. The implosion of Fobaproa
threatened to trigger the disintegration of the Mexican banking system,
especially since Fobaproa bonds represented 30% of the assets of Mexican
banks. After the Russian default, the notion that Mexico was too big to fail
was open to question.

US BANK STOCKS DOWN 50%

The stock market decline of August and September 1998 overtook the stocks
of the US money center banks with remarkable ferocity: many quickly lost
half of their value or more. The largest of these, Citibank, which was
exposed to Latin America to the tune of about 21% of its alleged net worth,
was down about 50% from its recent highs. Bankers Trust and J.P. Morgan
were battered in a similar fashion. The Dow as a whole was down about
20% from the July 17 peak at this time. The world financial community,
ignoring the experience summed up in later chapters of this book, expected
the central banks to act decisively to stop the crisis. But Greenspan testified
to the House Banking Committee's LCTM hearings on September 16 that
the alleged plan for coordinated interest rate cuts by the central banks of the
leading countries did not exist. Hans Tietmeyer, the leader of the
deflationary brotherhood at the Bundesbank, had already announced that he
saw no need for a rate cut. Japanese stocks promptly reverted to a 12-year
low. Speaking one day earlier at the same hearings, corsair George Soros
had cynically and frankly listed the ways in which world finance was
already undergoing "disintegration." The markets were not acting like a
pendulum, said Soros, but rather like "a wrecking ball." Unlike George
Shultz and others, Soros wanted to keep the IMF fully funded.

Things were made worse with the mid-September 1998 leaking of a report
by the Comptroller of the Currency, which pointed to the danger of a new
epidemic of non-performing debt and loan defaults looming for US banks.
"Projecting risk over the next 12 months, credit risk is expected to further
increase in all commercial portfolios," said the report. "Banks are leaving
themselves with fewer options to control the risks associated with
commercial lending should the economy falter." Regulators said that the
banks had been lowering their credit standards, and making too many
questionable loans: "For the fourth consecutive year," said the report,
"underwriting standards for commercial loans have eased." The report
singled out "home equity products," meaning the ubiquitous second
mortgages peddled on television by sports figures and dancing girls, as a
special problem area. The report had been ready in June, but had not been
disclosed until it was leaked. After loading their credit cards with high-
interest debt, American homeowners had refinanced that debt by pledging
their homes as collateral for home equity loans, which were extended even
when they had no equity. Now, with installment debt at $1.26 trillion, they
had filled up their credit cards a second time, and were approaching default
all along the line.

The gravity of the crisis was beginning to sink in. Newspaper ran stories to
reassure their jumpy readers. Forbes magazine tried to reassure the public
that this was not 1929, but merely 1987 -- an index of how bad things
already were. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung consoled the Bahnhofstraße that
"1998 Is Not 1929."42 Much of this was an elaborate apology for that fact
that the central banks had done absolutely nothing to stop the crisis. Alan
Greenspan so far "has kept his powder dry" -- a nice way of describing total
immobility. If "systemic risk" were to emerge, argued this paper, not only
the Fed but even the Eurogarchs would turn to reflation before it were too
late. 43 James Galbraith had noted in the Washington Post a few days earlier
that the Fed had done nothing for 18 months in spite of an obvious crisis,
and called for interest rate cuts to keep the US out of recession for another
year. (He was not to be confused with John Kenneth Galbraith, who had also
been issuing repeated calls for lower interest rates.) James Galbraith did not
42
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 19, 1998.
43
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 19, 1998.
call for a new Bretton Woods, but rather voiced the hope that regional
institutions like the European Monetary Union or the Asian Monetary Fund
might replaced the failed IMF. After the failure of so-called reform in
Russia, capitalism was a dead duck in Russia, he recognized. Congress could
force the Fed to cut interest rates, but Galbraith was pessimistic that they
would, so prospects were "bleak." This book argues that it was neither 1929
nor 1987, but rather 1931 -- meaning that the world faced, not with a stock
market decline, but rather with the disintegration of the big banks and other
existing financial structures.

CLINTON ADDRESSES THE CFR ON THE WORLD CRISIS

The existence of a world financial crisis of unprecedented severity was clear

for all to see no later than the end of October 1997. But this basic reality had
been recognized neither by the Clinton White House nor by the rest of the
US government. As late as November 1997, Clinton had fatuously called the
Asian panic "a few little glitches on the road." Between October 1997 and
October 1998, the United States government had taken absolutely no serious
measures of any kind to fight the depression. Rubin had produced a few
good lines, while Greenspan had spouted restrictive, then expansive,
rhetoric, but nothing had been done. The President needed to propose
legislation to outlaw hedge funds. He needed to call for derivatives to be
declared illegal and be phased out in an orderly way. It was time to compel
Greenspan to increase margin requirements for stock purchases. Above all,
the United States had to invite the nations of the world to Bretton Woods II.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, had been done in one full year. (The
Republican Congress, it is true, had been considering the final tearing down
of the Glass-Steagall firewall between banks and brokerages just when such
safeguards were needed most. And they had tried to make bankruptcy more
difficult for working families, just when they should have been enacting a
series of domestic debt cancellations and debt moratoria.) The Asian
Monetary Fund had been allowed to die stillborn. The G-22 had gone
nowhere. To be like FDR, one had to be an activist, and activity was here
nowhere to be seen. The US government record contrasted not at all
favorably with that of Herbert Hoover, who had at least called for a 1-year
international debt moratorium under similar circumstances. All of the
conclusions drawn at the end of Chapter VII of this book were unfortunately
applicable to the Clinton Administration, and even more to the Federal
Reserve. Even the Japanese government, mocked by US commentators
because of its paralysis, was a by comparison with the US a whirlwind of
activity with its stimulus packages, bank bailouts, and Asian Monetary Fund
ideas. If the term for Japan were paralysis, the term for Washington and
especially the Federal Reserve might be rigor mortis.

On September 14, Clinton finally told the New York Council on Foreign
Relations that the United States had to provide leadership for the world in
dealing with what he now acknowledged to be "the biggest financial
challenge facing the world in a half-century." "The United States has an
absolutely inescapable obligation to lead," said Clinton. A quarter of the
world's population now faced declining or negative economic growth, he
said. Clinton was worried about Russia, and had been reading the
Washington Post series on the new Asian misery. Clinton directed Rubin
and Greenspan to convene a meeting of the G-7 finance ministers and
central bankers within 30 days to discuss anti-crisis moves to recommend
ways to adapt the international financial architecture to the 21st century,"
and also spoke about the work of the G-22; in this connection he mentioned
cooperation with Romano Prodi of Italy.

What was missing was still the indispensable call for a New Bretton Woods.
On the same day, the G-7 finance ministers and central bankers had issued
cryptic boiler-plate in which they noted that "inflation is low or falling in
many parts of the world" and that their countries would coordinate their
actions "to preserve or create conditions for sustainable domestic growth and
financial stability in their own economies." Was this a promise of reflation,
or merely a reflation of promises?

Published reports later indicated that Clinton had indeed been considering
something along the lines of a New Bretton Woods. But over the Labor Day
weekend, he had been in contact with Britain's Tony Blair -- the worst
possible choice for a discussion partner; White House Chief of Staff Erskine
Bowles was later reported to have been talking about a "New Bretton
Woods." There followed a rush to define what a New Bretton Woods might
mean: Tony Blair, advised by his ideological salad chef Anthony Giddens of
the London School of Economics, came out with his own delphic "Third
Way" version at a Commonwealth meeting in Ottawa on September 29.
Jacques Chirac also wanted to appropriate this slogan, and his intent to
muddy the waters was immediately evident: Chirac called for a "New
Bretton Woods" on September 25. What Chirac meant was a kind of IMF
world dictatorship, exercised through a strengthened IMF Interim
Committee, with the finance ministers meeting frequently to act as a kind of
world directorate or world financial control board for the bondholders -- in
effect, a universal oligarchy of financiers. As of September 1998, the head of
the IMF Interim Committee was Carlo d'Azeglio Ciampi, an arch-monetarist
former official of the Bank of Italy and former Italian prime minister. French
Finance Minister Strauss-Kahn made this intent painfully clear when he
specified that Chirac was calling for "a true IMF government," whose goals
would include financial transparency and other favorite concerns of the Paris
and London creditors' clubs.

Camdessus was calling for greater transparency and strengthened IMF

surveillance, and was also contemplating the IMF Interim Committee as a
kind of world-wide committee of public safety. He was adamant that
controls were inadmissible.44 For Camdessus, the 24 finance ministers of the
Interim Committee would take over hands-on decisional control of the IMF.
They would become the new ephors of the System.

NEW BRETTON WOODS

Many policy makers, responsible persons, and intellectuals around the world
are aware that what is needed is a new world monetary system, although
there are many divergences about what its features might be. On April 7,
Italian prime Minister Romano Prodi told a press conference at the Willard
Hotel in Washington DC, "I personally believe we must move towards a
new Bretton Woods." On June 2, Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammed of
Malaysia said at a policy symposium in Tokyo: "I believe the time has come
to deal with the entire issue of reform of the international financial system to
ensure currency stability and contain the activities of those who buy and sell
money for no other purpose than to make profits." On August 30, Taichi
Sakaiya, the director of Japan's Economic Planning Agency, called for an
urgent meeting of world leaders to avert global financial crisis. Sakaiya
suggested that the G-7 nations, together with Russia, should meet to try to
calm markets. 45 The adequate answer to the unprecedented world crisis was
to convoke a second Bretton Woods, a world monetary conference to re-
establish a regime of fixed parities and eventual gold convertibility of the
most important trading currencies. The whole world was waiting for the
44
Michel Camdessus, Before the Next Crisis begins, Washington Post, September 27,
1998.
45
BBC, August 30, 1998.
United States government to issue the call for Bretton Woods II. What a real
Bretton Woods II would like is discussed in detail in the final chapter of this
book.

True to form, the BIS clique of central bankers blindly opposed meaningful
monetary reform. On November 20, 1998 Fed boss Greenspan, Bank of
England chief Eddie George, European Central Bank head Wim Duisenberg,
and Hans Tietmeyer of the Bundesbank all spoke out in opposition to fixed
exchange rates. Here were the Four Horsemen of the coming financial
Apocalypse.

THE WORLD THE USURERS MADE

Much of the world was now undergoing a violent economic contraction. A

September Washington Post series summed up the tragic dimensions of the
damage. Clinton had been impressed by the account he found here of the
nurses, pharmacists, and medical aides of the bankrupt Seoul Christian
Hospital who, fired with no back wages when the hospital closed, were now
homeless and camping out in the lobby of the facility. In Indonesia,
unemployment had gone from 5 million to 20 million, and was headed
higher. South Korea had lost 1 million jobs during 1998, and was posting
100 bankruptcies each day; it was the worst crisis since the Korean War of
1950-53. . Thais were being fired at the rate of 2,000 per day. The
Indonesian government now reported its revised estimate that 100 million of
its people would fall below 2,100 calories per day by the end of 1998.
Malnutrition was severe enough among children in many areas as to cause
the severe emaciation called marasmus, which is often accompanied by
irreversible brain damage. "Many of the problems being seen in Indonesia --
hunger and malnutrition, rising dropout rates, increasing child labor, crime
and prostitution, family disintegration -- are also increasing in Thailand,
South Korea, and other Asian nations," wrote the Washington Post.

Social progress was also being rolled back. Divorces, separations, and
family violence had spiked upward across Southeast Asia. In Indonesia,
government officials were estimating that 2.7 million children would drop
out of school this year because of the crisis. In Thailand, child prostitution
was increasing, and 12-year old girls were selling for $800 to $1,600 in
some rural districts. South Korea was still wealthy enough to afford
orphanages for the economic orphans whom parents could no longer care
for. The parks of Seoul were rapidly filling up with homeless men. If
America had Cleveland Cafes during the bust of the 1890s, and Hoovervilles
and apple sellers during the Great Depression, Seoul now had the IMF Hope
Wagon, a food stand staffed by a dozen homeless men who had lost their
jobs in the crisis and who were now dishing up boiled noodles. The men
named their pathetic project the IMF Hope Wagon, but they were not
making money. It was an epiphany, a defining moment in the depression.

Regional immigration patterns were being reversed. Thailand, with 2 million

jobless, had deported a quarter million Burmese migrant laborers. Laotians
coming to Bangkok in search of jobs were being arrested; news of the crash
had not yet reached the villages of rural Laos. Malaysia deported 50,000
Indonesians, and South Korea sent home a similar number of foreign
workers. Filipinos were being expelled from many countries.
"Go back to your village!" the nervous Thai government told peasants out of
work in the larger cities. "No One Told You To Come to Jakarta!" was the
Indonesian government's variation on the same theme.

The middle class was being crushed even more rapidly here than elsewhere
in the world. "The greatest success story of East Asia -- the emergence of a
broadening middle class -- is evaporating like the steam from a cup of tea,"
commented the Washington Post. The president of a Seoul shipping
container plant lamented: "For the past 30 years, it was growth, growth, new
jobs, new jobs, so people all became middle class. Now, it is really
miserable. There is no middle class. These people are all lower class." It was
a "class plunge." While it would be misleading to exaggerate the prosperity
attained by these countries under globalization, it was clear that the progress
achieved during an entire generation had been wiped out in just a few
months, for purely financial reasons.

In Russia, hoarding foodstuffs and other necessary commodities was the

order of the day. The period from September 4 through September 9 saw a
wave of panic buying. Shoppers were desperately stocking up on rice,
buckwheat, sugar, noodles, tea, coffee, laundry detergent, soap, pasta, and
other staples. One man told an American reporter that he had seen the price
of sugar go up three times while he was waiting in line in a supermarket
with his shopping cart. A researcher said all the eggs had disappeared from
the supermarket where she shopped, and when a new stock of eggs appeared
later in the day, the price had gone up 50%. "Political turmoil means hunger,
so we begin to store food," she observed. Chicken was selling for 90 rubles
per kilogram, while the official minimum wage was 84 rubles per month. 46

STANDSTILLS: THE WORLD IN SCHACHTIAN GRIDLOCK

"The best medicine would be for the Western world to accept the fact that
you have to give them breathing space -- let's say, 6-9 months -- in which
these countries wouldn't pay the interest on their debts," said Asian fund
manager and economist Marc Faber in an interview with Barron's. 47 It
became clear during September that the dangerous half-measure of
standstills was beginning to attract supporters among those who chose to
forget the lessons of the 1930s. On the occasion of releasing its Trade and
Development Report 1998 on September 16, the United Nations Trade and
Development agency (UNCTAD) issued a communiqué advocating a
"financial safeguard mechanism for currencies under speculative attack."
UNCTAD noted that "Turning a blind eye to the systemic nature of financial
instability is neither responsible nor acceptable. Global surveillance and
regulation have lagged behind the integration of financial markets -- with
increasingly costly consequences. Crisis management requires a mix of old
and new techniques in order to reduce the volatile movements of
international capital . . .debtor developing countries facing a speculative
attack on their currencies should have the right to impose unilateral
standstills on capital transactions like the trade safeguard actions permitted
under WTO rules." An UNCTAD survey had concluded that countries
which "had undergone across-the-board financial deregulation and
liberalization" were prone to "speculative bubbles" and "excessive capital
flows." UNCTAD scored the "exaggerated faith in markets" on the part of
policy makers." The Report listed "Essential tools: debt standstills and
capital controls," including "the application of insolvency principles to
currency attacks." UNCTAD proposed "a standstill on debt servicing to
ward off predatory investors and give a country the breathing space needed
to design a debt reorganization plan, thereby helping to prevent the liquidity
crisis from escalating into a solvency crisis." But it added that "a full-fledged
procedure, analogous to Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code,
is neither practical nor necessary. Article VIII of the IMF's Articles of
association could provide a legal base for the imposition of a debt standstill."
"The decision to impose a standstill could be taken unilaterally by the
country experiencing a currency attack; and evaluation of its justification
46
Washington Post, September 6, 7, 8, 1998.
47
Barron's, August 31, 1998.
could be the responsibility of an independent international panel established
for this purpose." The Report praised capital controls as "a proven technique
for dealing with volatile capital flows" and an "indispensable part of
developing countries' armory of measures for the purpose of protection
against international financial instability." Contrary to the United Nations
view, American Chapter XI was an absolutely indispensable tool for fighting
the world depression. Rumors swirled during the same week that Camdessus
was seeking authority from the IMF member governments to set himself up
as Standstill Czar, empowered to tell governments in regard to which debts
they could declare standstills, and for how long.

One of the few points of agreement at the disastrous IMF conference of the
first week of October 1998 was the revival of standstill. Camdessus wrote in
his report that "in extreme conditions, countries may find it necessary to put
in place a moratorium on . . .debt service payments" while they try to
reschedule their debt. The IMF wanted to preserve the sanctity of debt, but
also to head off unilateral debt moratoria and defaults of the type declared by
Russia on August 17, 1998.

Jacques Rueff recorded in his memoirs how horrified he was by US envoy

Henry Stimson's support for standstill agreements during the summer of
1931. Standstill agreements are by nature dangerous half-measures which
leave all important questions suspended without a final answer, and thus
tend to consign the economies in question to limbo. A standstill agreement
boils down to a mutual pledge not to rock the boat in the midst of a category
V financial hurricane. Standstills mean extended gridlock, an intolerable
situation in human affairs. Standstills by their very nature prevent the
issuance of new credit, and do nothing to restore confidence. All of this
should have been clear from the German experience of 1931 and thereafter.
Even a partial and temporary debt moratorium is insufficient, as the one-year
Hoover Moratorium of June 1931 taught the world. Hoover proposed a
moratorium because he was opposed to debt cancellation, not because he
was trying to bring it closer. In order to be effective, a moratorium on
international financial debt had to be general and open-ended -- it had to
freeze all principal and interest payments for the duration of the crisis.
Those who were proposing standstills in 1998 needed to be reminded that
they were in fact much less radical than Herbert Hoover. Those who thought
that capital controls plus standstill agreements would do the trick needed to
be reminded that they were endorsing the failed policies of Hjalmar Schacht
in 1931 (see Chapter VII). A far more vigorous approach was needed, as
shown in the final chapter of this book.

OCTOBER 1998: THE WORLD FINANCE OLIGARCHY PARALYZED

In August and September 1998, the world finance oligarchy had been forced
to look into the glowing bowels of Hell. The half-million bankers and fund
managers who are the chief beneficiaries of the globaloney system had felt
the icy breath of panic on their necks. Had the near-death experience
impelled them to consider any serious reforms?

The IMF and World Bank annual meetings held in Washington at the
beginning of October 1998, including the G-22 session on which reform
hopes had been pinned, underlined that they had not. Laissez-faire
orthodoxy prevailed up and down the line. As for President Clinton, the
promise he had shown in his mid-September speech to the CFR turned out to
be empty verbiage. Clinton refused to lift a finger against hedge funds or
derivatives, and made no move to re-instate gold convertibility, fixed parity,
or pro-industrial economic dirigism. William Greider accurately summed up
Clinton's failure of nerve:

American politics is about to be transformed by [the world

crisis], especially if it remains so passive. President Clinton,
other troubles aside, stands a fair risk of becoming a "New
Democrat" version of Herbert Hoover. Like Hoover, Clinton
entrusted his economic policy to conservative financial experts
(in his case, Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan). Now he is
captive to their narrow, cautious view of what's unfolding.48

But Greider's proposal to fight the depression domestically seemed to be to

"flood the streets with money," which was ironically the direction in which
Greenspan was also leaning. It was high time to understand that there was no
monetarist solution for the crisis. To his credit, Greider also called for a new
Bretton Woods, leading to a "more stable system of currency relationships."

Delusions of "relative stabilization" were rife in Washington by the end of

October 1998. That month proved to be the Dow's best since early 1987. But
was this pleasant reprieve being purchased at the price of incipient
48
William Greider, "Breakdown of Free-Market Orthodoxy," Washington Post, October
7, 1998.
hyperinflation stoked by the Greenspan Federal Reserve?

HALLOWEEN 1998 AT THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS

On the day before Halloween 1998, the heads of state and heads of
government of the Group of 7 issued an unusual statement, claiming in
effect that the worst was over. Their finance ministers spoke of the success
of crisis management, and repeated their mantra about transparency, while
professing eternal fealty to the IMF. The G-7 created the structure of an
emergency lending fund, under which troubled economies which had placed
themselves under IMF dictation could draw at will on lines of credit when
they needed a quick fix. The IMF quick fix facility was the product of
consultations among the emerging levy of Third Way politicians, including
Clinton, Germany's Gerhard Schröder, Britain's Tony Blair, Canada's Jean
Chrétien, and Italy's Massimo D'Alema. The nervous new optimism of the
Third Way leaders in late October 1998 was based on a number of factors.
The Dow was up some 13% from its late August lows. Greenspan had
lowered US interest rates twice, and seemed ready to keep on doing so. The
Congress had approved $18 billion for the IMF. The Japanese taxpayer was
going to be dunned half a trillion dollars to bail out the Japanese banks. The
IMF was putting up at least $40 billion for a financial Maginot line around
Brazil. Thailand's stock market was up 50% from its August lows. Hong
Kong had also gained back 50%, and was back over the 10,000 level. The
US dollar had fallen from ¥ 145 in August to ¥ 117, which relieved much of
the devaluation pressure on the Chinese ren min bi. Market insiders now
thought that Long Term Capital Management had not mortally wounded
Lehman Brothers, Bankers Trust or any other big banks. A wave of large
takeovers was in the offing: Daimler was buying Chrysler, Deutsche Bank
acquired Bankers Trust, America Online purchased Netscape, Exxon merged
with Mobil, British Petroleum had bought Amoco, Total was acquiring
Petrofina, and Rhone Poulenc and Hoechst were merging. All this helped
pump up stocks. But each of these mergers meant thousands of lost jobs.
The late 1998 flurry of mergers and acquisitions guaranteed that 1998 would
be the worst year for layoffs during the entire 1990s globaloney decade.
And, just beyond the Christmas holidays and the hoped-for Santa Claus
rally, there loomed the brave new world of the euro. A more fatuous fool's
paradise could hardly be imagined, but it was an illusion that might last for
weeks or months. Thanks to crony financing by Greenspan and the other
central bankers, money center banks had simply rolled over their mass of
kited derivatives from end of the third quarter 1998 into the first and second
quarters of 1999, when the tight money likely to be associated with the euro
will make them even harder to finance.

Not everything was serene. There was trouble for the bankers in unexpected
quarters. Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, with his country almost
three months in arrears on debt payments, declared that it could simply not
fulfill the conditions being demanded by the IMF, and there were signs that
Iran, its oil income reduced by the low world market price, might be on the
verge of default.

The impact on the Japanese oligarchy of the Russian default caused by the
IMF's doctrinaire monetarism, and the LCTM bailout organized by
Greenspan, was very ominous for the future prospects of the Anglo-
American free market creed. For the men behind screens in Tokyo, these
events had underlined the incompetence and the duplicity of the IMF and
Federal Reserve chieftains who had been tormenting and insulting them for
many long months. By late October 1998 the Japanese oligarchy was
thoroughly disenchanted with globaloney, and was pondering a return to the
highly successful dirigist methods long associated with the Japanese
Ministry of Finance and Ministry of International Trade and Industry: these
included window guidance of firms by the government, directed lending to
provide credit for production, and a strategic industrial policy. At the time
the $550 billion bank bailout was approved by the Diet, Finance Minister
Miyazawa announced a separate $30 billion fund to defend East Asian
currencies and economies, starting with Indonesia. This was a new unilateral
form of the Asian Monetary Fund which the IMF and the US Treasury had
blocked a year earlier. Japanese thinking was once more oriented towards an
Asian economic sphere, possibly including China, Malaysia, and Indonesia;
this kind of combination could be impervious to IMF assault, even if backed
by the Anglo-Americans. The Japanese were impressed by Mahatir's success
with exchange controls, and were happy to leave their money in Malaysia.
The big issue would be the Japanese ability to withstand the IMF-Wall
Street-City of London wrecking operation which was sure to follow.

THE BRITISH LIBOR PARTY

In the background, the Tony Blair regime, called by some the British LIBOR
Party (after the London Interbank Offered Rate, which appeared to have
replaced the old Marxism of the Trades Union Congress as the main article
of faith) was still trying to collect on the City of London's Russian derivative
contracts, which were already in the same category as the bonds of the
Czarist era. Once again the mangy British lion was attempting to bait the
Russian bear -- always a perilous exercise for the world. The intellectual
bankruptcy of the political leaders of the wealthy countries could not have
been more complete, making the next wave of the crisis merely a question of
time.

EUROPE IS NEXT

The euro was launched in January 1999. After the Russian default, the 11
European Union currencies which were candidates for merger into the EMU
monetary union were subjected to varying levels of pressure, and stresses
and strains began to appear in the European currency grid, which had last
been reviewed by the finance eurogarchs during their May consultations.
One key to the divergence was in widening bond yield spreads between
weak sisters Italy and Spain on the one hand, and Germany on the other,
where the government bonds called Bunds were in demand for reasons
largely related to Germany's past reputation as an economic power. The
question was raised, could the euro be launched on schedule?

By early September, voices were raised in favor of stopping the implacable

euro austerity. Hannes Swoboda, Socialist Party deputy in the Austrian
parliament, called for a suspension of the EMU convergence criteria for the
duration of the impact of the Asian and Russian crises on Europe. He said
that this would provide an emergency instrument to prevent the European
Union from sliding into a real recession. As it was, the hands of the
eurocrats were tied by the Maastricht straitjacket at precisely the moment
when anti-cyclical measures, including protectionist steps, were most
imperative. The Maastricht treaty was turning out to be a Nessus shirt for the
European financial Hercules.
The enterprise of launching a new world currency in the midst of a financial
hurricane was evidently a parlous one. The euro would necessarily appear as
something of an unknown quantity, to the average person if not to the
financial eurogarchs. As Bundesbank President Hans Tietmeyer once
remarked, "A failure of the monetary union might be a drama, but its success
under unstable conditions might be a tragedy." French Interior Minister
Jean-Pierre Chevènement had commented about the euro, "I believe it is like
the Titanic," and called for the band to play "Nearer My God to Thee."
There appeared to be two alternatives: if Duisenberg & Co. at the European
Central Bank decided to prove their anti-inflation mettle to the satisfaction
of the bond-holders, their policy might well prove so restrictive and
deflationary as to provoke a violent and possible fatal contraction in
European levels of production and employment -- an all-out depression.
Given the monetarist peer pressure on the bankers' camarilla running the
European Central Bank, demanding that they show themselves the worthy
heirs of the sturdy anti-inflation fighters at the German Bundesbank, this
was by far the more likely alternative. If so, Wim Duisenberg might turn out
to be one of the great villains of the world breakdown.

If, on the other hand, the ECB tried to provide credit sufficient to maintain
current levels of economic activity, it was likely that it would come under
attack by the hedge funds and the banks that follow them in for the kill,
leading to a new edition of September 1992 on a grand scale. There was also
the question of what would happen to the vestigial francs, lira, and gulden
during the last phase of their existence, when they might be rapidly depleted
by panic flights into the dollar or even into gold.

DOLLAR CRASH

The Long Term Capital affair should have served as a reminder to

Americans that the United States was the derivatives capital of the world,
with 90% of the known US share of the weird instruments concentrated in
the hands of the money center banks. It was in the wake of LTCM that the
idea of a general US banking panic began to dawn on certain mainstream
observers: Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post that a Wall Street
insider friend had told him in mid-September that "for the first time in my
professional life I hear serious people worrying about the survival of their
banks." 49A few more Merton-Scholes capers, and the entire edifice could
come crashing down. The Federal Reserve response to Long Term Capital
emphatically raised the specter of hyperinflation in the dollar zone, with
astronomical hyperliquidity being pumped into the banks to prevent
bankruptcy all around. Greenspan's largesse to the derivative banks, if
continued for long, would guarantee hyperinflation in the dollar. (By late
1998, Russia was lurching towards its second bout of hyperinflation in the
49
Jim Hoagland, "Storm off the Coast," Washington Post, September 27, 1998.
globaloney era, with a 300% yearly rate expected. What hyperinflation
looked like in Germany in 1922-23 is portrayed in Chapter VII) The
aftermath of the first airing of Long Term Capital's debacle included a
decidedly weaker dollar, and a sharp rise in the price of gold, so these
lessons were not being lost on the investment world.

Looking forward, we must ask the painful question of what the effect on the
US banking system would be if we were to have a few more Long Term
Capital cases, plus insolvencies by Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. We must
also factor in the reality that US banks act more like hedge funds than banks
in most of their operations. Such a scenario would doom the US banking
system, although Greenspan might preserve the illusion of vitality with the
formaldehyde of Fed loans. Hyperinflation would be one way to take care of
the mortgage debt, credit card debt, and all other debt of American
households -- unless corrupt politicians manage to sneak through legislation
indexing existing debt to the inflation rate, in which case the most timid
members of the middle class will soon be parading with pitchforks. But in
the larger picture, hyperinflation would doom the US dollar as a reserve
currency.

The universal and virtually automatic acceptance of a US dollar not

convertible into gold which has prevailed after 1971-73 has been an
historical anomaly. The post-1973 regime, as we show in Chapter IV, has
been far less successful than the original Bretton Woods system of 1944-
1971. If Greenspan begins to redline the dollar presses, it is simply a
question of time until the dollar will cease to be acceptable in international
trade. The time is coming when we will either have a new world monetary
system, or the US will have to pay for imports in gold. The endgame of the
dollar hyperinflation scenario would involve a free fall of the dollar, a move
out of all paper and into gold, commodities, and real estate by the finance
oligarchs, and a collapse in the secondary market of US Treasury securities.
It is fervently to be hoped that Greenspan and the Fed will be dumped, and
New Deal policies re-instated, before we reach that point.

The waning months of 1998 gave every indication that the worldwide
contraction of production and employment was gathering momentum. The
United States lost 193,000 jobs in manufacturing between January and
October 1998. In November, a wave of mass layoffs in the petrochemical
sector continued, with Monsanto wiping out 2,500 jobs and Texaco
terminating 1,000 workers. US steel shipments fell by 9.3% in September
1998. China reported exports down 17.3% compared to a year before.
Chinese steel exports for the first 9 months of 1998 were down 38% in
comparison with the same period of 1997. Industrial production in Brazil
was down 2.9% in the third quarter of 1998, and declined by 3% in
Argentina during the same period. Farm prices worldwide were at their
lowest levels in 20 years, despite severe mass starvation in a number of parts
of the globe.

World crude steel production had reached an all-time peak in 1997, with
total output of 794.5 million tons exceeding the previous 1989 peak for the
first time. But, according to figures from the International Iron and Steel
Institute in Brussels, output was declining during 1998. World steel output
in September 1998 was down 6.3% compared with September 1997, and
1998 production was down by 0.5% on a year-to-date basis. Russian
production was down 21.4% compared with the year ago month, and the
NAFTA zone was down 4.7%. China, by contrast, remained the world's
biggest steel producer with a robust 4.9% increase over the year-ago month.
Japan was down 8.8% on the same basis.

One who denied the reality of the contraction was Tony Blair. On October
11, 998 Labor Party Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown
pontificated that the British economy was "a rock of stability in these
troubled times." Unfortunately for the Blair regime, the London Observer
reported that same day that Britain faced over 400,000 layoffs in
manufacturing by the end of 1999, which would bring industrial
employment in the former workshop of the world down to the levels of 150
years ago. British farm incomes are experiencing their worst decline since
the 1930s. According to the Guardian of October 28, "activity in the
manufacturing sector has collapsed." But on October 21, Blair told the
British Parliament that it was time to stop the "idiotic hysteria" about the
prospects for the British economy, and described the minds of the
Conservative opposition as "black holes." Blair's friend Eddie George, the
Governor of the Bank of England, caused a furore of his own when he stated
that is was fine for unemployment to rise in the devastated north of England,
if this were necessary to protect better-off Kent and Surrey from inflation.
George is not likely to venture into Yorkshire any time soon without an
armed escort.

Between mid-October 1998 and early January 1999, the pace of the crisis
slowed. But the first business days of January brought a flurry of renewed
crisis symptoms: with the euro launched, the dollar showed alarming
weakness, falling 5% against the yen, fast enough that the Bank of Japan
launched support operations for the US greenback -- a rarity since 1995 -- on
January 12. The dollar's weakness was partly attributable to Clinton's
impeachment and trial in the Senate, and partly to the collapse of the IMF
bailout of Brazil, where the state of Minas Gerais on January 6 defaulted on
payments to the central government. Soon Brazil was losing $1 billion per
day of flight capital despite the high interest rates which had been strangling
its economy for more than a year. On January 13, Brazil devalued its
currency amidst a world stock market downturn, and two days later
announced that it would abandon any currency peg in favor of unmoored
floating. These events were sure to increase the pressure on Argentina,
Mexico, and other Latin American debtor nations. Jeffrey Sachs took the
occasion to gloat that all of the IMF's 1997-98 bailouts -- including
Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, and Brazil -- were now all
certifiable fiascos.

THE BUBBLE

The attempt to estimate the approximate dimensions of the world financial

bubble of the late 1990s is necessarily a parlous enterprise. But we must get
some idea of the size of the bubble, how fast the bubble is turning over, and
its growth rate, in order to appreciate fully the desperation of the human
predicament at the close of the century and of the millennium. Such an
attempt must be articulated on two levels. The first is the attempt to
determine the total monetary value of all outstanding financial paper,
including derivatives, stocks, bonds, mortgages, debentures, promissory
notes, commercial paper, credit card accounts, mutual funds, certificates of
deposit, securitized assets of all types, etc. Such a world total is
indispensable, since it implies a rate of return on the bubble, whether in the
form of fixed interest, or variable dividends, or other returns. But the bubble
is not a static magnitude. All of these assets are traded every day, be it in
markets or over the counter. The second important feature of the bubble is
its rate of turnover. How fast are these derivatives, stocks, bonds, mortgages,
debentures, commercial paper, acceptances, promissory notes, etc., changing
hands? The total amount of world financial turnover implies a series of costs
connected with trading profits, commissions, fees, and related costs. Finally,
both the bubble and the turnover were rapidly growing, at least until a
possible turning point between October 1997 and October 1998.
US BUBBLE, 1997-98

The biggest component of the bubble is represented by derivatives, which

are discussed in more detail in the following chapter. Derivatives include
exchange-traded futures and options on financial assets and commodities,
plus over-the-counter currency and interest rate swaps, and the more
complex derivatives known as structured notes. In 1990, according to the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, US commercial banks held $6.8
trillion of off-balance sheet derivatives. Since then, these derivatives
holdings of banks have been expanding at an average 20% yearly rate,
reaching $20.3 trillion by the end of 1996. In the first quarter of 1997 alone,
off-balance sheet derivatives held by all US banks grew by 10%, bringing
US derivatives reported by banks to $32 trillion as of March 31, 1997. If we
include the derivatives holdings of American investment banks and
insurance companies along with the derivatives held by commercial banks
covered by the FDIC, then the total US derivatives figure rose to about $40
trillion as of the end of the first quarter of 1998. (This still leaves out
derivatives held by hedge funds, non-bank corporations, institutions,
endowments, individuals, and state and local governments. It would also
leave out derivatives that are simply not reported by any of the above.)

At the end of 1996, the US Securities and Exchange Commission estimated

that the total equity capitalization of all US corporations attained $9.2
trillion. As of the July 1997 interim market top, the total market value of all
US stocks trading on exchanges undoubtedly exceeded $10 trillion.
Bonded debt is another large category. The Public Debt of the United States
topped out at just short of $5.57 trillion during the first week of September
1998, and towards the end of the month was just over $5.5 trillion.
Corporate bonds, junkified or not, are a separate category. In 1997 alone,
some $119 billion worth of junk bonds were floated. The total market value
of the US bond and credit market was estimated at about $21 trillion as of
the end of the third quarter of 1997. Smaller components of the bubble also
add up. US mutual funds are about $4 trillion. US installment debt in
another $1.5 trillion. US mortgage debt is about $3.4 trillion.

THE US BUBBLE AT ITS PEAK, 1997-98

DERIVATIVES $40 TRILLION

STOCKS $15 TRILLION

CREDIT MARKETS $21 TRILLION

MUTUAL FUNDS $5 TRILLION

MORTGAGES $3.5 TRILLION

INSTALLMENT DEBT $1.5 TRILLION

----------------------
TOTAL US BUBBLE $85 TRILLION

Financial paper of all types is thus more than one full order of magnitude
greater than the so-called Gross Domestic Product, which is itself a figure
heavily larded with financial and other services.

THE WORLD BUBBLE

The size of the US bubble is an important part of the story, but it is far from
being the whole story. The world total of derivatives approached a probable
historical top at no less than $130 trillion in notional value of outstanding
contracts during early 1998. It is thought that derivatives held by American
banks represent about one third to one fourth of derivatives held worldwide.
We incline towards the one fourth estimate, especially because of the very
rapid growth rates for derivatives in the most recent years in the United
Kingdom, Germany, and other European countries, plus derivative growth in
Japan, where there were no legal derivatives at all until a few years ago. To
get a round figure, let us therefore say that derivatives holdings by all the
world's banks, insurance companies, corporations, brokers, governments,
individuals, and other owners must now be at least $130 trillion.

This estimate is buttressed by the mid-1997 "Public Disclosure of the

Trading and Derivatives Activities of Banks and Securities Firms", a report
issued jointly by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the
Technical Committee of the International Organization of Securities
Commissions. According to this study, world derivatives held by banks and
brokers grew from $62.6 trillion at the end of 1994 to $69.35 trillion at the
end of 1995, a growth rate of almost 11%. The great powers of the
derivatives world were led in 1995 by the United States ($23.1 trillion),
Japan ($11.5), France ($9.4), Great Britain ($7.4), Switzerland ($6.3),
Germany ($4.3), and Canada ($3.3). Switzerland was the per capita leader,
with $877,673 in derivatives for each Swiss.

If this accounting of world derivatives is adjusted upward in line with the

$32 trillion for US derivatives at the end of March 1997 cited above, we
would have gotten a snapshot of world derivatives holdings at the end of the
first quarter of 1997 in the amount of just under $100 trillion. And this
figure surely understated the reality, due to non-reported derivatives, and
because of the holdings of hedge funds, non-bank corporations, institutions,
endowments, individuals, and governments, which were generally omitted.

The great question mark is represented by the derivatives holdings of hedge

funds. Hedge funds, by present definition, report nothing. The most recent
window on the hedge fund world was opened by the collapse of Long Term
Capital Management, which turned out to have more than $1 trillion of
derivatives exposure. Long Term Capital Management was a medium-sized
hedge fund, not comparable in size to the giants like the Soros Quantum
Fund or the Robertson Tiger Fund, which were five to eight times as big. If
one hedge fund of the middling sort can generate $1 trillion in derivatives,
what might be the value of the unreported derivatives of the 5,500 hedge
funds operating in this world? World derivatives may amount to $150
trillion, $200 trillion, or even more. As long as hedge funds are allowed to
operate in complete secrecy, there is no reliable way of knowing the notional
value of their derivatives contracts.

In 1993 the International Monetary Fund estimated the total of the world's
publicly traded financial assets as about $24 trillion, and further estimated
that this entire total was being bought and sold every 24 days. This would
imply a yearly turnover figure of $250 trillion in stocks and bonds alone six
years ago, and a daily turnover of $1 trillion already back then. One year
earlier, in 1992, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) had estimated the financial assets of its member
states at $35 trillion. A November, 1994 study by the McKinsey Company
consulting firm forecast that total world financial assets would reach $53
trillion in constant dollars or $83 trillion in nominal dollars by the year 2000.
But this falls far short, especially because of derivatives growth.

By 1993, the IMF thought that the yearly trade in US Treasury securities
amounted to a little over $80 trillion. According to the McKinsey study,
global bond trading amounted to more than $500 billion per day, for a yearly
total of $125 trillion. All in all the McKinsey study, taken together with
more recent data suggested a mid-1990s daily world turnover of about $1.5
trillion for stocks, and about $.7 trillion for bonds for a daily total certainly
in the neighborhood of $2.2 trillion, with a yearly turnover of about $ .55
quadrillion.

The SEC thought that the market value of all the world's stocks had totaled
$22.4 trillion at the end of December 1996. The world-wide price increase
for stocks during the first half of 1997 certainly brought the world's equity
capital to $25 trillion by July 1997, which may have represented the pre-
Asian crisis top. This entire mass of stocks must be turning over about once
a month, or perhaps even more rapidly. A monthly turnover would bring
yearly stock transactions to about $315 trillion during the latter half of 1997.

A rough estimate of the world bubble might therefore look something like
this. We set world derivatives at $130 trillion, world stocks at $25 trillion,
and world credit markets of all sorts at perhaps $40 trillion, adding in bonds,
money markets, etc. Other financial instruments would then represent all
mortgages, real estate trusts, mutual funds, consumer and credit card debt,
etc. The US bubble would represent about one third of the total world
bubble.

THE WORLD BUBBLE, 1997-98

DERIVATIVES >$130 TRILLION

STOCKS $25 TRILLION

CREDIT MARKETS $40 TRILLION?

OTHER INSTRUMENTS $5 TRILLION?

----------------------
TOTAL WORLD BUBBLE >$200 TRILLION
If this is roughly the size of the bubble, let us attempt to put it in motion.
How fast do derivatives turn over? Not all of them do. There is no instant
market for structured notes, which must be carefully evaluated using the
recondite Black-Sholes equations to figure out what they might be worth.
Complex designer derivatives or over-the-counter derivatives do not readily
trade on exchanges. These are the privately negotiated contracts that exist in
the virtual space between the laptop computers of two or more yuppy quants.
As for the futures and options, we must recall that they have definite dates of
expiration and do not last through the year. Options, in particular, are
wasting assets that become worthless if they are not used by a certain date.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association publishes statistics on

certain types of over-the-counter derivatives, especially currency and interest
rate swaps. According to this source, the total world notional value of
privately negotiated derivatives contracts was $17.7 trillion in December,
1995. One year later, at the end of December 1996, the total of these non-
exchange derivatives was set by the ISDA at $24.292 trillion. This implies a
growth rate of a stunning 37% per year. Such derivatives growth, if
continued, would bring this total to over $33 trillion by the beginning of
1998. Again, there is every reason to believe that any attempted summary of
privately negotiated contracts which are not reportable to governments will
tend to understate the real dimensions of the phenomenon.

According to the IMF's International Capital Markets study issued in

August, 1995, during the year 1994 world options, futures, index futures and
index options markets traded 1.14 billion contracts worldwide, with slightly
more than half changing hands in the United States. The Chicago Mercantile
Exchange billed itself as "the world's largest market." Yearly turnover on the
CME reached a new all-time record in 1994, with a total of $183 trillion in
this single exchange. In 1995, the CME saw 203.2 million options and
futures contracts change hands, for a total turnover of $169 trillion. In 1996,
CME trading amounted to 198 million contracts. The Chicago Board of
Trade, another center of futures trading, saw the buying and selling of 222.4
million contracts in 1996. At the Chicago Board Options Exchange, 176
million options contracts changed hands during that same year.

Europe's biggest market for exchange-traded futures, options, and other

derivatives is LIFFE, the London International Financial Futures and
Options Exchange. The action at LIFFE amounts to £160 billion a day, for a
yearly total of 168 million derivatives contracts with a total yearly value of
£40 trillion (roughly $64 trillion) in 1996, the current record. LIFFE says it
is larger than its two closest European competitors combined. But
Germany's Deutsche Terminbörse, plus France's MATIF, plus Switzerland's
Soffex, have a bigger combined turnover than LIFFE. So this suggests a
yearly European derivatives turnover of somewhat more than $125 trillion.
LIFFE's busiest day was March 2, 1994, when 1.6 million contracts changed
hands, and its biggest month was October 1996, when the volume was 18.4
million contracts.

If, out of the first-quarter 1997 world total of $100 trillion in derivatives
reported by banks, $25 trillion were privately negotiated swaps and
structured notes, and $75 trillion were traded on exchanges and turned over
every 20 business days, we might expect a yearly turnover of about $940
trillion on the world's derivatives exchanges - somewhat more than recently
observed. But derivatives are like an iceberg, with the visible transactions
above the water and the structured notes and privately negotiated
transactions and hedge fund operations out of sight. There is every reason to
believe that total buying and selling of exchange-trade derivatives plus over-
the-counter derivatives is in excess of $1 quadrillion per year.

Commodity trading, no matter how speculative, tends to be dwarfed by the

turnover in paper instruments. The New York Mercantile Exchange
(NYMEX) bills itself as the world's largest market for energy and metals,
including futures and options on commodities. NYMEX includes COMEX,
the New York commodity exchange. During 1996, the turnover on NYMEX
amounted to 80 million contracts for a total value of over $2 trillion.
NYMEX sees its main world competitor in the London Metals Exchange
(LME), which seems to be of roughly comparable dimensions.

THE BALLOONING OF FINANCIAL AGGREGATES: A CASINO

SOCIETY

A breathtaking and even chilling feature of the global economy is the

endless proliferation and hypertrophy of financial transactions. The Bank for
International Settlements estimated, for example, that international bank
loans amounted to $3.6 trillion in 1991, already a tidy sum. But bank
lending, as we will see, is in no way the characteristic feature of the modern
global economy. The global economy deals in financial aggregates that are
whole orders of magnitude greater than this modest figure.

Many observers of the contemporary scene have called attention to the

"casino economy" or "casino society" of the late twentieth century. The term
appears to have been coined by the British economist Susan Strange with her
book The Casino Society. This notion reached a larger audience when it was
taken up in by Business Week with the article "Playing With Fire: Games the
Casino Society Plays" in the issue of September 16, 1985. In those days
people were shocked to notice that between 1973 and 1985, the volume of
futures trading in stocks and bonds had increased ninefold, while total
national output had increased only threefold. But that, it was discovered
later, was just a small sample of what was to come.

By 1998, foreign exchange transactions amounted to more than $1.5 trillion

per day, dwarfing the $20 billion per day that used to be the norm as recently
as the 1960s and the $640 billion level which had impressed Treasury
Secretary Brady in 1989. As of mid-1995, London still lead the world in
foreign exchange transactions with $460 billion in turnover each day,
followed by New York with $250 billion, Tokyo with $160 billion,
Singapore with $100 billion, and Hong Kong, Zürich and Frankfurt with $80
to $90 billion each, for the 1995 grand total of $1.2 trillion daily. 50 Since
there are about 250 business days each year, $1.5 trillion per day adds up to
a yearly turnover of $375 trillion in currency markets - as of October 1998.

World yearly financial turnover in mid-1998 could therefore be roughly

estimated in the following terms, which we offer with a caveat about
inevitable duplication:

currency trading $ .4 quadrillion

stocks and bonds $ .55 quadrillion

derivatives $ 1.0 quadrillion

This would suggest that the total turnover of world financial markets of all
sorts is between $1.5 and $2 quadrillion. One way to see if these figures are
50
Financial Times, September 20, 1995.
in the ballpark is to compare them with the figures for interbank payment
transfers going through the interbank payment systems of the world.

INTERBANK TRANSFERS

A good place to start is CHIPS, the New York Clearinghouse Interbank

Payments System, with is a netting and settlement system for the largest
New York money center banks and other member banks, and which can be
fairly described as the cash aorta of the current world financial system,
especially as regards international payments in the dollar sector. In 1997, the
CHIPS home page on the Internet was telling the public that the average
CHIPS daily transfer value was "well over $1 trillion." The total cash
throughput of the CHIPS system in 1996 was about $331.5 trillion. This
meant that the average daily throughput of CHIPS in 1996 was about $1.33
trillion (That was more than the yearly throughput for 1971, the first full
year of a computerized CHIPS, which was only $1.13 trillion.) During 1997,
CHIPS turnover reached a colossal of $362 trillion on almost 59 million
transactions. This was an average rate of $1.44 trillion per day. The biggest
day so far on CHIPS has been November 28, 1997, when $2.24 trillion
surged through the cyber-plumbing.

CHIPS Yearly Volume Statistics

Year Business Total

Days Banks Total Dollar Transaction
Volume*** Volume
(in thousands)

1970* 180 9 $547,615,444 531,778

1971 250 15 $1,131,043,459 801,725
1972 250 15 $4,766,919,981 2,029,312
1973 250 15 $9,184,508,815 2,710,927
1974 250 56 $10,704,349,972 3,474,194
1975 250 63 $10,984,093,108 6,035,347
1976 250 69 $13,138,412,336 7,123,203
1977 250 77 $16,190,636,464 8,247,530
1978 250 80 $20,357,618,638 9,587,874
1979 250 92 $26,844,745,422 10,939,641
1980 251 100 $37,121,139,871 13,244,426
1981 250 99 $40,090,491,736 15,865,423
1982 251 99 $52,971,279,272 18,642,034
1983 251 117 $60,307,620,949 20,187,976
1984 250 138 $69,134,986,179 22,822,230
1985 250 142 $78,401,027,605 24,850,426
1986 251 140 $106,583,481,092 28,527,878
1987 252 139 $139,808,593,176 31,900,251
1988 251 139 $165,388,378,741 33,962,623
1989 251 140 $190,212,347,368 36,520,215
1990 251 131 $222,107,644,171 37,324,466
1991 251 126 $217,312,321,589 37,564,127
1992 253 122 $238,255,498,155 39,073,091
1993 252 121 $265,745,211,884 42,162,247
1994 251 115 $295,443,759,600 45,598,359
1995 251 111 $310,021,249,560 51,032,782
1996 252 104 $331,541,104,158 53,489,396
1997 251 95 $362,186,525,130 58,971,837
1998** 169 90 $229,960,580,221 39,393,238

TOTAL: $3,526,443,184,096 702,614,556

* First Day On Line was April 6, 1970.

** Year-To-Date as of August 31, 1998.
*** All Dollar Amounts are Expressed
in Thousands.

[Source: www.chips.org]
It is thought that CHIPS handles about 95% of all international dollar
transactions. We might therefore raise the official CHIPS annual throughput
by about 5% to get an approximation of the total of all international dollar
interbank transactions, which by 1998 had to be almost $380 trillion each
year.

Then we have Fedwire, the computerized system for money transfers among
the Federal Reserve System's member banks. In 1995, Fedwire carried a
total of about $223 trillion in payments. Are these the same sums that are
reflected in the CHIPS statistics? Probably, sometimes. If we simply add the
CHIPS and Fedwire turnover, we get about $ 600 trillion per year of
interbank transfers for the US alone, which may need to be adjusted
downward for duplication of some transfers to get a national total, but which
does not seem to be exorbitant when compared to Japanese and European
statistics.

The Bank of Japan has created its own settlement system, the BOJ-NET.
BOJ-NET in 1996 carried a daily average traffic of 157.4 trillion yen per
day, which at 118 yen to the dollar represented the equivalent of $1.33
trillion of interbank transfers each day, for a yearly total of about $335
trillion. The City of London operated its Clearinghouse Automated
Payments System (CHAPS), which in 1992 handled almost $38 trillion.
Various German payment systems moved just over $100 trillion in 1992.
Then there is the case of Switzerland, a small country with a highly
developed banking system. The Swiss Interbank Clearing System in 1992
carried the equivalent of $93.6 billion each day, for a yearly throughout of
$23.4 trillion. The new Trans-European Automated Real Time Gross
Settlement Express Transfer (TARGET) is scheduled to be ready for euro
transactions starting on January 1, 1999.

By 1992, bank transfer figures were already large enough to make IMF
analysts nervous. In their study entitled "Large-Value Transfer Systems" 51
issued by the International Monetary Fund in 1994, Bruce J. Summers and
Akinari Horii commented that "the daily flows of funds over these systems
is huge in relative terms as well, on average equaling the value of annual
GDP every 2.6 and 2.8 days in Switzerland and Japan, respectively, and
every 3.4 days in the United States for Fedwire and CHIPS combined."
[Summers and Horii 74] This means that bank transactions which have
something to do with all forms of production and services can be thought by
now of as being finished up in the first two or three days of January, with the
rest of the 250 business days of a calendar year being devoted to financial
speculation only.

$1.5 QUADRILLION IN TOTAL WORLD YEARLY TURNOVER

See Bruce J. Summers ed., The Payment System: Design, Management, and
51

Supervision, (Washington: International Monetary Fund, 1994).

If US yearly interbank turnover came in at $600 trillion and Japan generated
$335 trillion, for a combined total of $935 trillion, let us estimate the rest of
the world, including the European Union with the United Kingdom, plus
Switzerland, at $400 trillion in yearly interbank turnover. This would give us
a yearly figure of almost $1.4 quadrillion for interbank transactions in the
world economy. Updating and adjusting out figures for growth in the bubble
and for the countries not included in the tabulation, we come to the
conclusion is thus that by the late spring of 1998, the total volume of world
interbank transfers was indeed likely to be approaching the colossal sum of
$1.5 quadrillion. This estimate is broadly coherent with the following
detailed figures for interbank transfers during 1992, six years in the past.

DAILY INTERBANK TRANSFERS, 1992

1992 figures; daily payments in billions of US dollars.

FRANCE

Paris Clearing House 97.0

SAGITTAIRE 44.7

Banque de France credit transfer system 32.1

GERMANY

Elektronische Abrechnung mit Filetransfer 212.9

(daily electronic clearing)

Daily local clearing 142.0

EIL-ZV (intercity credit transfer system) 34.9

(Eiliger Zahlungsverkehr)

local credit transfer system 21.6

ITALY

SIPS (Sistema Interbancario di Pagamenti) 38.9

Electronic Memoranda 33.9

BISS 9.3
(Banca d'Italia continuous Settlement System)

JAPAN

bill and check clearing systems 112.6

Zengin Data Communications 54.5

FEYCS 196.1
(Foreign Exchange Yen Clearing System)

BOJ-NET 1133.8

SWITZERLAND

SIC 95.1
(Swiss Interbank Clearing System)

UNITED KINGDOM

Town clearing 9.8

CHAPS 147.9
(Clearing House Automated Payment System)

UNITED STATES

Fedwire (funds) 796.8

[Fedwire (securities) 558.8]

CHIPS 953.2
(Clearing House Interbank Payment System)

[Source: Payment Systems in the Group of Ten Countries (Basel: Bank for
International Settlements, 1993).52 ]

TOTAL 1992 DAILY FUNDS TURNOVER $4.167 trillion

TOTAL 1992 YEARLY FUNDS TURNOVER $1.042 quadrillion

The 1992 result was thus a daily turnover of $4.167 trillion and a yearly
turnover of $1.04 quadrillion in the interbank payment systems of these six
countries alone. If we factor in the securities that are transferred over
Fedwire (about $558.8 billion a day in 1992), the daily turnover rises to
$4.726 trillion and the yearly turnover to about $1.18 quadrillion, but this
may represent duplication. Note that CHIPS average daily volume jumped
from $ 953.2 billion per day in 1992 to $1,440 billion per day in 1997, an
increase of about 51%. BOJ net went from $1.13 trillion per day in 1992 to
$1.33 trillion in 1996, for an increase of about 18%. So we again converge
on the conclusion that, by 1998, yearly interbank transfers must indeed have
been in the neighborhood of $ 1.5 quadrillion or more.

LIQUIDITY CRISIS

The ballooning of financial transactions poses the problem of a potential

liquidity crisis. The figures just developed suggest that a more than $5
trillion is passing each day through the payment systems, markets, and cash
registers of the world. Now, $5 to $6 trillion is a lot of money. Just how
much can be hinted at through a comparison of this hefty sum with the total
US money supply in its various guises.

See also David Folkerts-Landau, Peter Garber, and Dirk Schoenmaker, "The Reform of
52

Wholesale Payment Systems" (online).

The Federal Reserve System regularly publishes a figure which it calls M-1.
M-1 represents the total of US currency circulating outside of banks, plus
checking accounts (or demand deposits), plus travelers checks not issued by
banks, plus some other checkable deposits like NOW accounts. In October
1998 the M-1 money supply was hovering around a mere $1.1 trillion. This
is the cash instantly available for the needs of the financial system.

The Federal Reserve also publishes figures for something called M-2, which
is a slightly broader definition of the money supply. M-2 represents M-1
with the addition of savings accounts, money market accounts, Individual
Retirement Accounts, and Keough plans. In October 1998 M-2 was about
$4.3 trillion.

The Fed also tracks a data series it calls M-3, which lumps together M-2
plus large bank deposits over $100,000 that cannot be withdrawn on
demand, such as jumbo certificates of deposit. In M-3 the Fed also includes
Eurodollars held in US, UK, and Canadian banks by US residents, although
other Eurodollars are not included. In October 1998, M-3 came to about
$5.8 trillion.

Finally, the Fed also publishes statistics regarding what it calls "liquid
assets". These include the M-3 money supply plus savings bonds, short-term
Treasury bills, and bankers' acceptances. In September 1997 the Fed's figure
for liquid assets was about $6.3 trillion.

Banks used to guard against panic runs by setting aside reserves in the form
of cash kept in their vaults against the eventuality that large numbers of
depositors might suddenly demand that their savings be paid out to them in
greenbacks. But under globalism, reserve requirements have been dwarfed
by the tremendous magnitude of the banks' speculative business. Reserve
requirements are thus unlikely to be of much help, as a group of recent
commentators have observed: "Although some central banks consider
reserves important, reserve requirements -- expressed as a percentage of
banks' eligible liabilities -- are rapidly declining while payment flows are
increasing. Non-interest-bearing reserve requirements are increasingly
difficult to enforce in today's global financial markets, as banks find ways
around them." 53 The potential difficulty ought therefore to be obvious: the
David Folkerts-Landau, Peter Garber, and Dirk Schoenmaker, "The Reform of
53

Wholesale Payment Systems" (online).

amount of money churning through the electronic plumbing of the banking
system every day is exceedingly large in comparison with the total money
supply. If the plumbing were to freeze, it would be impossible to turn even a
small fraction of the outstanding paper instruments into cash, and this
realization would rapidly lead to panic.

THE QUADRILLION-DOLLAR BUBBLE

The deadly sickness of the world economy of the late twentieth century can
be summed up in the following global analysis: the System is currently
attempting to maintain some $200 trillion worth of paper instruments and
well over $1 quadrillion in turnover on the basis of industrial, agricultural,
and related commodity production which we must now estimate as below
$10 trillion per year This estimate of $10 trillion in combined world agro-
industrial commodity production is a very generous one, and may overstate
current levels by as much as a third. This figure has been drastically lowered
over the past decade by such events as the 60% decline in commodity
production in the entire former Soviet sphere of influence, and is now falling
as a result of the Asian crisis. But let us use $10 trillion for purposes of
argument.

The problem of the world economic and financial system thus boils down to
how to maintain the circulation of $200 trillion in paper promises to pay on
the back of a mere $10 trillion in tangible physical wealth:

$200 trillion = $200,000,000,000,000 20

---------------------------------------------- = --------
$10 trillion = $10,000,000,000,000 1

For every dollar of production, there are 20 dollars of paper claims. (The
situation is actually much worse, since speculative profit on trading the
assets in question is being omitted for purposes of simplification.)

At this point a yuppy quant investment banker from Wall Street may
observe: "The problem is not as serious as you make it look. After all, we
don't need to pay back the whole debt every year. We merely need to pay the
interest and roll over the principal."

And of course, the yuppy quant is right, up to a point. What has to be paid
every year is a rate of return on the $200 trillion. For purposes of illustration,
let us assume that the rate of return is a very modest 5%. As of this writing,
the yield on 30-year Treasury bonds is just above 5%, which is an all-time-
low. All other Treasury securities yield less. But many other investments
yield far more. To our investment banker, a 5% return is a bad joke. He likes
returns of 35% per year and up. But let us settle on 5% for purposes of
illustration here. 5% of $200 trillion = $10 trillion. This is the total of debt
service and dividends that has to be paid each year. The yearly debt service
and dividend requirement is thus roughly equal to the total value of world
production.

"See," says our investment banker. "You only have to come up with $10
trillion in interest and dividends out of your $10 trillion of production."

But this will not be easy. The money that can be used to pay the $10 trillion
in debt service is not our whole $10 trillion in real production. We can only
use the world PROFIT on the $10 trillion of production. A very good rate of
profit for farms and factories in this post-industrial world is about 5%. A 5%
profit on $10 trillion gives us a worldwide profit of $500 billion.

$10 trillion 20
-------------- = --------
$500 billion 1

How can we stretch $500 billion of world profit so as to cover the $10
trillion of world debt service? In other words, how can we stretch each $1 of
real profit from world commodity production to pay $20 of world debt
service?

The yuppy investment banker is undaunted. "We can arrange financing for
the missing $9.5 trillion, but it will cost you at least 15%. Of course, the
bankers will want to see collateral. And naturally, we will want to cut costs,
junk low-profit departments, and downsize your work force." So what the
investment banker proposes as a solution is first of all to add to the debt and
increase the interest rate on much of it. He wants to cut productive
employment, reduce production, and increase the burden of debt service that
has to be borne by each dollar of remaining real production.

Our $10 trillion in worldwide real physical production is already shrinking.

Since about 1971, we have witnessed a 2% to 3% decline in real per capita
commodity production (as distinct from services, etc.) each year in the
United States. The decline is attributable to hostile takeovers, downsizing,
and to the other aspects of globaloney. So we have the worst of all possible
worlds: the paper demands for income are growing, even as the real-
production levels and real absolute profits are disappearing.

Notice that a system with $20 of debt service for every $1 of real profit
cannot be described as a liquid system. It is a very illiquid system. If
everyone demands to collect their debt service at the same time, and nobody
is willing to extend new loans, then it is clear that the debt service cannot be
paid. Indeed, if the bond holders in general realize how unlikely they are to
be paid, then a general panic is almost certain to ensue. Up to now, one of
the main factors which has delayed the panic has been naive monetarist
blindness of people like our yuppy quant investment banker.

Notice also that even a lender of last resort cannot help the System to avoid
panic. Such a lender can at most finance one or two more rounds of
ballooning debt and falling production. Every delay in the panic comes at the
price of making the panic more serious and destructive when it finally does
arrive. Notice finally that the bubble of paper promises to pay has been
growing at a hyperbolic rate, while world agricultural and industrial
production is declining. The divergence between debt-service requirements
on the one hand and the means to service the debt, on the other, is increasing
every minute.

Two outcomes are possible within the framework of globalist/monetarist

ideology: the first is a liquidity crisis and panic that destroys financial
institutions immediately and thus brings down the System. Some might
describe this variant as hyperdeflation. The other outcome is an attempt by
governments to churn out enough cash to permit the debt to be serviced. But
that leads to a period of hyperinflation, followed by chaos and ending up in
the destruction of the System. And this sums up why a collapse and
disintegration of this system are unavoidable, and why a breakdown crisis of
world civilization is an immediate threat for the end of the twentieth century.
The only alternative is represented by the policies outlined in the final
chapter, to which the reader is invited to turn at any time.

HOW THIS BOOK CAN HELP YOU

This quick recap of the worsening world financial and economic crisis ought
at least to convince any rational human being that an epoch-making crash is
now a distinct possibility. If you read further, you will learn more about why
the crash is inevitable - unless current policies are urgently reformed - and
why it will tend to destroy paper financial instruments of all kinds.

The author has no illusions about the tenacity of human folly; he is well
aware that his advice will be dismissed with scorn by many, and that he will
be vilified by those who have a vested interested in maintaining popular
illusions until the very last moment, for the advantage of a few insiders. But
the author is also convinced that there are still many who will respond to a
timely warning. Woe to those who are caught unprepared by the crash! The
cataclysm that is coming will threaten all of us with a breakdown of the
normal activity of production and distribution of the most basic products - of
food, of clothing, of electrical power. If allowed to continue very long, the
cataclysm will attack the very fabric of human society in ways that most
people now alive in the United States can hardly imagine, but which
residents of South Korea, Indonesia, and Russia may have less difficulty in
envisioning, based on their recent tragic experience.

The people blind-sided by the coming cataclysm will know all the gut-
wrenching horrors of seeing every prop of their imagined financial assets
and holdings swept away in days, if not in hours. It will be the worst
financial and economic disaster in all of human history. But that does not
mean that there is nothing that you as an individual can do. As a human
being you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You
have the right to survive. This book can help you to survive in four ways:

1. First, this book can help you to understand what is happening. You can
only make sense of your own individual life if you can situate personal
experience within the context of broader historical reality. That reality is not
what Rush Limbaugh says it is. The stock market and mutual fund boom of
the 1990s has been a very dangerous form of collective insanity. This book
can insulate you from mass hysteria and irrationality in the crash by showing
in advance that the panic was lawful and predictable, that it was inevitable
under prevalent policies and standards of public morality. The Titanic is
about to collide with the iceberg, and you must recognize what is now going
to happen.

2. This book can help you to turn away from the mentality of usury, the
axioms of greed and parasitism, which have flourished over recent decades.
If your expectations remain those of greed and usury, you will be unable to
make the decisions which you must make in order to survive the crash. Up
to now, for example, you have probably been concerned with obtaining high
rates of appreciation or return on your stocks and mutual funds. If you
continue to operate on these expectations, you risk being wiped out in the
coming crash. If, by contrast, you prioritize providing shelter, food, and
clothing for your family, your chances of survival will be greatly enhanced.
The Titanic is listing, and you must put aside your preoccupation with social
life on board.

3. This book provides specific ideas on how you can reorganize whatever
assets you may now have to increase your ability to survive the cataclysm.
These recommendations are for the average person who may have some
stocks, an insurance policy, a few bucks in a money market or mutual fund,
savings bonds or just a bank account. Even if you have only debt, a clear
understanding of what is happening may enable you to fare better. The
Titanic is sinking, and your must find a life jacket.

4. This book asserts that there are no real solutions to the crisis to be found
for individuals. The gravity of the cataclysm means that the current
economic and financial policies of the United States and the other leading
countries of the world must be junked as soon as possible. We are already in
a worldwide economic depression of unprecedented severity, worse than the
1930s if we take the entire world situation into account. Therefore, we need
new policies, policies of economic recovery. This book will help you to
understand what the President and Congress must do to get out of the
depression, since you the citizen are going to have to make sure that the
needed measures be carried out. We will need Chapter 11 bankruptcy
reorganization for the entire US economy, a world debt moratorium, a
nationalization of the Federal Reserve System, cheap federal credit for
production, and an infrastructure program. We will need an emergency
world monetary conference to set up a new world monetary system. Your
life jacket can save you from drowning for some time after the Titanic
disappears beneath the waves, but what you need most is a Coast Guard
cutter to take you on board and get you back to dry land. What the public
can learn from the oncoming cataclysm about national and international
economic policy may represent the most important factor in the survival of
the United States and the world into the twenty-first century.