NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME

So far I have been unsuccessful in getting on any major American TV outlets including the ones I used to work for to discuss the issues raised in my book PLUNDER. I have been on TV in England, France, Al Jazeera, Russia, and Brazil, And just last Friday on Iran’s PRESS TV:

Now that CNN has added a comedy show, maybe it will add a real news show. Did anyone see CNN’s pro-war rally on Saturday night, masquerading as a let’s help the vets and the thank them for their service with patriotically correct pandering but without referencing the war itself? And this is America’s “most trusted” NEWS network?

COMING NEXT: A CURRENCY WAR
BANKS STILL NOT LENDING DESPITE CASH INFUSIONS
WAR ESCALATES IN PAKISTAN

MONDAY MORNING: AP: U.S. stocks headed for yet another sharply lower open Monday as stock markets tumbled further around the world on worries about the health of the global economy. U.S. stock futures fell but came well off their worst levels. Dow Jones industrial average futures fell 145, or 1.8 percent, to 8,116, after being down more than 200.

Paul Krugman: “Things Continue To Fall Apart”

Afghanistan: US chopper shot down

60 MINUTES ALMOST SCORES WITH A STRONG STORY

60 Minutes returned to the credit default swaps issue arguing that the housing market was brought down by Wall Street insiders making side bets on its failure, and in so doing contributed to its demise. It also showed how Congress—in the form of a unanimous Senate vote in 2000 passed a bill that would deregulate a practice that had actually once been illegal. There was no reporting on who lobbied for the bill, how much was spent on it and which politicians benefited. There was no reporting on how much money was made when illegal gambling was relegalized.

A Columbia Law professor and former regulator basically gave the Wall Street firms a big pass by concluding that these savvy sleaze merchants really didn’t understand what they were doing and hence were more naïve than culpable. No other view was offered, no attention paid to preadatory lending practices, mortgage fraud and other crimes. So here we had an investigation that, sadly, that was showing a little but hiding a lot.

This is one more sign of why we need a joint Congressional investigation. like the Watergate hearings, with subpoena power, not just a glitzy TV piece to get to the bottom of this. If this is not a national emergency, what is? Steve Kroft is a good reporter but this story demanded more than a segment that turns on the conclusions of an ex-regulator. 60 Minutes helped lionize Alan Greenspan and didn’t even show his admission that he was wrong about deregulation, not just credit swaps. Once again, our mainstream media is not exposing the full extent of the crimes that have destroyed our economy.

WELCOME TO THE COMING ECONOMIC WAR

We are in the midst of an intensifying economic war and most of us don’t know it.

Many nations and peoples in the world are blaming the United States and its lax regulatory regime for allowing the financial crisis that is now pounding their own economies. Many countries who took US advice, loans and bought our securities may be hard put to blame us because they were also complicit. But anti-American murmers are being heard especially as unemployment sweeps the globe along with a deepening hunger crisis.

Until now it was the US which took the initiative in international economic affairs. That is changing, as BBC reported this weekend.

Asian and European leaders have called for comprehensive reform of the global financial system.

Ending a summit in Beijing, they also urged the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to play a greater role in helping countries hit by the market turmoil.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon called for action to help affected developing nations.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said Beijing would take an active role at a summit of world leaders to be held in Washington next month.

The Chinese are actually seething;

ANGER AT THE US IS GROWING AS REUTERS REPORTS

BEJING (Reuters) - The United States has plundered global wealth by exploiting the dollar’s dominance, and the world urgently needs other currencies to take its place, a leading Chinese state newspaper said on Friday.

The front-page commentary in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily said that Asian and European countries should banish the U.S. dollar from their direct trade relations for a start, relying only on their own currencies.

“The grim reality has led people, amidst the panic, to realize that the United States has used the U.S. dollar’s hegemony to plunder the world’s wealth,” said the commentator, Shi Jianxun, a professor at Shanghai’s Tongji University.

Shi, who has before been strident in his criticism of the U.S., said other countries had lost vast amounts of wealth because of the financial crisis, while Washington’s sole concern had been protecting its own interests.

“The U.S. dollar is losing people’s confidence. The world, acting democratically and lawfully through a global financial organization, urgently needs to change the international monetary system based on U.S. global economic leadership and U.S. dollar dominance,” he wrote.

NAKED CAPITALISM HAS MORE

We have seen reports on various China-focused blogs and even in the US media that China is increasingly chafing over the US dominance in financial affairs, and is particularly unhappy about the role of the dollar. Consider this quote from an August New York Times article:

Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese central banking at Northwestern University, said that when he visited the People’s Bank of China for a series of meetings this summer, he was surprised by how many officials resented the institution’s losses [on dollar assets].

He said the officials blamed the United States and believed the controversial assertions set forth in the book “Currency War,” a Chinese best seller published a year ago. The book suggests that the United States deliberately lured China into buying its securities knowing that they would later plunge in value.

“A lot of policy makers in China, at least midlevel policy makers, believe this,” Mr. Shih said.

This is one reason I am perplexed at Bush having a financial summit that includes China and India next month. It is guaranteed that the role of the dollar and the US’s abuse of its sovereign privilege will be a major topic. Do we really want to provide a forum and mechanism that could accelerate a move away from the dollar as reserve currency? If you doubt such a move is underway, consider: international shippers are increasing their use of other currencies for invoicing (see here and here).

WHY CHINA IS PISSED; THEY ARE IMPACTED

DONGGUAN (China) - AT LEAST 2.7 million factory workers in southern China could lose their jobs as the global
economic crisis hits demand for electronics, toys and clothes, according to industry estimates.

The region has seen massive export-driven expansion in recent years by supplying the world with cheap consumer
goods, but rising production costs and falling US and European demand have marked a swift end to the boom.

Now 9,000 of the 45,000 factories in the cities of Guangzhou, Dongguan, and Shenzhen are expected to close
before the Chinese New Year in late January, the Dongguan City Association of Enterprises.

CURRENCY CRISIS ON THE WAY

Predicts Ed Harris (NC):

Most of us in the US who are financially-minded have been sufficiently caught up with the three ring circus of market turmoil, seemingly-a-new-trick-every-day Fed and Treasury interventions, and continuing financial firm implosions that we haven’t looked up much to see what is happening in the wider world. Yes, the Baltic Dry Index is tanking, a bunch of Eurobanks nearly failed, but hey, that was two weeks ago, old news, Iceland collapsed, Argentina is on the ropes again (but that seems to happen every five years), South Korea is wobbly, and plunging commodity prices are giving exporting countries big shocks. But in the generally-provincial US, that amounts to background noise.

Your humble blogger has taken note of further worrisome developments, such as the dramatic fall in the Australian and New Zealand dollars (7% on Friday, ouch, on top of steep falls before that), the pound and the euro without being sure what to make of that. It appears to go beyond flight to quality; some of its is high demand for dollars to unwind dollar-related trades, and the Friday action in particular, with big moves in the dollar and an even bigger rise in the yen, versus huge bid-asked spreads in some other currencies, seemed to be a flight to liquidity. And then we have other countries looking shaky: the Baltics, Russia, a lot of Eastern Europe. and Latin America.

BRILLIANT COMMENTARY: GRETCHEN MORGENSON IN NYTIMES ON “I AM SHOCKED, REALLY SHOCKED”

WATCH: MY LATEST ON THE BAILOUT ON THEREALNEWS.COM

BANKS ARE AT TIPPING POINT (FINANCIAL TIMES)

Paul Kedrosky writes on his blog, Infectious Greed:

…. banks in the U.S. and the U.K. will end up being entirely nationalized before this crisis is over — but it’s still a striking way of looking at the data. The gist: Government recapitalization and other fund-raising has largely been in service of banks’ prior subprime losses, while corporate and consumer loans are just starting to hit bank balance sheets. It won’t take much to tip banks over into insolvency again.

BLOOMBERG: DAVIS FORUMS CONTRIBUTED TO CRISIS

(Bloomberg) — Once upon a time, the World Economic Forum was the ultimate Wall Street jamboree.

Now, in the riptide of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, WEF officials and delegates say many of the chief executive officers who gathered in Davos, Switzerland, over the last five years didn’t listen to warnings from their peers. Davos organizers also say they failed to play tough with the financial-industry bosses, opting to accept their funding and let them turn Davos into a rave-up for Wall Street excesses.

“The partying crept in,'’ says Klaus Schwab, the 70-year- old WEF founder and executive chairman. “We let it get out of control, and attention was taken away from the speed and complexity of how the world’s challenges built up.'’

The fallout has left the WEF riddled in buyer’s remorse, with officials throughout the organization asking what they have wrought and, like Wall Street, whether they offered too much of a good thing.

HOW A NATION OF WORKERS BECAME A NATION OF DEBTORS

Long Time unionist Frank Joyce references my work in a must read commentary:

The credit that gets you your car(s), your plasma TV, your home and college tuition for your children? That seems “cheap.” Isn’t the word “free” the single most common word in credit solicitations?

Admittedly sometimes there can be a downside to all this credit. Well actually, more often than not the lenders, especially credit card companies do treat their customers like shit. They raise rates and add incomprehensible and ever more expensive fees. When you call them to argue or just get an explanation you enter voice mail hell. Or if you do reach someone they might respond by lowering your credit limit or adding yet another fee. Collection agencies can really make you life miserable.

And yes, politicians of both parties do keep changing the rules so that lenders can basically do whatever they want. Until just the last few weeks they were virtually all for “deregulation.” (Suddenly they are all “born again” regulators. Hmmm.) Speak up as Dennis Kucinich, Danny Schechter and others have done and you will be marginalized as a kook, a whiner or an extremist.

And yes it can be annoying that the perpetrators of this economic bondage are living very large while you are struggling more and more every day.

But, hey, don’t be ungrateful. You live in the “ownership society”!

Mo Saceriby: Where Do Oil Prices Go? (October 24, 2008)

The global economic crisis has also cut petroleum and energy prices over the last 3 months. Perhaps it took some time for prices and speculators to collide head-on with the reality of this hundred year economic downturn. However, once the crackup occurred, it was inevitable that oil would take the tumble despite the fact that it had appeared resistant to the economic downturn for almost a year as petroleum prices rose to their July high of just under $150 per barrel. The question now is how low crude prices will fall from current levels of around $70 per barrel?