All entries for Tuesday 18 March 2008

Financial Meltdown = Result of a "Gigantic Fraud"?

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, March 17, 2008

Leading Economic Writer: Financial Meltdown A "Gigantic Fraud"
Says Americans "duped" by "serpent-tongued" elite

A leading economic journalist has described the current financial crisis as a "gigantic fraud", the fallout of a deliberate and preconceived profit agenda to enslave the middle classes in a debt bubble.

The economics editor of the London Guardian, Larry Elliott, has hit out at the global financial elite in a refreshing piece that marks a rare shift away from the establishment hackery we are used to from the corporate media.

In an article titled America was conned - who will pay? Elliot writes:

Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.

[...]

Business, of course, needs consumers to carry on spending in order to make money, so a way had to be found to persuade households to do their patriotic duty. The method chosen was simple. Whip up a colossal housing bubble, convince consumers that it makes sense to borrow money against the rising value of their homes to supplement their meagre real wage growth and watch the profits roll in.

As they did - for a while. Now it's payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned. They have been duped by a bunch of serpent-tongued hucksters who packed up the wagon and made it across the county line before a lynch mob could be formed.

Elliot also states that the debate is now not about whether the US faces a recession, but is about how deep it will be and how long it will last, comparing the downturn to the South Sea Bubble crisis in 1720, and declaring that the "Ponzi securitisation scam has been exposed."

A Ponzi scheme, named after Charles Ponzi, is one that offers abnormally high short-term returns in order to entice new investors. The high returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays require an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going, meaning it is inevitable that it will eventually collapse.

Elliot, like former chief economist of the World Bank turned whistleblower, Joseph Stiglitz, points a finger of blame squarely at former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, stating:

"In the longer term, lessons must be learnt from the turmoil. One is that you don't solve the problems of a collapsing bubble by blowing up another, which is what Alan Greenspan did after the dotcom fiasco in 2001 - the most irresponsible behaviour of any central banker in living memory."

Last week we highlighted the fact that Greenspan, instead of trying to act to reverse the damage he has done to the US economy, is actively encouraging its further demise by urging foreign states to abandon their dollar peg.

Another cogent point Larry Elliot makes is the following:

"If this is, heaven help us, The Big One, one of the only consolations will be that the repugnance at the orgy of speculation that has sapped the strength of the US economy will put a new New Deal on the political agenda."

It should be added that, given that this crisis has been engineered by a financial elite Ponzi scheme, we should be extremely wary of any "new deal" that is brokered by the financial and political elite posing as our saviors.

There are already talks of a "new world order" emerging from the fallout of the current economic meltdown. A consolidation among the big financial institutions does not spell good news for ordinary Americans and people across the world who have been effectively herded into this current crisis by the financial elite.

We, along with others such as Stiglitz, have repeatedly warned of the quickening of an agenda of economic catastrophe allied to the "solution" of predatory globalism.

Nevertheless, while CNN and other mainstream outlets continue to parade economic "experts" who ludicrously suggest that the destruction of the dollar and the economic downturn is "not necessarily a bad thing" for America, it is a refreshing change to read a mainstream report that actually hints at the reality of the situation the US and the rest of the world now faces at the hands of the elite.

: 18 Mar 2008 10:16 |  Tags: Banking Dollar Economics Elliott Financial Guardian Larry Meltdown |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem