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 2nd August 07 - John Kelley, Dissident Voice
Yesterday, the Dow Jones dropped 300+ points, down over 400 at its low for the day. Today, it will probably be just as volatile as it has been, but the shape of things to come is not good. We can only ride this irrational over-exuberance about the market for so long before we have to pay the piper. It’s quite simple. While the market was setting a new record July 20th by breaking 14,000, the actual financial underpinnings of the country were growing quite bleak. |
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 30th July 07, Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus
Ten years after the Asian financial cataclysm of 1997, the economies of the Western Pacific Rim are growing, though not at the rates they enjoyed before the crisis. The region has been indelibly scarred by the crisis. There is greater poverty, inequality, and social destabilization than before the crisis. South Korea’s painful labor market reforms, for instance, have produced the quiet desperation behind one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries. |
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 13th July 07, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project SyndicateThis July marks the tenth anniversary of East Asia’s financial crisis. In July 1997, the Thai Baht plummeted. Soon after, financial panic spread to Indonesia and Korea, then to Malaysia. In a little more than a year, the Asian financial crisis became a global financial crisis, with the crash of Russia’s ruble and Brazil’s real. |
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 10th July 07 - Richard C. Cook, GlobalResearch.ca
Remember when the U.S. was the world’s greatest industrial democracy? Barely thirty years ago the output of our producing economy and the skills of our workforce led the world. What happened? It’s hard to believe that in the space of a generation our character and capabilities just collapsed as, for example, did our steel and automobile industries and our family farming. What then are the causes of the decline? Here’s how I would put it today: our economy is on an artificial life-support system, a barely-breathing hostage in a lunatic asylum. That asylum is the U.S. and world financial systems which are on the verge of collapse. |
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 3rd July 07 - Mike Whitney, GlobalResearch.ca
The Bank for International Settlements issued a warning this week that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies have created an enormous equity bubble which could lead to another “Great Depression”. The UK Telegraph says that, “The BIS--the ultimate bank of central bankers--pointed to a confluence of worrying signs", citing mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system. |
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 21st June 07 - Ernest Partridge, Dissidentvoice.org
The concept of “the invisible hand,” cherished by self-designated “conservatives,” has its origin in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. "[The individual] neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… [H]e intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." An unyielding faith in the infallible beneficence of “the invisible hand,” leads to “market absolutism” — the doctrine that whatever government attempts, privatization and the free-market can do better. |
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15th June 07 - Richard C. Cook, GlobalResearch.ca
It’s official. Mark your calendars. The crash of the U.S. economy has begun. It was announced the morning of Wednesday, June 13, 2007, by economic writers Steven Pearlstein and Robert Samuelson in the pages of the Washington Post, one of the foremost house organs of the U.S. monetary elite. Pearlstein’s column was titled, “The Takeover Boom, About to Go Bust” and concerned the extraordinary amount of debt vs. operating profits of companies currently subject to leveraged buyouts. |
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