http://eutilitariancommons.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/a-world-leader-fiction-or-agenda/
The days are over when one reads about the ‘New World Order’ only in conspiracy websites and blogs.
Both CNN and BBC are now clearly indicating through their politically, diplomatically (censored) correct news (all done for the benefit of humanity) that the New World Order has now publically arrived, we are at that point of the plan! When will the mass killings, the wars and the chipping arrive ? – one can only guess – surely it is soon!!
http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/14/news/economy/g20_powerplay/
G-20: Shaping a new world order
U.S. economic mettle is tested as emboldened leaders from throughout the world gather in Washington.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The role of the United States as the world’s economic leader will be tested this weekend when 20 significant world leaders meet in Washington to address the global financial crisis.
Some European leaders are hailing the summit as the next Bretton Woods – a reference to the historic talks in the latter days of WWII that, in effect, made the dollar the world’s dominant currency and laid the foundation for the economic order of the past 60 years.
The United States basically ran those meetings. Close to prevailing in the war, it was the world’s undisputed military and economic leader.
But today, with the current credit crisis partly rooted in America, and with the rising economic might of China and a unified Europe, that dominance is being challenged.
“The Europeans see themselves as taking a position equal to the U.S.,” said Irene Finel-Honigman, an international affairs professor at Columbia University specializing in international banking. “We’re looking at a different composition of players and a different powerplay. It’s going to be fascinating to watch.”
To bolster their position, the Europeans come to the meeting emboldened by their belief that the credit crisis didn’t originate on their soil.
They say that means the more tightly regulated European banking model has triumphed over the more lax laws favored in America.
“The initial response was accusing the U.S. of cowboy capitalism,” said Finel-Honigman. “But as the weeks passed, it’s become clear we’re all in this together.”
Together or not, deep divisions still exist between the United States and the Europeans, who initially called for this meeting and will be pushing an agenda heavy on new rules.
Their proposals include: Greater oversight of hedge funds and investment banks; increasing how much money banks need to keep in reserve; more transparent and universal accounting standards; and limits on executive pay.
All that would be accompanied by a new global network of regulators -regulators that would presumably have power over U.S. banks, a potential non-starter with the Bush administration.
“Self-regulation to solve all problems, it’s finished,” French President Nicholas Sarkozy was quoted saying in the Guardian newspaper last month. “Laissez-faire, it’s finished. The all-powerful market that is always right, it’s finished.”
Moreover, the Europeans are expected to come to the talks presenting a more united front than ever. And they are likely to use one voice to gain international support to counter U.S. policies which many blame for this crisis.
For the United States, the main goal of the summit will be to derail many of these new regulations, said Robert Brusca, chief economist at Fact and Opinion Economics, a Manhattan consultancy.
It’s a goal Brusca seems to fully support.
“The last thing we need is another powerless, toothless, cumbersome global agency,” he said. “You need to let [banks] run their business, the government isn’t going to run it any better.”
The Bush Administration is of the same mindset.
While Bush has agreed some more regulation is needed, particularly when it comes to unifying accounting standards and increasing transparency, he is wary of too much government involvement.
“We must recognize that government intervention is not a cure-all,” Bush said in statement just before the summit Thursday, which seemed almost designed to temper European expectations. “History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market – but too much.”
Brusca said the United States should instead focus on what he views as more fundamental causes of this economic crisis – mainly China’s unwillingness to let its currency, the yuan, rise in value.
The low yuan, Brusca argues, makes Chinese goods unfairly competitive, and prods U.S. consumers to buy too much. This gives China its huge trade surplus, which it has used to buy U.S. Treasurys, mortgage-backed securities and other products that allowed all these banks to lend so freely in the first place.
“They have abused the rules of the game, and politically, this is very dangerous,” he said.
The Bush administration may raise this issue at the talks. Getting China to raise the yuan was, after all, one of the administration’s highest priorities just a few years ago.
When a consensus is achieved by the G-20 it carries a lot of weight. With its 19 nations plus the European Union, it represents 90% of the world’s economy and 75% of its population. But reaching a consensus is the toughest part for such a big and powerful group.
And at this summit, China, Russia, and most developing countries will be pushing for more power, not just within the G-20, but in other, more exclusive clubs like the G-7, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund.
With all these nations pushing for such disparate things, it’s unlikely much will get done, at least this time around.
The Europeans are unlikely to push China to reform its currency because of what China will likely ask in return, said Sebastian Mallaby, a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“China isn’t going to give up its export-led growth strategy for the sake of the international system unless it gets a bigger stake in that system – meaning a much bigger voice within the International Monetary Fund and a corresponding reduction in Europe’s exaggerated influence,” Mallaby wrote in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “Naturally, the Europeans aren’t proposing it.”
And despite America coming to the table with a black eye from selling these rotten mortgage backed securities around the globe, nearly everyone says the country, with its massive economy and long history of solid stewardship, is still in the driver’s seat when it comes to setting worldwide economic policy.
“There is no other country that could offer the leadership that would cause the G-20 to come up with anything even worth thinking about,” said George Magnus, a senior economic advisor at the Swiss bank UBS.
That means the Europeans are unlikely to get the type of oversight they’re proposing.
Combine the wide range of interests, the complexity of the problem, and the fact that the U.S. is being represented by a lame duck president – Barack Obama is not expected to attend – and it’s unlikely anything will get accomplished besides, maybe, a commitment to meet again.
“I have quite low expectations of what’s likely to be achieved,” said Magnus. “This is just the beginning of a long and crucial dialogue.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7725157.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2008/10/a_new_bretton_woods_where_is_k.html
How Bretton Woods reshaped the world
Economics reporter, BBC News
In the summer of 1944, delegates from 44 countries met in the midst of World War II to reshape the world’s international financial system.
The location of the meeting – in the plush Mount Washington Hotel in rural Bretton Woods, New Hampshire – was designed to ensure that the delegates would have no distractions, and no pressure from lobbyists or Congressmen, as they worked on their plans for post-war reconstruction.
The meeting was born out of the determination by US President Franklin D Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill to ensure post-war prosperity through economic co-operation, avoiding the economic conflicts between countries in the 1930s that they believed contributed to the drift to war.
The principal negotiators at the meeting were the US, represented by the US Treasury’s Harry Dexter White, and the UK’s John Maynard Keynes, who was serving as UK Treasury adviser despite declining health.
And chairing the proceedings was Henry Morgenthau, the US Treasury Secretary, from the only country that was likely to emerge from the war with a strengthened economy.
President Roosevelt told the conference: “The economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbours, near and distant.”
Fixed exchange rates
The meeting was part of the process led by the US to create a new international world order based on the rule of law, which also led to the creation of the United Nations and the strengthening of other international organisations.
The delegates focused on two key issues: how to establish a stable system of exchange rates, and how to pay for rebuilding the war-damaged economies of Europe.
And they established two international organisations to deal with these problems.
The International Monetary Fund was set up to enforce a set of fixed exchange rates that were linked to the dollar.
Countries in balance of payments difficulties could receive short-term help from the IMF to avoid devaluation, and it could sanction changes in exchange rates when necessary.
The World Bank (officially the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) was set up to make long-term loans “facilitating the investment of capital for productive purposes, including the restoration of economies destroyed or disrupted by war [and] the reconversion of productive facilities to peacetime needs”.
Post-war prosperity
A third organisation, the International Trade Organisation, designed to encourage free trade, was still-born when the US refused to ratify its charter in 1947 – although tariff reductions were pursued through the Gatt treaty later.
However, more ambitious proposals from the UK’s John Maynard Keynes to set up a world central bank which could issue its own currency (which he called bancor) were rejected by the US.
Keynes hoped a new bank could help reflate the world economy by expanding the money supply.
He also wanted the cost of adjustment shared between countries with trade surpluses and deficits, so that countries with big surpluses would have to revalue their currencies, as well as deficit countries being forced to devalue.
Instead, the Bretton Woods system gave the US currency – which was linked to gold – the dominant position in the world economy and allowed the US to run a trade deficit without having to devalue.
And the US, which contributed the most money to both institutions, also gained the most voting rights, giving it a veto over major policy decisions.
Marshall Plan
The establishment of a rules-based system of international finance helped restore confidence in the world economy and led to an extraordinary boom in the post-war years.
The US also helped the European recovery by contributing additional funds through the Marshall Plan when the World Bank’s efforts proved inadequate.
World trade among developed countries grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, boosting world output and raising the standard of living, especially in Europe and Japan.
The US, still by far the richest country in the world, was happy to provide export markets for its allies, and sent dollars abroad through military and civilian aid which helped lubricate the wheels of commerce.
Meanwhile, the focus of the World Bank gradually shifted to helping developing countries with the establishment of its special low-interest loan arm, IDA.
Breakdown of Bretton Woods
However, by the 1970s, the US currency was under pressure from a combination of factors, including the cost of the Vietnam war and the growing trade deficit.
In 1971, the US under President Nixon unilaterally went off the gold standard and devalued the dollar, a move ratified by the Smithsonian Agreement later that year.
This led to the abandonment of fixed exchange rates and the introduction of floating rates, where the value of all the main currencies was determined by market trading.
Attempts to forge a new Bretton Woods agreement on currencies in the 1970s failed, although the IMF still retained its role of helping countries cope with major currency crises – including Britain in 1976.
The breakdown of Bretton Woods had two consequences.
On the one hand, it led European countries to begin seriously considering closer monetary co-operation, which ultimately led to the creation of the euro in 1999.
And it led to the creation of the G7, the informal group of the world’s leading economies, which helped to coordinate currency adjustment in the Plaza and Louvre Accords in the 1980s.
Financial globalisation
On the other hand, the end of the Bretton Woods system unleashed two decades of financial globalisation, encouraged by the deregulation not just of currency markets, but also of rules about banking and investment.
This led to increased flows of private money to rich and poor countries alike, which helped boost growth but also created greater instability.
The rapid reversal of such private sector flows when currencies were threatened with devaluation was the central cause of the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, which spread to Russia and eventually Argentina.
The resources of the IMF proved inadequate to compensate for the run on their currencies, and the adjustment proved painful, with sharp falls in GDP.
Since then, many Asian countries, including China, have accumulated large currency reserves to insulate themselves against future crises, avoiding the need to call on the IMF.
New global rules
The latest world financial crisis, which has hit the richest countries hardest, has renewed calls for a new global framework of financial regulation.
But the task this time will be far more complex, with the proliferation of financial instruments and the fact that there is no longer one country that dominates the world economy in the way the US did after World War II.
And the political impetus for co-operation is less compelling today than it was in 1944, after a decade of war and depression.
Any new agreement would have to recognise the power of the rising economies, such as China and India, and reshape the institutions created more than half a century ago.
Such changes are not likely to be either quick or easy.
Well one can only congratulate the world internationalists for their inter-generational work which guided by Lucifer (the prince of this world) is now in that stage when the foundation and bed-rock for a possible super state in the middle East can be created which will exert its influence on the rest of the ‘cattle’ on the rest of mankind. Rest assured a world war is needed to fulfill this ultimate ambition. For as
James Paul Warburg stated, who was the son of Paul Moritz Warburg, a prominent banker, stated before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950 that, “We shall have world government whether or not you like it — by conquest or consent.” http://eutilitariancommons.wordpress.com/2008/11/05/globalisation/
Now for all my fellow co-religionists (in other words Catholics) who will say that God will not permit such things I can plainly say this, “the sin of the world and our sin is such that yes God will permit these mobsters to reek havoc again and again. The truth was and still is that the power to avert such matters is in the hands of primarily Catholics armed with conversion and prayer and other people of good will.”
To the citizen of any country I invite to examine the following information. Could it be possible that world democratic governments have been sabotaged to the extent that such states are not governed any longer by their own elected representatives ? Well lets take my country – case in point – we the citizens go to the voting stations elect our government – Nationalist or Labour – and return home. The government of the day then receives advice from international organisations such as the IMF (set up by those nefarious internationalists) and lo and behold our yearly financial budget policies are based on the internationalist’s advice.
This year’s advice (2008)
1) good bank provisioning
2) maximum charging for utility bills
3) no increase to the worker’s salary – no bonuses, wage increases, allowances etc…
4) an invitation for foreign banks to come into the country
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.cfm?sk=16833.0
http://www.imf.org/external/country/mlt/index.htm
http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2008/pn08104.htm
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2008/cr08276.pdf
http://www.imf.org/external/np/ms/2008/053008.htm
If the state in question follows the advice, with the intention of lowering deficits, inflation etc…, then the international body heaps congratulatory remarks and praise upon that state – the politicians congratulate themselves and think, “hey what a good job we have done!” and the citizen who voted the administration to power has (without its consent) voted the Internationalists to power!!!
http://eutilitariancommons.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/global-governance.doc
http://eutilitariancommons.wordpress.com/page/2/
http://eutilitariancommons.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/lords-of-chaos2.doc
http://eutilitariancommons.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/the-redistribution-of-wealth.doc
The information is so wide spread and obvious that one must essentially struggle to convince him/herself that this situation is impossibe and unbelievable - that the world is indeed governed in this manner.
Hello… wake up… yep this is how the world is governed… all those noble organisations… such good will going steadily and progressively awry!!
SOS – world. Is it possible that institutions governed by a malific will are turning the world into a World Government ready for the take over by a Son of Perdition?
“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.” – Nathan Mayer Rothschild 1777 A.D. – 1836 A.D.
http://eutilitariancommons.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/first-came-the-euro-then-appeared-the-amero/
Is a World War planned ?
Oh yes it is!! and its been planned for a long long time :
Below: as quoted from http://www.threeworldwars.com/index.html opinions belong to the author. The letter is looked upon by Masons as a forgery, the knowledgeable ones attempt to accredit the letter to William Guy Carr. The letter was already debunked in 1897 by Freemasons and was attributed as being the work of a certain Mr Leo Taxil. See http://freemasonrywatch.org/counterpunch.html, http://www.resurrectingliberty.com/Freemasons.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Guy_Carr . However, if the Mazzini letter were indeed a forgery by Leo Taxil, in 1897 how could such details emerge previous to the 1st and 2nd World Wars ? Surely William Guy Carr was not the author. Evidently the aim of World War III or IV, would be to elect a World King as well described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, see http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/przion1.htm - a book also debunked by Masonic websites as being the fictitious work of a certain Nilus.
Pike’s Letter to Mazzini
It is a commonly believed fallacy that for a short time, the Pike letter to Mazzini was on display in the British Museum Library in London, and it was copied by William Guy Carr, former Intelligence Officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. The British Library has confirmed in writing to me that such a document has never been in their possession. Furthermore, in Carr’s book, Satan, Prince of this World, Carr includes the following footnote: “The Keeper of Manuscripts recently informed the author that this letter is NOT catalogued in the British Museum Library. It seems strange that a man of Cardinal Rodriguez’s knowledge should have said that it WAS in 1925″.It appears that Carr learned about this letter from Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago, Chile, who wrote The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled. To date, no conclusive proof exists to show that this letter was ever written. Nevertheless, the letter is widely quoted and the topic of much discussion.Following are apparently extracts of the letter, showing how Three World Wars have been planned for many generations.“The First World War must be brought about in order to permit the Illuminati to overthrow the power of the Czars in Russia and of making that country a fortress of atheistic Communism. The divergences caused by the “agentur” (agents) of the Illuminati between the British and Germanic Empires will be used to foment this war. At the end of the war, Communism will be built and used in order to destroy the other governments and in order to weaken the religions.” 2
Students of history will recognize that the political alliances of England on one side and Germany on the other, forged between 1871 and 1898 by Otto von Bismarck, co-conspirator of Albert Pike, were instrumental in bringing about the First World War. “The Second World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences between the Fascists and the political Zionists. This war must be brought about so that Nazism is destroyed and that the political Zionism be strong enough to institute a sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, International Communism must become strong enough in order to balance Christendom, which would be then restrained and held in check until the time when we would need it for the final social cataclysm.” 3
After this Second World War, Communism was made strong enough to begin taking over weaker governments. In 1945, at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, a large portion of Europe was simply handed over to Russia, and on the other side of the world, the aftermath of the war with Japan helped to sweep the tide of Communism into China. (Readers who argue that the terms Nazism and Zionism were not known in 1871 should remember that the Illuminati invented both these movements. In addition, Communism as an ideology, and as a coined phrase, originates in France during the Revolution. In 1785, Restif coined the phrase four years before revolution broke out. Restif and Babeuf, in turn, were influenced by Rousseau – as was the most famous conspirator of them all, Adam Weishaupt.)“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.” 4
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, world events, and in particular in the Middle East, show a growing unrest and instability between Modern Zionism and the Arabic World. This is completely in line with the call for a Third World War to be fought between the two, and their allies on both sides. This Third World War is still to come, and recent events show us that it is not far off.
The dynamics of a World War are not 100% clear, however they are evidently obvious even to video game designers!! - let alone the real guys:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JC3UMJ2It4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7jKRDTg8m8
The tensions exist:-
1) USA vs China, Russia
2) Arab world + Russia vs NATO Europe
3) NATO USA vs Russia
4) Israel + USA vs Iran + Arab, African States + Russia ?
Would this not create a World War ? added to this we can include the money of many world states (Black projects) creating lethal weaponry and terrorism. Super-imposed upon this we can add religious divisions, historical hatred, and the primeval war between good and evil – oh yes we are close !!
Back to the IMF
The United States, Europe and Bretton Woods II
By George Friedman and Peter Zeihan
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President George W. Bush met Oct. 18 to discuss the possibility of a global financial summit. The meeting ended with an American offer to host a global summit in December modeled on the 1944 Bretton Woods system that founded the modern economic system.
The Bretton Woods framework is one of the more misunderstood developments in human history. The conventional wisdom is that Bretton Woods crafted the modern international economic architecture, lashing the trading and currency systems to the gold standard to achieve global stability. To a certain degree, that is true. But the form that Bretton Woods took in the public mind is only a veneer. The real implications and meaning of Bretton Woods are a different story altogether.
Conventional Wisdom: The Depression and Bretton Woods
The origin of Bretton Woods lies in the Great Depression. As economic output dropped in the 1930s, governments worldwide adopted a swathe of protectionist, populist policies — import tariffs were particularly in vogue — that enervated international trade. In order to maintain employment, governments and firms alike encouraged ongoing production of goods even though mutual tariff walls prevented the sale of those goods abroad. As a result, prices for these goods dropped and deflation set in. Soon firms found that the prices they could reasonably charge for their goods had dropped below the costs of producing them.
The reduction in profitability led to layoffs, which reduced demand for products in general, further reducing prices. Firms went out of business en masse, workers in the millions lost their jobs, demand withered, and prices followed suit. An effort designed originally to protect jobs (the tariffs) resulted in a deep, self-reinforcing deflationary spiral, and the variety of measures adopted to combat it — the New Deal included — could not seem to right the system.
Economically, World War II was a godsend. The military effort generated demand for goods and labor. The goods part is pretty straightforward, but the labor issue is what really allowed the global economy to turn the corner. Obviously, the war effort required more workers to craft goods, whether bars of soap or aircraft carriers, but “workers” were also called upon to serve as soldiers. The war removed tens of millions of men from the labor force, shipping them off to — economically speaking — nonproductive endeavors. Sustained demand for goods combined with labor shortages raised prices, and as expectations for inflation rather than deflation set in, consumers became more willing to spend their money for fear it would be worth less in the future. The deflationary spiral was broken; supply and demand came back into balance.
Policymakers of the time realized that the prosecution of the war had suspended the depression, but few were confident that the war had actually ended the conditions that made the depression possible. So in July 1944, 730 representatives from 44 different countries converged on a small ski village in New Hampshire to cobble together a system that would prevent additional depressions and — were one to occur — come up with a means of ending it shy of depending upon a world war.
When all was said and done, the delegates agreed to a system of exchangeable currencies and broadly open rules of trade. The system would be based on the gold standard to prevent currency fluctuations, and a pair of institutions — what would become known as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank — would serve as guardians of the system’s financial and fiduciary particulars.
The conventional wisdom is that Bretton Woods worked for a time, but that since the entire system was linked to gold, the limited availability of gold put an upper limit on what the new system could handle. As postwar economic activity expanded — but the supply of gold did not — that problem became so mammoth that the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1971. Most point to that period as the end of the Bretton Woods system. In fact, we are still using Bretton Woods, and while nothing that has been discussed to this point is wrong exactly, it is only part of the story.
A Deeper Understanding: World War II and Bretton Woods
Think back to July 1944. The Normandy invasion was in its first month. The United Kingdom served as the staging ground, but with London exhausted, its military commitment to the operation was modest. While the tide of the war had clearly turned, there was much slogging ahead. It had become apparent that launching the invasion of Europe — much less sustaining it — was impossible without large-scale U.S. involvement. Similarly, the balance of forces on the Eastern Front radically favored the Soviets. While the particulars were, of course, open to debate, no one was so idealistic to think that after suffering at Nazi hands, the Soviets were simply going to withdraw from territory captured on their way to Berlin.
The shape of the Cold War was already beginning to unfold. Between the United States and the Soviet Union, the rest of the modern world — namely, Europe — was going to either experience Soviet occupation or become a U.S. protectorate.
At the core of that realization were twin challenges. For the Europeans, any hope they had of rebuilding was totally dependent upon U.S. willingness to remain engaged. Issues of Soviet attack aside, the war had decimated Europe, and the damage was only becoming worse with each inch of Nazi territory the Americans or Soviets conquered. The Continental states — and even the United Kingdom — were not simply economically spent and indebted but were, to be perfectly blunt, destitute. This was not World War I, where most of the fighting had occurred along a single series of trenches. This was blitzkrieg and saturation bombings, which left the Continent in ruins, and there was almost nothing left from which to rebuild. Simply avoiding mass starvation would be a challenge, and any rebuilding effort would be utterly dependent upon U.S. financing. The Europeans were willing to accept nearly whatever was on offer.
For the United States, the issue was one of seizing a historic opportunity. Historically, the United States thought of the United Kingdom and France — with their maritime traditions — as more of a threat to U.S. interests than the largely land-based Soviet Union and Germany. Even World War I did not fully dispel this concern. (Japan, for its part, was always viewed as a hostile power.) The United States entered World War II late and the war did not occur on U.S. soil. So — uniquely among all the world’s major powers of the day — U.S. infrastructure and industrial capacity would emerge from the war larger (far, far larger) than when it entered. With its traditional rivals either already greatly weakened or well on their way to being so, the United States had the opportunity to set itself up as the core of the new order.
In this, the United States faced the challenges of defending against the Soviet Union. The United States could not occupy Western Europe as it expected the Soviets to occupy Eastern Europe; it lacked the troops and was on the wrong side of the ocean. The United States had to have not just the participation of the Western Europeans in holding back the Soviet tide, it needed the Europeans to defer to American political and military demands — and to do so willingly. Considering the desperation and destitution of the Europeans, and the unprecedented and unparalleled U.S. economic strength, economic carrots were the obvious way to go.
Put another way, Bretton Woods was part of a broader American effort to extend the wartime alliance — sans the Soviets — beyond Germany’s surrender. After all wars, there is the hope that alliances that have defeated a common enemy will continue to function to administer and maintain the peace. This happened at the Congress of Vienna and Versailles as well. Bretton Woods was more than an attempt to shape the global economic system, it was an effort to grow a military alliance into a broader U.S.-led and -dominated bloc to counter the Soviets.
At Bretton Woods, the United States made itself the core of the new system, agreeing to become the trading partner of first and last resort. The United States would allow Europe near tariff-free access to its markets, and turn a blind eye to Europe’s own tariffs so long as they did not become too egregious — something that at least in part flew in the face of the Great Depression’s lessons. The sale of European goods in the United States would help Europe develop economically, and, in exchange, the United States would receive deference on political and military matters: NATO — the ultimate hedge against Soviet invasion — was born.
The “free world” alliance would not consist of a series of equal states. Instead, it would consist of the United States and everyone else. The “everyone else” included shattered European economies, their impoverished colonies, independent successor states and so on. The truth was that Bretton Woods was less a compact of equals than a framework for economic relations within an unequal alliance against the Soviet Union. The foundation of Bretton Woods was American economic power — and the American interest in strengthening the economies of the rest of the world to immunize them from communism and build the containment of the Soviet Union.
Almost immediately after the war, the United States began acting in ways that indicated that Bretton Woods was not — for itself at least — an economic program. When loans to fund Western Europe’s redevelopment failed to stimulate growth, those loans became grants, aka the Marshall Plan. Shortly thereafter, the United States — certainly to its economic loss — almost absentmindedly extended the benefits of Bretton Woods to any state involved on the American side of the Cold War, with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan signing up as its most enthusiastic participants.
And fast-forwarding to when the world went off of the gold standard and Bretton Woods supposedly died, gold was actually replaced by the U.S. dollar. Far from dying, the political/military understanding that underpinned Bretton Woods had only become more entrenched. Whereas before, the greatest limiter was on the availability of gold, now it became — and remains — the whim of the U.S. government’s monetary authorities.
Toward Bretton Woods II
For many of the states that will be attending what is already being dubbed Bretton Woods II, having this American centrality as such a key pillar of the system is the core of the problem.
The fundamental principle of Bretton Woods was national sovereignty within a framework of relationships, ultimately guaranteed not just by American political power but by American economic power. Bretton Woods was not so much a system as a reality. American economic power dwarfed the rest of the noncommunist world, and guaranteed the stability of the international financial system.
What the September financial crisis has shown is not that the basic financial system has changed, but what happens when the guarantor of the financial system itself undergoes a crisis. When the economic bubble in Japan — the world’s second-largest economy — burst in 1990-1991, it did not infect the rest of the world. Neither did the East Asian crisis in 1997, nor the ruble crisis of 1998. A crisis in France or the United Kingdom would similarly remain a local one. But a crisis in the U.S. economy becomes global. The fundamental reality of Bretton Woods remains unchanged: The U.S. economy remains the largest, and dysfunctions there affect the world. That is the reality of the international system, and that is ultimately what the French call for a new Bretton Woods is about.
There has been talk of a meeting at which the United States gives up its place as the world’s reserve currency and primacy of the economic system. That is not what this meeting will be about, and certainly not what the French are after. The use of the dollar as world reserve currency is not based on an aggrandizing fiat, but the reality that the dollar alone has a global presence and trust. The euro, after all, is only a decade old, and is not backed either by sovereign taxing powers or by a central bank with vast authority. The European Central Bank (ECB) certainly steadies the European financial system, but it is the sovereign countries that define economic policies. As we have seen in the recent crisis, the ECB actually lacks the authority to regulate Europe’s banks. Relying on a currency that is not in the hands of a sovereign taxing power, but dependent on the political will of (so far) 15 countries with very different interests, does not make for a reliable reserve currency.
The Europeans are not looking to challenge the reality of American power, they are looking to increase the degree to which the rest of the world can influence the dynamics of the American economy, with an eye toward limiting the ability of the Americans to accidentally destabilize the international financial system again. The French in particular look at the current crisis as the result of a failure in the U.S. regulatory system.
And the Europeans certainly have a point. If fault is to be pinned, it is on the United States for letting the problem grow and grow until it triggered a liquidity crisis. The Bretton Woods institutions — specifically the IMF, which is supposed to serve the role of financial lighthouse and crisis manager — proved irrelevant to the problems the world is currently passing through. Indeed, all multinational institutions failed or, more precisely, have little to do with the financial system that was operating in 2008. The 64-year-old Bretton Woods agreement simply didn’t have anything to do with the current reality.
Ultimately, the Europeans would like to see a shift in focus in the world of international economic interactions from strengthening the international trading system to controlling the international financial system. In practical terms, they want an oversight body that can guarantee that there won’t be a repeat of the current crisis. This would involve everything from regulations on accounting methods, to restrictions on what can and cannot be traded and by whom (offshore financial havens and hedge funds would definitely find their worlds circumscribed), to frameworks for global interventions. The net effect would be to create an international bureaucracy to oversee global financial markets.
Fundamentally, the Europeans are not simply hoping to modernize Bretton Woods, but instead to Europeanize the American financial markets. This is ultimately not a financial question, but a political one. The French are trying to flip Bretton Woods from a system where the United States is the buttress of the international system to a situation where the United States remains the buttress but is more constrained by the broader international system. The European view is that this will help everybody. The American position is not yet framed and won’t be until the new president is in office.
But it will be a very tough sell. For one, at its core the American problem is “simply” a liquidity freeze and one that is already thawing. Europe’s and East Asia’s recessions are bound to be deeper and longer lasting. So the United States is sure — no matter who takes over in January — to be less than keen about revamps of international processes in general. Far more important, any international system that oversees aspects of American finance would, by definition, not be under full American control, but under some sort of quasi-Brussels-like organization. And no American president is going to engage gleefully on that sort of topic.
Unless something else is on offer.
Bretton Woods was ultimately about the United States trading access to its economic might for political and military deference. The reality of American economic might remains. The question, then, is simple: What will the Europeans bring to the table with which to bargain?
http://www.nicenetruth.com/home/2008/11/the-united-states-europe-and-bretton-woods-ii.html
http://eutilitariancommons.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/a-world-leader-fiction-or-agenda/
Single Global Currency Assn.
Urges G20 To Initiate Research
And Planning For Single Global Currency.
The Single Global Currency Assn. urges the G20, meeting in Washington this weekend, to initiate research and planning for a Single Global Currency. The Association’s President, Morrison Bonpasse, wrote to IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Single Global Currency Assn. urges the G20, meeting in Washington this weekend, to initiate research and planning for a Single Global Currency. The Association’s President, Morrison Bonpasse, wrote to IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to urge such a step in order to “achieve the primary goal of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference and the primary goal of the IMF: stable currency around the world.”
The Association supports the calls by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy for a “new Bretton Woods” and a restructuring of the global financial system.
This call for research and planning echoes the work done in Europe in the 1980’s and 1990’s to plan for the euro. Bonpasse is confident that when a serious examination of the costs and benefits is done, the world will embrace the goal of a Single Global Currency, to be managed by a Global Central Bank within a Global Monetary Union.
He said, “The easiest to understand benefits of a Single Global Currency will be the elimination of $400 billion in annual foreign exchange costs, the elimination of foreign exchange fluctuations, and the elimination of the need of expensive foreign exchange reserves, now totaling more than $3 trillion around the world.”
The Single Global Currency Association was formed in 2003 in the U.S. to seek the implementation of a Single Global Currency by 2024, the 80th anniversary of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. Said Morrison Bonpasse, “With the expansion and creation of regional monetary unions, there is no question that we will someday achieve a Single Global Currency as the benefits vastly outweigh the costs. The only questions remaining are ‘How long?’ and ‘How much will further delay cost?’ ” He continued, “If the European Monetary Union can successfully provide stable currency to 15, soon to be 16, countries, why not a Global Monetary Union for all countries?”
The Association maintains a website at www.singleglobalcurrency.org, and has published three editions of the book, The Single Global Currency – Common Cents for the World. In 2000, the number of currencies among the members of the United Nations peaked at 158, and in January, with the adoption of the euro in Slovakia, that number will drop to 142. With the creation of the Gulf Cooperation Council Monetary Union in 2010, the number will drop to 137. Said Bonpasse, “The trend to a Single Global Currency is clear.”
THE LETTER:
23 October 2008
RE: The Single Global Currency and the 15 November G20 Conference.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Managing Director
International Monetary Fund
700 19th Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20431
Dear Mr. Strauss-Kahn:
The upcoming G20 Conference gives you and the 20 member countries an opportunity to begin moving the world to a new international finance structure which will achieve the primary goal of the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference and the primary goal of the IMF: stable currency around the world. That new structure will include a Single Global Currency, managed by a Global Central Bank within a Global Monetary Union
Please ask the 15 November conference to officially begin researching and planning for a Single Global Currency. The first element of such research would be a comprehensive study of the Benefits and Costs, as was done in Europe prior to the commitment to the establishment of the euro. Enclosed is a FACT list of the estimated benefits of a Single Global Currency.
Such research would also consider such issues as:
- how to manage inflation in a world without foreign exchange,
- the level of reserves required to maintain confidence in a Single Global Currency
- how to cope with regional “shocks” within a Global Monetary Union.
Economists will be tempted to evaluate whether the world is an Optimum Currency Area (OCA), according to the criteria established by Robert Mundell and others since the 1960’s. However, OCA research has been unable consistently to evaluate the utility even of the monetary unions of the EMU and the United States.
Also enclosed is another copy of the 2008 Edition of my book, The Single Global Currency – Common Cents for the World. I hope that you or a staff member will be able to read it and begin the process of preparing the world and the IMF for a Single Global Currency. Also enclosed are copies of my letters to you of 19 November 2007 and 28 February 2008.
The goal of the Single Global Currency Association is a Single Global Currency, managed by a Global Central Bank within a Global Monetary Union by the year 2024, which is only 16 years away. Seventeen years before the 2002 implementation of the euro with the people of Europe, there was a Soviet Union and a Berlin Wall. As the original primary goal of the IMF was to help the world manage currency fluctuations, it is well within that charter for the IMF to lead the world to a Single Global Currency. With its original goals achieved, the IMF could transform itself into part of the Global Central Bank.
Sincerely yours,
Morrison Bonpasse
President
# # #
The Single Global Currency Association is dedicated to the goal of implementing a Single Global Currency, within a Global Monetary Union and managed by a Global Central Bank by 2024. We shall achieve this goal through education and persuasion.
LONG LIVE THE REACTION AGAINST THE REVOLUTIONARY NEW WORLD ORDER!! YOU WILL NOT HAVE THE PLANET – YOU WILL HAVE HELL!!!
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.