4/10/11 - Alex Jones Goes Apesh*t, Sweating And Panting: Globalist Banking Cartel Hijack Occupy Wall Street

Alex Jones will gives a special broadcast today on the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been swelling for weeks. His worst concerns have been confirmed about the true nature of who has been steering the demonstrations.

6/8/11 - China calls for new global reserve currency

Published: 06 August, 2011, 08:39
Edited: 06 August, 2011, 21:21

Indian shares hit a 13-month intraday low on Friday and the Asian markets are yet to respond on Monday to the US credit rating downgrade (AFP/ Photo / Indranil Mukherjee)

China, the US’s biggest creditor, reacted to the downgrade of America’s credit rating by saying it showed that US should “cure its addiction to debts” and called for a new stable global reserve currency instead of the dollar.

"The US government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone," China's official Xinhua news agency declared in a commentary.

The Standard & Poor's credit agency cut the US long-term rating from AAA to AA+ on Friday over concerns about the nation's climbing debt and budget deficit problems.

“China has every right now to demand the US address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China's dollar assets,” Xinhua news agency stated.

China is now calling for a new stable global reserve currency.

“International supervision over the issue of US dollars should be introduced and a new, stable and secured global reserve currency may also be an option to avert a catastrophe caused by any single country,” Xinhua wrote.

Concerns are also rising in Asia's third-largest economy, India, where the Finance Minister called the situation“grave.”

"We will have to analyze [the downgrade]. It will require some time,” Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee told reporters in New Delhi.

It comes as Indian shares hit a 13-month intraday low on Friday due to US economic worries and the European debt crisis.

Asian markets plunged on Friday following carnage in US and EU markets amid fears of a double-dip global recession. And the dollar has yet to face the markets when they respond on Monday to the US credit rating downgrade by Standard and Poor’s.

The sell-off in Asia followed the biggest one-day points decline on Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis.

Stocks in India and Japan have gone into nosedive as confidence built by America’s move to raise its debt ceiling on Tuesday ebbed away.

Asian observers of the American political scene have been unimpressed by the brinkmanship which delayed a resolution of the debt ceiling issue until the 11th hour. A number of Chinese newspapers went so far as to call the whole debacle immoral and irresponsible.

The US credit rating downgrade is expected to cause yet more worries in Asia, bringing anxieties over America’s financial health to a tipping point after all the other debates and decisions of the past week.

With the dollar hitting its lowest point in several years, a critical mass of opinion is building in Asia over whether it should continue to be used as a reserve currency.

Asia has a vested interest in what is going on in the United States as they hold three trillion dollars of US debt, so what happens in America clearly affects what happens in Asia greatly. If Americans do not have jobs, then they are not spending money on consumer goods – and in many cases that means Asian exports.

With confidence at a nadir in Asia now, the stock market meltdown comes as no great surprise to many analysts who predicted at the beginning of week that a slump was on the horizon.

13/7/11 - One World, One Money: The Quest for a Single Global Currency « Forcing Change

By Carl Teichrib (www.forcingchange.org)

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This report was originally published in late 2007 in Forcing Change, and was reprinted as a chapter in the book, A Single Global Currency (Icfai University Press, 2009). Since it was first released, there have been numerous developments in the quest for a single global currency. One World, One Money, although a few years old, is an essential read in that it provides a framework to understanding this critical monetary agenda.

“A global economy requires a global currency.” – Paul Volcker, former Chair of the US Federal Reserve.[1]

—————-

“I fully support a single global currency.”

Flabbergasted, I waited for an explanation.

“That way farmers in Africa get the same pay as farmers in North America, and workers in Asia would receive the same as their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.”

Hmmm…an interesting perspective. I asked the gentleman sitting across the lunch table; “Have you ever seriously studied banking or the historical role of money?”

His response to the negative didn’t surprise me; after all, wage equality and production values are not currency issues per se, albeit currency matters do play a role. Much of our lunch hour, therefore, was spent reviewing the relationship between money, banking, and power.

This provocative discussion, enjoyed over a steaming bowl of soup, took place at the annual meeting of a multi-million dollar Christian-based relief organization. And the person I was dining with wasn’t just an interested attendee; he was a board member representing a significant regional arm of this organization. Granted, he was only one man in a large administrative structure, but his decisions – combined with other board members – impact projects around the globe. Thus, I found his supportive statement for a world currency even more disturbing; here was an individual involved in economic decisions that impacted projects around the globe, yet he didn’t understand what he was asking for.

During the course of our lunch-hour, it was obvious that he had no conception of the incredible power-shift that would occur under such a scheme, a shift that would effectively create a global master of untouchable proportions. All he could see was an international-sized band-aid solution, “a single global currency,” to address the problem of world poverty….

read the rest via One World, One Money: The Quest for a Single Global Currency « Forcing Change.

Inflation in China Poses Big Threat to Global Trade

European Pressphoto Agency

Fishermen and sellers in a fishing port in Sanya City of Hainan Province, China.

By DAVID BARBOZA

Published: April 17, 2011

• • Linkedin
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  • PermalinSHANGHAI — As the United States and Europe struggle to get their economies rolling again, China is having the opposite problem: figuring out how to keep its revved-up growth engine from generating runaway inflation.

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The latest sign that things were moving too fast came on Sunday, when China’s central bank ordered the biggest banks to set aside more cash reserves.

The move essentially reduces the amount of money available for loans, and is an attempt to cool down the economy. It follows the government announcement on Friday that China’s economy was growing at an annual rate of 9.7 percent, by far the strongest performance by any of the world’s biggest economies.
Because China is now the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, and because the country has been a leading source of global growth during the last two years, money problems here can reverberate from Wal-Mart to Wall Street and the world beyond.
High inflation endangers China’s status as the low-cost workshop for the world. And if the government’s efforts to fight inflation cause the economy to stumble, that will cloud the outlook for international businesses — whether multinationals like General Electric or copper miners in Chile — that have been counting on China for growth.
Inside China, inflation also poses a threat to social stability, a particular worry for Beijing, especially since authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Middle East have become the focus of popular uprisings.

“China’s inflation is a big concern, and actual numbers are worse than officially reported,” said Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

She says Beijing is engaged in an economic tug of war, trying to encourage sustainable growth while struggling to control inflation.

Food prices are soaring, and the government said on Friday that the consumer price index in March had risen 5.4 percent, its sharpest increase in nearly three years. Hoping to tame inflation, in the last six months Beijing has tightened restrictions on bank lending and raised interest rates on loans (to discourage borrowing) and deposits (to encourage savings).

The decision on Sunday to raise the capital reserve ratio for banks, to 20.5 percent of their cash, was the fourth such increase this year.

The government has also increased agricultural subsidies to curb food prices, and tried to forbid some Chinese companies from raising consumer prices. These efforts stand in contrast to those in the United States, where inflation is low (the underlying annual inflation rate was 1.2 percent last month) and where the debate centers on how much to stimulate the economy given the size of the deficit. Inflation is also running low in Europe, where some countries are imposing harsh austerity measures to pare their budget gaps.

But analysts say the results of this economic management have been mixed. Growth has begun to moderate from its torrid pace of about 10 percent annual growth but inflation has become worse.
For example, housing prices continue to climb even though Beijing has long promised to curb the property market and to spend billions of dollars over the next few years on affordable housing.
The average apartment in central Shanghai now costs more than $500,000. Even in second-tier cities like Chengdu, in central China, the price of a typical home costs about 25 times the average annual income of residents.
Analysts say too much of the country’s growth continues to be tied to inflationary spending on real estate development and government investment in roads, railways and other multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
In the first quarter of 2011, fixed asset investment — a broad measure of building activity — jumped 25 percent from the period a year earlier, and real estate investment soared 37 percent, the government said on Friday.
Some of the inflationary factors, like global commodity and food prices, may be beyond Beijing’s ability to influence. Gasoline prices have also jumped sharply, in line with global oil prices. As the world’s largest car market, China’s demand for fuel is soaring, and gasoline prices are close to $4.50 a gallon, up from $3.82 a gallon in late 2009.

Rising food prices, meanwhile, are showing up in various ways — including higher prices at fast-food chains, like Master Kong, which in January raised the price of its popular instant noodles by about 10 percent.

China’s current supercharged boom began in early 2009, during the global financial crisis, when Beijing moved aggressively to increase growth with a $586 billion stimulus package and record lending by state-run banks.

The loose monetary policy, and big investments in local government projects, did revive economic growth. But even at the time there were already concerns about soaring property prices, undisciplined bank lending and the huge debts being amassed by local governments.