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In World's Economic Crisis, Competition in Ignominy Remains Keen
William Pfaff
On my flight to
They buy debt from very poor countries in the expectation that generalized debt relief will eventually be organized by the
international community. These speculators then elude such debt settlements through various subterfuges, mainly by
reassigning the debt, and the nominal end-holder subsequently sues in a friendly court in America or
They allowed Liberian debt-relief negotiations to proceed while transferring their own debt holdings to companies that then successfully sued under British law to obtain substantially more than had been accepted in settlement by 97 percent of the other international creditors.
Such people would seem members of the lowest order of present-day necrophagic speculation, were that category not already overcrowded by mortgage-scam operators, real-estate salesmen and brokers, and debt repackagers in the great globalized free market who in recent years managed to turn home-mortgage rip-offs to the poor in America into an international crisis unforeseen by either the former financial masters of the universe or the world's central bankers.
The competition in ignominy remains keen.
The players include the financiers who buy credit default swaps to profit from the national debt crises they are striving
to provoke. But such merely are everyday
There is a lot of money to be made by big international banks in impoverished small, and even medium-sized, countries in times of world crisis.
Let the Greek government of
The conservative government that preceded his in
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman
What about the people who are not running scams but furnished the brainpower for the system itself, and even now at the
IMF and the
An obvious problem in
One of the big problems in Greece (and
There is something very strange when international authorities advise governments that they must practice stimulus and austerity both, and recommend lean labor forces, postponed pensions for workers and cuts in state health expenditure, while announcing there can be no economic recovery until the consumer begins to spend more money.
How does the consumer consume when he or she has no money, and sees little prospect for things getting better?
This is monetarist economic ideology still at work in governments. Some American blogger suggested back when the crisis was starting that governments just hand out cash to families, rather than to banks. That probably would have worked.
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In World's Economic Crisis, Competition in Ignominy Remains Keen | William Pfaff
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