POLITICAL TOONS OF THE WEEK // THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

October 10, 2008 at 10:33 pm (Associate Post, Current Affairs, Economy, Humour, People's Art)

All of the following ‘Copyleft’ by Carlos Latuff



7 Comments

  1. Ben Heine said,

    October 10, 2008 at 11:26 pm

    great political art

  2. george in toronto said,

    October 11, 2008 at 2:21 am

    Just before Bush leaves office,he wants to be remembered as the worst presidunce.
    This whole mess was brought by greedy Americans. Tool Greenspan brought the interest rates to 1% to spike the party and while the band played–Bush killed 1.5 million Iraqies and bankrupted the country and still the obtuse public enjoyed themselves.Now that the band has packed up and the bar drinks are gone,time sober up suckers-under cold water.
    However– No matter how bad it gets , Israel will always feed/leach from us.
    United Tits for Israel :^)

  3. AUSSIEAUSSIEAUSSIEAUSSIE said,

    October 11, 2008 at 4:27 am

    AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE STUPID AND SUCKERS

  4. Not so aussie said,

    October 11, 2008 at 9:08 am

    Australia is following America, what does it make them?
    You can lead an Aussie to water and yes, you can make him drink!

  5. Mark Gilmore said,

    October 11, 2008 at 11:12 am

    re “AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE STUPID AND SUCKERS”:
    I’m an American and can vouch for that opinion !

  6. Cpl. Cadaver said,

    October 11, 2008 at 1:59 pm

    I have to agree with you George. The Stockholders are largely to blame. If the CEO’s don’t have a good showing with stellar profits, the CEO gets fired.

    The stock market and real estate market are largely the result of the greed of Americans. Greedy buyers kept expecting to find a buyer for their over-inflated home prices.

    Any market can be described as a cone. The base diameter is the cutomer
    base and the height as the price. As the price increases, the customer base shrinks. There just wasn’t enough people with the money to support the housing market and it collapsed.

    The stock market was fueled by wild speculation. There was no economic base in America as the manufacturing base was exported overseas due to the high taxation and other economic factors. With no economic base in America and coupled with relentless consumer spending and easy credit (easy debt with high interest) America exhausted itself fiscally and couldn’t sustain the buying. That in turn casued a drop in the need for manufacturing goods which resulted in a weak labor market and a weak retail market.

    American’s are finally getting what they deserve.

    I’m glad but very concerned that the American empire is done. Will America’s fascist government initiate a war in it’s end?

    And I am also an American. (Gulf War 1 era vet)

  7. Tom Dennen said,

    October 11, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    Tom Dennen

    About ten to fifteen years ago, stories began emerging about the activities of the Big, Bad World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Third World countries.

    These institutions, it seems, had begun a lending practice, which entailed offering these countries cheap, low-interest money that they knew would not and could not be paid back.

    When they defaulted, the banks in essence took over the economies, took over in debt repayments, the bulk of those countries’ wealth by simply collecting the interest on the original loan.

    And if the capital loan is never touched, the interest is indefinite.

    That, we now agree, is history.

    (On the up side, say my justifiable detractors, some thirty million Third World denizens have joined the economic middle class and a few leaders have swollen Swiss savings stashed away).

    But their countries are in an inescapable debt trap, paying off interest that eats up most of their Gross Domestic Product revenues.

    Historic bells began ringing two or three years ago when a thing called sub prime mortgages began to appear in print because they were appearing on the red side of the balance sheets of large First World lending institutions that had been manipulating the banking system’s business methods: These inevitable default debts were bought, sold and resold as ‘highly leveraged optimal return’ financial instruments and other fancy names.

    The rest is also, as they say, history.

    But there is a curious coincidence if not a pattern here, in the economic treatment of those, individuals or small countries, which are more than likely, if not predictably and inevitably, debt defaulters.

    Why lend them money when you know it won’t come back?

    Because it will.

    Through Interest.

    Interest is certainly income and therefore debt is money.

    And it’s a permanent income that over the years will far exceed the original loan – a permanent money supply for an original, one-time investor!

    What a way to do business.

    It looks a lot like some clever one-eyed economists leading those who are so blind they can’t balance a chequebook let alone an economy.

    This is an edited version of a release last week from the World Bank representing the G7 countries, published on the Shell Infosight website (www.shellinfosight.com) on 9 October.

    “World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick says that the way in which the world tries to solve its economic problems needs to be rethought amid today’s global crisis, including turning the Group of Seven into a Steering Group that would include South Africa and other emerging market economies.

    Speaking at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC on Monday, Zoellick said that the existing multilateral economic system needs a fundamental overhaul to become one that empowers rising economic states.

    Zoillick said, “The G-7 is not working. We need a better group for a different time. “For financial and economic cooperation, we should consider a new Steering Group including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the current G-7.”

    “Such a Steering Group would bring together over 70 percent of the world’s GDP, 56 percent of the world’s population, 62 percent of its energy production, the major carbon emitters, the principal development donors, large regional actors and the primary players in the global capital, commodity and exchange rate market,” he said.

    Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is war.

    I believe that we are watching some of the final battles in the economic consolidation of the world’s resources.

    This is an excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt’s first Fireside Chat in 1933, long before sub prime lending enjoyed its brief but savage disruption of the global economy:

    “ … First of all, let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit — in bonds, in commercial paper, in mortgages and in many other kinds of loans. In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning around…

    “ … We have had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people’s funds.

    “They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was, of course, not true in the vast majority of our banks, but it was true in enough of them to shock the people of the United States, for a time, into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all.”

    1933.

    This week from Gebari, one of the most respected business journalists in Britain who’s been right so many times in the past it is indeed worrying to see such doom from such a person:

    “We face extreme danger. Unless there is immediate intervention on every front by all the major powers acting in concert, we risk a disintegration of global finance within days. Nobody will be spared, unless they own gold bars.”

    But Qui Bonum? Who will benefit?

    Could it be that Mr. Zoellick has his eyes on South Africa’s gold bars?


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