Nuovo asse energetico e militare sino-russo nel Pacifico, verso una nuova Guerra Fredda?

Wirepullers: dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, per quarant'anni, il mondo è rimasto congelato, fermo sulla cortina di ferro. La storia di quegli anni è stata la storia della contrapposizione tra i due blocchi e qualsiasi cosa succedesse, anche nel più remoto angolo del pianeta, trovava giustificazione nella distinzione est/ovest. La caduta del muro prima e l'11 settembre dopo hanno sconvolto questo mondo, prima sancendo la fine della contrapposizione tra i blocchi, poi creando le condizioni per la nascita di un mondo nuovo, monocolore, a stelle e strisce. Era l'inizio di una nuova epoca, caratterizzata dal controllo di Washington sul pianeta. Ma questo nuovo mondo già scricchiola, come il vecchio aveva iniziato a fare negli anni Ottanta, preannunciando la propria fine. Il multipolarismo è una realtà che si sta inesorabilmente affermando. La crisi economica, le guerre stagnanti in Iraq e Afghanistan e l'emergere di nuove economie, sempre più solide e potenti, fanno intravedere le prime crepe nel progetto dei neocon americani. I sismografi geopolitici registrano le prime vibrazioni, anticipo delle scosse telluriche che potrebbero aspettarci in un futuro non troppo lontano. Un mondo si è chiuso nell'89, uno forse lo sta per fare a breve. E a Mosca e Pechino ci si dà da fare per accelerare il tutto, cancellando un caposaldo di entrambi: il dollaro. (4)

Settanta miliardi di metri cubi di gas e venticinque miliardi di dollari: questo il valore del patto siglato da Gazprom e China National Petroleum Corporation. Con questo agreement, negoziato direttamente dai due premier Wen Jabao e Wladimir Putin nel corso di colloqui ufficiali tenutisi a Pechino nei giorni scorsi, il gigante cinese corre in soccorso di un’economia russa che attraversa, ormai da alcuni mesi, una crisi produttiva profonda. Le previsioni degli economisti e le dichiarazioni dello stesso primo ministro russo Dmitri Medvedev indicano che nell’ultimo anno il paese ha prodotto il 7,5% in meno rispetto ai passati dodici mesi mentre la Cina crescerà di una percentuale variabile tra l’8,3 ed il 9%, un differenza sostanziale che potrebbe riscrivere gli equilibri geopolitici nell’area asiatica nel prossimo futuro e in prospettiva nel medio e lungo periodo.

Mosca fornirà a Pechino ogni anno 70 miliardi di metri cubi di gas ottenendo in cambio prestiti commerciali per 25 miliardi di dollari, i tecnici russi in collaborazione con quelli cinesi costruiranno una raffineria a Tianjin e gestiranno in joint venture tra le 300 e le 500 stazioni di rifornimento. Gazprom si è impegnata inoltre a fornire alla Cina gas liquido estratto da Sakhalin, ad ulteriore riprova della volontà di entrambi i paesi di stringere rapporti politico-commerciali sempre più profondi in tema di energia ed idrocarburi. Il vicepremier cinese Wang Qishan ha definito quella apertasi nei giorni scorsi come “una nuova fase di collaborazione a lungo termine” tra le due potenze, che riguarderà non solo il settore energetico ma anche quelli finanziario e militare. La Development Bank e la Agricultural Bank, entrambe cinesi, hanno infatti accordato a Vnesheconombank e a Vneshtorgbank, banche russe, un prestito da mezzo miliardo di dollari ciascuna e le Forze Armate dei due paesi si doteranno di una linea di comunicazione preferenziale per mantenere un contatto costante in caso di lanci di missili balistici contro i due paesi. Cina e Russia si candidano quindi a diventare il baricentro politico ed economico di una regione, quella del Pacifico, che sarà di fondamentale importanza per gli interessi globali. Al contempo, condividendo informazioni in campo di sicurezza militare, cercano di gettare basi comuni che possano consentire ad entrambe di affrontare eventuali sfide strategiche, in un futuro che sembra farsi ormai sempre più prossimo. Se nei prossimi quindici o venti anni il mondo assumerà sempre più una dimensione “Pacifico-centrica” non potranno essere che Pechino e Mosca a decidere di voler spostare a proprio favore gli equilibri regionali, a probabile detrimento di una posizione statunitense che sembra farsi sempre più debole nell’area asiatica.

Restano da verificare quali saranno le scelte statunitensi per la regione, sia a livello strategico che commerciale. Al momento scenari di scontro tra Washington e Pechino sembrano essere quanto mai utopici. Gli Stati Uniti sono fortemente indebitati e scatenare un conflitto di qualsivoglia tipo con la Cina rischierebbe di portare il paese verso un crollo in stile sovietico. Non è però da escludersi a priori la possibilità che, nel prossimo futuro, la Casa Bianca si trovi costretta a dover fronteggiare una Cina più potente ed arrogante sia sul versante economico che su quello strategico-militare. Come affronteranno allora a Washington la minaccia cinese? Si tornerà ad una situazione già vista, in cui due superpotenze si affrontano in una guerra congelata dalla paura? Difficile dirlo ora, ma tutto lascia pensare che in questo caso non ci troveremo di fronte a ricorsi storici, le leadership saranno quindi chiamate a scrivere una nuova pagina di politica internazionale se vorranno preservare uno dei beni più preziosi per l’umanità.

Autore: Simone Comi

Fonte: http://simonecomi.blogsome.com/

Karl Marx Predicted Collapse of US Dollar in 1857

Wirepullers: dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, per quarant'anni, il mondo è rimasto congelato, fermo sulla cortina di ferro. La storia di quegli anni è stata la storia della contrapposizione tra i due blocchi e qualsiasi cosa succedesse, anche nel più remoto angolo del pianeta, trovava giustificazione nella distinzione est/ovest. La caduta del muro prima e l'11 settembre dopo hanno sconvolto questo mondo, prima sancendo la fine della contrapposizione tra i blocchi, poi creando le condizioni per la nascita di un mondo nuovo, monocolore, a stelle e strisce. Era l'inizio di una nuova epoca, caratterizzata dal controllo di Washington sul pianeta. Ma questo nuovo mondo già scricchiola, come il vecchio aveva iniziato a fare negli anni Ottanta, preannunciando la propria fine. Il multipolarismo è una realtà che si sta inesorabilmente affermando. La crisi economica, le guerre stagnanti in Iraq e Afghanistan e l'emergere di nuove economie, sempre più solide e potenti, fanno intravedere le prime crepe nel progetto dei neocon americani. I sismografi geopolitici registrano le prime vibrazioni, anticipo delle scosse telluriche che potrebbero aspettarci in un futuro non troppo lontano. Un mondo si è chiuso nell'89, uno forse lo sta per fare a breve. E a Mosca e Pechino ci si dà da fare per accelerare il tutto, cancellando un caposaldo di entrambi: il dollaro. (3)

The great October fall of the US dollar is turning into an avalanche. On Tuesday, the American currency lost nine kopeks in Russia and reached a new minimum mark this year - 29.5 rubles per dollar. Within six months (April through September) the dollar lost over 10 percent at the world foreign exchange trading, which marked the sharpest decline since 1991. Some experts believe that the American currency is close to collapse, which may lead to a new financial crisis.

The tendency of the US dollar devaluation has been observed for a few years, but the current rate of decline is unprecedented. Some jokesters even rushed to re-read the letters of Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels written during the US financial panic of 1857 discussing the collapse of America. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so serious.

The chief economist of HSBC Bank Stephen King believes that if the US officials fail to stop the fall of American currency, it may provoke another financial crisis. “A dollar collapse would be a disaster all round… It would leave the international monetary system short of stability and long of fear. It would unleash economic upheavals on a similar scale to those seen in the 1970,” King wrote for The Independent.

American officials don’t seem to be overly concerned since nothing is being done about it. The US hasn’t done anything to support the currency since 1955. But is a collapse inevitable? From the viewpoint of macroeconomic indicators, the US state of affairs is, indeed, scary: record budget deficit of $1.4 trillion, record state debt that now exceeds $11.9 trillion, high unemployment and weak currency. Huge inflows of capital into the economy that Obama is proud of haven’t yet shown results.

But on the other hand, weak currency may be good for the US.
“The economy is supported by industrial orders based on the current weak dollar and higher prices in the future. Key players in the market are ready to support their manufacturers by weakening the currency,” says Alexander Kuptsikevich, FxPro financial analyst.

If the state debt is growing, it means that the US continues to obtain loans.

“Market participants prefer to borrow money in dollars, and dollar loans are relatively affordable. They invest into more active instruments denominated in currencies of developing countries,’ explains Yevgeny Nadorshin, chief economist of Trust Investment Bank.
This causes growth of stock index. For example, Russian Trading System increased by 34 percent within two and a half months.

World center banks, who used to be trusted American partners, also turn their backs to dollar. They reduced investments into assets denominated in American currency. According to Barclays Capital , in April, May, and June, the banks invested 63% of their gains in euro or yen. If it continues, this may lead to further devaluation of dollar.

However, central banks of the countries that depend on export try not to let it happen. For example, last week a group of Asian central banks carried out unprecedented intervention in the financial markets by actively buying American currency. Bank of Russia was not a passive observer either. According to experts’ evaluations, the bank purchased over three billion dollars.

The good thing about it is that it helped Russian manufacturers to maintain competitiveness and bank reserves. The question is whether we would have to spend much more when investors change their minds and flee the Russian market changing their rubles into dollars. Last year we paid a high price for it.

“I’m not afraid that the events of the last year will repeat. The circumstances now are different. The world touched the bottom of the crisis and revival began, so there won’t be sharp moves,” says profile manager of Pilgrim Asset Management Olga Izyumova.

Yevgeniy Nadorshin agrees with her. He also thinks that dollar will continue weakening. But many experts think that as soon as the US announces the raise of interest rates, American currency will stop falling and even start growing. When is it going to happen?

Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve evades the answer. All he says is that this will happen when the US is sure of stable growth. On Tuesday investors discussed information obtained from the US official sources that the Federal Reserve will start raising interest rates no earlier than the second half of the next year.

Fonte: english.pravda.ru

Decline of the Dollar

Wirepullers: dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, per quarant'anni, il mondo è rimasto congelato, fermo sulla cortina di ferro. La storia di quegli anni è stata la storia della contrapposizione tra i due blocchi e qualsiasi cosa succedesse, anche nel più remoto angolo del pianeta, trovava giustificazione nella distinzione est/ovest. La caduta del muro prima e l'11 settembre dopo hanno sconvolto questo mondo, prima sancendo la fine della contrapposizione tra i blocchi, poi creando le condizioni per la nascita di un mondo nuovo, monocolore, a stelle e strisce. Era l'inizio di una nuova epoca, caratterizzata dal controllo di Washington sul pianeta. Ma questo nuovo mondo già scricchiola, come il vecchio aveva iniziato a fare negli anni Ottanta, preannunciando la propria fine. Il multipolarismo è una realtà che si sta inesorabilmente affermando. La crisi economica, le guerre stagnanti in Iraq e Afghanistan e l'emergere di nuove economie, sempre più solide e potenti, fanno intravedere le prime crepe nel progetto dei neocon americani. I sismografi geopolitici registrano le prime vibrazioni, anticipo delle scosse telluriche che potrebbero aspettarci in un futuro non troppo lontano. Un mondo si è chiuso nell'89, uno forse lo sta per fare a breve. E a Mosca e Pechino ci si dà da fare per accelerare il tutto, cancellando un caposaldo di entrambi: il dollaro. (2)

Don't believe everything you read on the Drudge Report. Well into the next few decades, the global economy will still be all about the benjamins.

The greenback is looking a bit green around the gills -- and no matter where you look, the bad news for the U.S. dollar just seems to be getting worse. America's currency has been plunging in value against the euro and the Japanese yen (and the Barack Obama administration has shown little inclination to brake the slide). Dark mutterings from the world's other great powers about the need for a new global reserve currency have accelerated the trend. Rumors about plans to topple the dollar from its pedestal abound. And just in case someone might be inclined to dismiss all the dire talk as a foreign conspiracy, the (American) head of the World Bank went on the record last month with a warning: "The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency," Robert Zoellick said in a speech. "Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar."

Some onlookers cite the dollar's decline as yet one more bit of evidence that the long period of American global dominance is coming to an end. The greenback's function as the world's leading reserve currency has been one of the key features of Washington's privileged place in the world since World War II. For decades the dollar has been the currency the world's countries tend to use when they do business with each other. Most central banks around the world have held the lion's share of their foreign exchange reserves in dollars, while most globally traded commodities (like oil) have been priced in the U.S. currency, too. It's an arrangement that translates into many benefits for the United States, most notably lower borrowing costs (because there's always more demand for the reserve currency than others). And then there are the myriad political and cultural knock-on effects -- the power and the prestige -- that accrue to the currency at the top of the economic pecking order. So it should come as no surprise that predictions about the impending "demise of the dollar" tend to go hand in hand with the expectation that America's hyperpower days are numbered.

There's just one problem with this picture: It ain't necessarily true. Or not yet, at least. The creation of the euro and the rise of new economic heavyweights like China are indeed opening up prospects for a global monetary system that is much less dollar-centered than today's. For that to happen, though, will require myriad changes that are likely years, if not decades away. And in the meantime, Benjamin Cohen of the University of California-Santa Barbara, points out, "It's clear that the dollar is still the leading currency in almost every category."

Overall, he notes, the dollar continues to remain well out in front of the pack in foreign exchange trading, trade, and international banking markets. Although most countries have been adding euros to their reserves since the European currency was introduced in 1999, the amount of reserves held in dollars is 2½ times greater -- "and in terms of absolute magnitude, the amount of dollars held in reserves is still on the increase," Cohen says. In fact, he points out, the dollar's share of the world's global currency reserves is actually much higher than it was at the beginning of the 1990s. In 1990 the dollar accounted for just 45 percent of reserves; today the figure is 65 percent. (For what it's worth, Cohen adds, the dollar's share peaked at 71.5 percent in 1999, the year of the euro's introduction. So sure, the euro has made a dent.)

Cohen and other economists -- including those who are less sanguine about the dollar's future -- point out that much of the current hysteria (or, depending on where you stand, euphoria) about the greenback's role tends to confuse two things: present volatility in the foreign exchange markets and the dollar's medium- to long-term structural role in the global economy. Take a look at history, in fact, and the present aura of uncertainty about the dollar appears, well, historical. Some dollar doomsayers have been claiming of late, for example, that the world's oil-producing countries are contemplating a wholesale switch to pricing oil in euros rather than dollars -- a move that, the pessimists claim, would mark the virtual death knell of America's economic dominance.

That was the thrust, for example, of a much-ballyhooed recent article, "The Demise of the Dollar," by British journalist Robert Fisk, who darkly points out that the United States invaded Iraq shortly after Saddam Hussein started pricing Iraqi oil in euros. Fisk's piece, despite presenting minimal detail to back its claims, triggered something of a run on the dollar when it was published -- a good example of the degree of the current jitteriness. In response, Harvard University economist Richard Cooper points out that the OPEC countries traditionally bring up the idea of junking the dollar pricing system periodically every time the dollar gets weak. The idea, for example, of jettisoning dollars in favor of SDRs (special drawing rights, a sort of IMF pseudo currency) that is making the rounds again has been brought up repeatedly over the years. And if they did? "I don't think it's a big deal one way or the other," he says.

And that brings us to the biggest question that potential dollar-dumpers find themselves compelled to answer: If not the dollar, then what's the alternative? The most obvious candidate would seem to be the euro. Back in pre-euro days, the deutsche mark and the French franc never really posed a serious alternative to the dollar, given their comparatively small reach back then. The economic heft of the euro-area countries, by contrast, is about the same as that of the United States; both sides account for about one-quarter of global GDP. And European financial markets are relatively deep and liquid (though still not quite on the scale of the United States'). Skeptics argue that European economic growth in the decades to come is likely to remain tepid, given Europe's rigid labor markets, dense regulation, and graying populations. And then there's that little detail that the political underlay of the euro is an international treaty rather than a nation-state.

Still, given the rising financial problems faced by the United States -- like its miserable current account deficits and exploding national debt -- economists like Harvard's Jeffrey Frankel and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Menzie Chinn speculate that the euro could well make a go of it, perhaps surpassing the dollar's share of overall reserves as soon as 2015. Still, one wonders whether even this scenario really represents the fundamental transformation of the global order that some would predict. So what about, say, the Chinese renminbi or the Japanese yen? Although the latter is still widely held as a reserve currency in some parts of the world, its attractiveness has been diminished by the lackluster performance of Japan's economy since the 1990s. As for the renminbi, even the biggest China boosters acknowledge that it will take years before China's economy takes on the attributes needed for a global reserve currency -- particularly the deep, transparent, and liquid financial markets that still attract overseas investors to the United States. Oh, yes, and moving toward genuine convertibility might not hurt, either. (Meanwhile, it should be noted, China's dollar reserves continued to grow in the third quarter of this year.)

Another idea making the rounds involves the aforementioned SDRs. The idea has been gaining currency (forgive the pun) ever since March 23, when Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China's central bank, proposed that central banks shift more of their foreign exchange reserves from dollars to SDRs. Far from ordering someone in the CIA to zap Zhou with a poison dart, though, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner actually welcomed the suggestion. (Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the need for greater international reliance on SDRs has been the official policy of the IMF since 1978.) At April's G-20 meeting in London, the assembled countries then approved a massive issuance of $250 billion worth of SDRs -- the first in years.

There's just one problem, though. As Barry Eichengreen, a leading economist at the University of California-Berkeley, writes in a recent article, "[S]keptics question whether the SDR could ever replace the dollar as the world's leading reserve currency, for the simple reason that the SDR is not a currency. It is a composite accounting unit in which the IMF issues credits to its members." Based on a basket of four currencies (the dollar, euro, pound, and yen), the SDR can only be used right now by central banks and a few international institutions like the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements -- and not, it should be noted, by companies or consumers. Expanding the role of SDRs beyond their present function and into that of a genuine global currency would entail an amount of political and economic re-engineering that few of the major powers would seem to have the stomach for as things stand now.

And that, in turn, drives home another important point: Although politics do play a major role in deliberations about the future reserve currency, they do so rather differently from the simplistic ways evoked in public discussion. The University of California's Cohen scoffs at the notion, for example, that Gulf Arabs might be blithely prepared to toss the dollar aside for the sake of dimly defined commercial advantage. Saudi Arabia, he points out, has a long-standing agreement with the United States to refrain from actions that might seriously destabilize the dollar; in return the United States promises to guarantee Saudi security in a region that offers myriad threats. "The Saudis have much more important issues to worry about than earning a few more percentage points on their currency reserves," Cohen says. The same applies, he points out, to Japan, still bound to the United States in a military alliance as well as through an intricate web of commercial relationships. Although China has surpassed the United States as Japan's No. 1 trading partner, that fact alone is hardly enough to compel Tokyo to shift all of its reserves to renminbi.

In short, the dollar's continued global predominance is not a sure thing; it's just that it looks a lot more likely than just about any of the other options. "To seriously dislodge the dollar in its international role would actually require concerted action around the world," says Harvard's Cooper. Does he see any signs of that? "No."

Autore: Christian Caryl

Fonte: www.foreignpolicy.com

The demise of the dollar

Wirepullers: dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, per quarant'anni, il mondo è rimasto congelato, fermo sulla cortina di ferro. La storia di quegli anni è stata la storia della contrapposizione tra i due blocchi e qualsiasi cosa succedesse, anche nel più remoto angolo del pianeta, trovava giustificazione nella distinzione est/ovest. La caduta del muro prima e l'11 settembre dopo hanno sconvolto questo mondo, prima sancendo la fine della contrapposizione tra i blocchi, poi creando le condizioni per la nascita di un mondo nuovo, monocolore, a stelle e strisce. Era l'inizio di una nuova epoca, caratterizzata dal controllo di Washington sul pianeta. Ma questo nuovo mondo già scricchiola, come il vecchio aveva iniziato a fare negli anni Ottanta, preannunciando la propria fine. Il multipolarismo è una realtà che si sta inesorabilmente affermando. La crisi economica, le guerre stagnanti in Iraq e Afghanistan e l'emergere di nuove economie, sempre più solide e potenti, fanno intravedere le prime crepe nel progetto dei neocon americani. I sismografi geopolitici registrano le prime vibrazioni, anticipo delle scosse telluriche che potrebbero aspettarci in un futuro non troppo lontano. Un mondo si è chiuso nell'89, uno forse lo sta per fare a breve. E a Mosca e Pechino ci si dà da fare per accelerare il tutto, cancellando un caposaldo di entrambi: il dollaro. (1)

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading.

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.

The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power – along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system – which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.

Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.

China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq – blocked by the US until this year – and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.

Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.

Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements – the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system – America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.
The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

Autore: Robert Fisk

Fonte: www.independent.co.uk

L'articolo di Robert Fisk si puo leggere tradotto in italiano su Internazionale Nr. 816, 9/15 ottobre 2009.

Il neocolonialismo agrario

Wirepullers: i paesi più ricchi e importanti protagonisti del mercato finanziario stanno acquistando terreni nelle regioni più povere del pianeta. La crisi alimentare dell'anno scorso ha fatto paura e chi può corre ai ripari. Si chiama "neocolonialismo agrario" e l'obiettivo di chi lo pratica è quello di assicurarsi un futuro alimentare roseo, nel caso di crisi mondiali o approfittare dei lauti guadagni che la prossima bolla finanziaria, quella del cibo appunto, consentirà di ottenere. Ma per chi questi terreni li ha coltivati fino a ieri e ora se li vede portare via senza neanche essere stato interpellato, tutto questo suona coma una condanna a morte. (3)

Una delle grandi battaglie del secolo XXI sarà quella dell'alimentazione. Molti Paesi importatori di alimenti sono colpiti dall'aumento dei prezzi. Gli Stati ricchi stavano affrontando il problema; poi, nella primavera del 2008, si sono spaventati per l'atteggiamento protezionista delle nazioni produttrici che hanno limitato le loro esportazioni. Da quel momento vari Stati in crescita economica e demografica -ma privi di grandi risorse agricole e idriche- hanno deciso di garantirsi riserve di alimenti comprando terre all'estero. Contemporaneamente anche molti speculatori si sono messi a comprare terreni per fare affari. Sono convinti che l'alimentazione sarà l'oro nero del futuro. Secondo loro, da qui al 2050, la produzione di alimenti raddoppierà per soddisfare la domanda mondiale. "Investite in fattorie! Comprate terra!" ripete Jim Rogers, guru delle materie prime. George Soros scommette anche sui biocombustibili e ha acquistato terreni in Argentina. Un gruppo svedese ha comprato mezzo milione di ettari in Russia; l'hedge fund russo Renaissance Capital 300.000 ha in Ucraina; il britannico Landkom 100.000 ha anch'essi in Ucraina; la banca statunitense Morgan Stanley e il gruppo agro-industriale francese Louis Dreyfus, decine di migliaia di ettari in Brasile, ecc.

Ma chi principalmente si è lanciato a comprare terre in tutto il mondo sono gli Stati con petrodollari e valuta estera. La Corea del Sud, primo compratore mondiale, ha acquistato 2.306.000 ettari; a seguire Cina (2,09 milioni), Arabia Saudita (1,61 milioni), Emirati Arabi Uniti (1,28 milioni) e Giappone (324.000 ha). Totale: circa 8 milioni di ettari di terra fertile comprati o affittati all'estero. Regioni intere sono passate sotto il controllo straniero in Paesi con scarsa densità demografica e i cui governanti sono disposti a cedere parte della sovranità nazionale. Un fenomeno che preoccupa. In un rapporto allarmante, la ONG Grain denuncia "un accaparramento di terre a livello mondiale" (1).

Senza campi fertili né acqua, i Paesi del Golfo sono quelli che si sono lanciati prima. Kuwait, Qatar e Arabia Saudita cercano ovunque terreni disponibili. "Loro hanno la terra, noi i soldi", spiegano gli investitori del Golfo. Gli Emirati Arabi Uniti controllano 900.000 ha in Pakistan; e stanno pensando a progetti agrícoli in Kazakistan. La Libia ha acquistato 250.000 ha in Ucraina in cambio di petrolio e gas. Il gruppo saudita Binladen ha acquisito terreni in Indonesia per coltivare riso. Investitori di Abu Dhabi hanno comprato decine di migliaia di ettari in Pakistan. La Giordania produrrà commestibili in Sudan. L'Egitto ha acquisito 850.000 ha in Uganda per seminare grano e mais... La Cina è l'acquirente più compulsivo, perché deve alimentare 1 miliardo e 400 milioni di bocche mentre dispone solo del 7% delle terre fertili del pianeta. Inoltre l'industrializzazione e l'urbanizzazione gli hanno distrutto circa 8 milioni di ettari. E alcune regioni si stanno desertificando. "Abbiamo meno spazio per la produzione agricola, ed è sempre più difficile aumentare il rendimento", ha spiegato Nie Zhenbang, capo dell'Amministrazione Statale per i Cereali (2).

La Cina possiede terre in Australia, Kazakistan, Laos, Messico, Brasile, Suriname, e soprattutto in Africa. Pechino ha firmato circa trenta accordi di cooperazione con governi che le danno accesso alla terra. A volte le autorità di Pechino inviano dalla Cina la manodopera; pagata meno di quaranta euro al mese, senza contratto di lavoro e senza copertura sociale.

Da parte sua la Corea del Sud controlla ormai all'estero una superficie superiore alla totalità delle sue stesse terre fertili... Nel novembre 2008 il gruppo Daewoo Logistics ha stipulato un accordo con il Governo di Marc Ravalomanana, presidente del Madagascar, per affittare

1 milione e 300mila ettari, ossia la metà delle terre coltivabili di quella grande isola...

Il Governo sudcoreano ha comprato anche 21.000 ettari destinati all'allevamento in Argentina, Paese nel quale il 10% del territorio (circa 270.000 chilometri quadrati) si trova nelle mani di investitori stranieri, che "hanno beneficiato della disponibilità dei differenti governi per acquisire milioni di ettari e risorse non rinnovabili, senza restrizioni e a prezzi modici" (3). Il maggior proprietario terriero è Benetton, industriale italiano della moda, che possiede circa 900.000 ha ed è diventato il principale produttore di lana. Anche il milionario statunitense Douglas Tompkins ha circa 200.000 ha situati nelle vicinanze di importanti riserve d'acqua. In generale la cessione di terre a Stati stranieri si traduce in espropriazioni di piccoli produttori e in un aumento della speculazione. Senza dimenticare la deforestazione. Un ettaro di bosco procura un guadagno tra i quattro e i cinquemila dollari se vi si piantano palme da olio; ossia da 10 a 15 volte più che se si dedica a produrre legno (4). Questo spiega si stanno sostituendo con piantagioni i boschi dell'Amazzonia, del bacino del Congo e del Borneo.

E' un ritorno a odiose pratiche coloniali, e una bomba ad effetto ritardato. Perché la ‘tentazione' degli Stati stranieri è quella di saccheggiare le risorse, come fa la Cina, con manodopera importata e poco profitto locale... Ma la resistenza si organizza. In Pakistan, i contadini si stanno mobilitando contro lo spostamento dei villaggi che avverrà se il Qatar comprerà dei terreni nella regione del Punjab. Il Paraguay ha approvato una legge che proibisce di vendere terreni agli stranieri. L'Uruguay lo sta valutando; e il Brasile pensa di cambiare la sua legislazione. Il neocolonialismo agrario toglie il lavoro ai contadini e crea un "rischio di pauperizzazione, tensioni sociali estreme e violenze civili" (5). La terra è un tema molto sensibile. Ha sempre suscitato passione. Rappresenta una parte dell'identità dei popoli. Toccare questo simbolo potrebbe avere brutte conseguenze.

Note: (1) http://www.grain.org/m/?id=213

(2) China Daily , Pechino, 9 maggio 2008.

(3) Daniel Enz e Andrés Klipphan, Tierras SA. Crónicas de un país rematado , Alfaguara, Buenos Aires, 2006.

(4) Le Nouvel Observateur , Parigi, 23 dicembre 2008.

(5) Le Monde , Parigi, 23 novembre 2008.

Autore: Ignacio Ramonet
Fonte: Le Monde Diplomatique

Néocolonialisme agraire: des chefs d'Etat de pays pauvres mettent eux-mêmes leur terre en viager

Wirepullers: i paesi più ricchi e importanti protagonisti del mercato finanziario stanno acquistando terreni nelle regioni più povere del pianeta. La crisi alimentare dell'anno scorso ha fatto paura e chi può corre ai ripari. Si chiama "neocolonialismo agrario" e l'obiettivo di chi lo pratica è quello di assicurarsi un futuro alimentare roseo, nel caso di crisi mondiali o approfittare dei lauti guadagni che la prossima bolla finanziaria, quella del cibo appunto, consentirà di ottenere. Ma per chi questi terreni li ha coltivati fino a ieri e ora se li vede portare via senza neanche essere stato interpellato, tutto questo suona coma una condanna a morte. (2)

Parmi les " bienfaits " des colonisations conduites au XIXe siècle, il y eut l'introduction forcée et la culture obligatoire du coton dans les régions de savanes africaines : au Tchad, par exemple, chaque chef de famille était tenu de cultiver une " corde " de coton, soit environ un demi-hectare, afin d'approvisionner l'industrie textile française. En contrepartie, sa récolte lui était payée et, quand on lui avait retenu les avances sur les semences, les engrais et les pesticides, il lui restait trois sous pour participer aux débuts de la société de consommation.

On était à la fin des années 1920. Les paysans tchadiens ignoraient ce qu'était l'anticolonialisme, mais ils avaient bien compris que la nouvelle tâche qui leur était imposée était inique : elle tombait à la même saison que la culture du sorgho vivrier, elle doublait la quantité de travail, et elle occupait une parcelle consacrée à l'indispensable jachère, seule technique possible de régénération des sols. Beaucoup se révoltèrent, mais la " chicote " coloniale eut tôt fait de les calmer, et les courageuses dénonciations d'André Gide ne furent guère entendues en métropole.

A l'aube du XXIe siècle, la décolonisation est - dit-on - achevée, le travail forcé est interdit, et le monde entier peut être informé en temps réel de la plus petite exploitation de l'homme par l'homme, fût-elle commise au coeur de la Nouvelle-Guinée ou de l'Amazonie. Et pourtant, aussi insidieuse que légale, une nouvelle forme de colonisation des terres a commencé à s'instiller dans les régions les plus pauvres de la planète, et nul ne proteste. Au contraire, les premiers intéressés sont même parfois demandeurs, comme ces représentants de la région indonésienne de Papouasie qui ont démarché des investisseurs saoudiens en leur offrant un million d'hectares pour qu'ils puissent y produire les céréales dont manque l'Arabie saoudite, moyennant quelques investissements dans les infrastructures et quelques miettes vivrières pour les populations locales.

ON NE SPOLIE PLUS, ON ACHÈTE
A cette occasion, on découvre que le processus n'est pas nouveau : le Brésil a concédé plus de 5 millions d'hectares à des étrangers depuis 2000. Mais la crise alimentaire vient de donner une légitimité à la démarche car, pour assurer leur " sécurité alimentaire ", les pays qui en ont les moyens n'hésitent plus à se porter acquéreur ou à louer des superficies de plus en plus vastes de terres à l'étranger. C'est ainsi que la Corée du Sud vient de rendre public le contrat passé par le groupe Daewoo avec Madagascar et, cette fois-ci, l'offensive est de taille, puisqu'elle porte sur 1,3 million d'hectares pour produire 4 millions de tonnes de maïs et 500 000 tonnes d'huile de palme.

Sécurité alimentaire ? Ce n'est pas si sûr, et quand bien même les pays riches nourriraient-ils quelques craintes dans ce domaine qu'il serait indécent d'aller faire fabriquer leur pain quotidien dans les champs de ceux qui meurent de faim. C'est plus probablement un nouvel avatar du bon vieux colonialisme, relooké en fonction des réalités du moment, qui permet de continuer à aller chercher les matières premières là où elles se trouvent au meilleur prix. Autrefois, on utilisait la force militaire pour asservir les populations faibles, au détriment des droits humains élémentaires, notamment du droit des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes. Aujourd'hui, toutes les règles du droit des affaires sont respectées : on ne spolie plus, on achète ou on loue. Les grandes compagnies minières l'ont bien compris, mais on n'imaginait pas que l'agriculture finirait par intéresser les spéculateurs.

Or, depuis le début des années 1990, la Banque mondiale a décrété que la propriété privée de la terre était une valeur universelle, et elle a entrepris d'imposer au monde ce principe sous le nom de " sécurisation " des terres. Tout le monde, dit-elle, devrait donc y trouver son compte, et ce sont d'ailleurs souvent les chefs des Etats pauvres qui mettent eux-mêmes leur pays en viager. Hélas, comme du temps de la colonisation, la " rente " qui y est attachée profite très peu aux petits paysans.

Ceux-ci vont même assez rapidement constater que non seulement ils ne vont rien gagner mais, pour la plupart, ils vont tout perdre et seront contraints d'aller grossir les hordes de pauvres qui s'entassent dans les bidonvilles des grandes villes des pays du Sud. Car les immenses superficies concédées aux pays riches ou aux multinationales du Nord seront cultivées sur un mode intensif, soit quatre hommes pour 1 000 hectares.

Cette ruée vers les terres cultivables atteignant des proportions inquiétantes, chacun y va de son couplet : " c'est un pacte néocolonial " déclare Jacques Diouf (FAO) ; " il faut une protection des populations locales " estime Alain Joyandet ; " cela pose un problème de gouvernance " affirme Michel Barnier. Oui mais, à part le dire, on fait quoi ?

Autore: Christian Bouquet

Fonte: www.lemonde.fr

Why Corporations, Emerging Powers and Petro-States Are Snapping Up Huge Chunks of Farmland in the Developing World

Wirepullers: i paesi più ricchi e importanti protagonisti del mercato finanziario stanno acquistando terreni nelle regioni più povere del pianeta. La crisi alimentare dell'anno scorso ha fatto paura e chi può corre ai ripari. Si chiama "neocolonialismo agrario" e l'obiettivo di chi lo pratica è quello di assicurarsi un futuro alimentare roseo, nel caso di crisi mondiali o approfittare dei lauti guadagni che la prossima bolla finanziaria, quella del cibo appunto, consentirà di ottenere. Ma per chi questi terreni li ha coltivati fino a ieri e ora se li vede portare via senza neanche essere stato interpellato, tutto questo suona coma una condanna a morte. (1)

In the past six months, big players in the global economy have grabbed 50 million acres of arable land, from Africa to Southeast Asia.

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before:

Investment banks, sovereign wealth funds and other barely regulated financial entities in search of fat paydays go on buying binges structurally adjusted to maximize their earnings reports and employee bonuses, while simultaneously screwing their business associates and everyone else in the process. It's all done in near-total secrecy, and by the time everyone finds out about it, they're already in the poorhouse.

That's more or less the playbook for the derivatives and credit-default swaps gold rush that ruined the global economy, which cratered in 2007 and has yet to recuperate.

The bubble money has now moved on from housing and turned to the commodities markets, especially global food production. Given what that money did to the housing market, things don't look good for local communities whose land is being bought up by governments, sovereign wealth and hedge funds, and other investors on the hunt for real value in a hyperreal economy.

Entrenched and developing economic powers -- the U.K., China, South Korea, India and more -- have launched land rushes to outsource production of everything from staples like rice, wheat, corn and sugar to finance bubbles like biofuels. That includes oil-wealthy Gulf States, which recently feasted on commodities speculation that exploded oil prices in 2008.

The hard numbers are alarming: According to the Guardian, in the last six months over 20 million hectares (around 50 million acres) of arable land, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia, have been sold or negotiated for sale or lease. That's about half the size of all arable land in Europe, or the size of entire U.S. states North Dakota or Oklahoma.

The aptly titled report, " 'Land Grabbing' by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries," from the International Food Policy Research Institute, which declined to be interviewed for this article, explains that "details about the status of the deals, the size of land purchased or leased, and the amount invested are often still murky."

It's no wonder: The economic valuation of land and water has increased in concurrence with both price commodities and the ravages of climate change, whose droughts, wildfires and other extreme environmental events are quickly shrinking what's left of the planet's arable land and clean water.

That exponential process will only be intensified by the biofuels some of these lands will be used to grow, which is a particularly shameless insult. Rather than use the 2.8 million hectares China bought from the Congo -- or the tens of thousands of hectares the U.K. bought from Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania, and so on -- to feed the hungry, those investor nations will use them to grow food for our cars. What biofuels will do is make a few outsider nations very rich at the expense of a great many locals who could use the land to feed themselves.

But don't call it a land grab, cautioned Rodney Cooke, technical advisory division director of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), who, along with the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), also declined to comment on this article, commissioned a study from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to analyze the disturbing trend. "I would avoid the blanket term 'land-grabbing,' " Cooke said. "Done the right way, these deals can bring benefits for all parties and be a tool for development."

Keep dreaming, argued Patrick Woodall, research director for Food and Water Watch.
"These investments are effectively land grabs for a number of reasons," he told AlterNet by phone. "They're going to be used to grow crops for exports. They're taking arable land out of the domestic food supply. Most of these deals are totally secret, and there are no standards of access to public information. We're also concerned about places with weak legal systems, where farmers and pastoralists won't even know these lands are being sold from beneath them. Some don't even have formal land-titling systems, so this is going to push people off the land and take away their access to food."

It already has, said the FAO's Trade and Market division representative David Hallam, using the kind of maddening opacity made legendary by economists and other hedging professionals.
"There are economic, political, social and ethical concerns surrounding these investments. The record of foreign direct investment in agriculture over the years does, unfortunately, suggest that many of those concerns are well-founded. A review of the literature on the impacts of foreign direct investment in agriculture leaves us with some unease, and at least not a conviction that there are definitely positive effects to be had."

Of course, these diluted revelations didn't stop Hallam from blaming the host countries for its investment partners' shock-doctrine policies. "Most of the onus of actions to attract investment and to make sure it meets the requirements of developing countries," he concluded in a speech to the Woodrow Wilson Institute, "falls very much on the developing countries, on the host countries rather than the investing countries. It's not so much to say no to these investments perhaps, but rather to make sure that the policy and legislative framework is in place to maximize the benefits and minimize the risk."

"That's obviously misguided policy prescription," Woodall countered. "The local leadership are usually not interested in cutting good deals for the people who are actually living on the land, so these questions should be dealt with openly. But that is just not always the case. There's no reason to expect the investment houses that have brought down the global economy to treat countries in the developing world fairly."

But all of this is prologue. This type of opportunist land-grabbing is not new, nor has its recent escalation gone unnoticed by those with a healthy sense of reality. Ever since the housing bubble popped under the weight of political corruption, financial crime and environmental destabilization, the smart money had its eye firmly on more earthbound commodities.

The serious questions worth asking arise after the ink has dried on its secretive contracts: What happens when global warming really takes hold and starving locals get tired of watching their homegrown food and fuel leave their borders? Whose army will enforce these contracts, once they are rendered moot by uprisings and internecine warfare?
The answer is: the same thing that's happening already, just on a much, much larger scale.

"This is already causing a lot of political upheaval," Woodall said. "The government of Madagascar fell recently because of public fury over of a land deal with South Korea's Daewoo Logistics," which would have given the investor over a million hectares, roughly half the size of Belgium, for literally nothing. "China's deal with the Philippines also got scotched because of resistance. The problem is that most people don't know these deals exist."

"We are not against the idea of working with investors," Madagascar's new president Andry Rajoelina explained, after being installed by the military and a constitutional court months after violent protests chased his predecessor, Marc Ravalomanana, out of Iavoloha Palace to an undisclosed location. "But if we want to sell or rent out land, we have to change the constitution, you have to consult the people."

Involving people, especially the poor, in deals that sell arable land from underneath them just isn't in the investment playbook. After all, even the $700 billion doled out by ex-U.S. Treasury Secretary and ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson is practically impossible to track, on purpose. And that's America handing out American money to American banks.

So what cutthroat land-grabber in his or her right mind, which is focused like a laser on maximum profit by any means necessary, is going to clue in a bunch of poor farmers, who already have little recourse, to food-rush schemes designed to lock down production and pricing for richer countries half a world away?

For its part, the FAO believes that some kind of binding global code of conduct is a possible solution, but it admits that such a possibility is closer to fantasy than reality.

"Its enforcement is likely to be problematic," the FAO said in a somewhat laughable policy brief called 'From Land Grab to Win-Win.' "It might nevertheless offer a framework to which national regulations could refer, especially if parties realize that compliance with common standards is in their mutual self interest."

But it never is, which is why these deals are made in the first place. To be brutally honest, mutual interest is the opposite of what investor countries are looking for, which is a one-sided interest arrangement in which already-rich nations and investors, lost in a haze of wasteful consumption and economic and political corruption, hopscotch the world in search of naive hosts to feed upon. And whether it is rice or sugar cane or palm oil or other fuels for their bloated bodies or cars, they are not invested, literally, in the health and well-being of those hosts. They are survivalists in the purest sense, and survivors just don't share when they can hoard.

"Investors are looking at this as scarce land and water in a world of increasing scarcity," Woodall argued, "which is one reason they are pursuing it so actively. They're bringing the plantation mentality to the 21st century and driving people off their land. This is crazy stuff. If the deals that people know about are as big as North Dakota, what does that say about the deals they don't know about?"

Autore: Scott Thill

Fonte: www.alternet.org

Tornano gli speculatori

Wirepullers: Goldman Sachs è forse la banca più importante al mondo, e non deve essere un caso se i suoi manager prima o poi finiscono in una qualche amministrazione pubblica (in Italia gli esempi di Romano Prodi e Mario Draghi). Qualcuno addirittura pensa che sia la stessa Goldman Sachs a piazzarli nei punti nevralgici della politica mondiale, per poterla controllare come una sorta di piovra che si muove nell'ombra. Non sappiamo se questo sia vero, è indubbio però che Goldman Sachs è un colosso economico molto potente. (4)

Con i tassi bassi si cercano investimenti più redditizi. E così si rischia una nuova bolla. Intanto la Goldman Sachs ha annunciato i profitti trimestrali più elevati della sua storia, e lo stesso hanno fatto le maggiori imprese finanziarie.

A Wall Street la crisi sembra dimenticata. Goldman Sachs ha annunciato i profitti trimestrali più elevati della sua storia: 3,44 miliardi di dollari, corrispondenti a 4,58 dollari per azione, battendo del 29 per cento le previsioni degli analisti. Le maggiori imprese finanziarie hanno seguito a ruota. Perfino Citigroup ha riportato profitti trimestrali per 4,3 miliardi di dollari, pari a 0,49 dollari per azione, un'azione che a marzo valeva solo 0,97. Ma marzo sembra lontanissimo, così come sembrano appartenere ad un passato remoto le immagini di Goldman Sachs e Morgan Stanley in crisi di liquidità, salvate dall'intervento propizio dello stato. Insomma non c'è più area di crisi a Wall Street, dove era proprio nata. Possiamo quindi dedurre da questi segnali che la crisi sia finita anche per il resto del paese (e del mondo)? Purtroppo no. Innanzitutto non è tutto oro quel che luccica. Mentre la performance di Goldman Sachs e JP Morgan sono state veramente straordinarie, quelle delle altre banche no. Togliendo i profitti per il conferimento della controllata Smith Barney a una joint venture con Morgan Stanley, Citigroup avrebbe riportato nel trimestre una perdita di 2,4 miliardi e non un profitto di 4,3 miliardi. Lo stesso si può dire per Bank of America. E Cit, un intermediario finanziario specializzato nei prestiti alle piccole e medie imprese, si avvia ad essere la quinta più grossa bancarotta nella storia degli Stati Uniti. In secondo luogo i profitti ottenuti derivano principalmente da condizioni di mercato eccezionali e difficilmente ripetibili. Con tassi di interesse pressoché nulli, forti rialzi azionari, e una valanga di collocamenti di titoli, i settori del trading e dell'investment banking hanno messo a segno profitti record. Ma per quanto riguarda il business del credito tradizionale la situazione non è altrettanto rosea. JP Morgan, una delle banche migliori, ha riportato perdite di 955 milioni di dollari nel settore del credito al consumo e di 672 milioni nel settore carte di credito. Citigroup ha dovuto accantonare 3,9 miliardi per perdite attese sui prestiti. Visto che in passato Citigroup ha sottostimato queste perdite, il futuro non sembra molto roseo.

Per finire, anche se la crisi è iniziata a Wall Street, non finisce lì. Con un livello di disoccupazione che si sta avviando al 10 per cento e i pignoramenti delle case in aumento (+15 per cento nei primi sei mesi dell'anno), l'economia reale non sembra dare grossi segnali di ripresa. Ma allora perché Wall Street gioisce? Una possibile spiegazione, fornita da molti analisti, è che il settore finanziario e la Borsa in generale anticipino l'economia reale di circa sei mesi. Il crollo di ottobre-novembre anticipava la crisi economica attuale. E il boom degli ultimi tre mesi anticiperebbe una ripresa a fine anno. Storicamente questa relazione è giustificata. Ma se c'è una cosa che questa recessione ci ha insegnato è di non fidarsi troppo delle correlazioni passate. L'alternativa, molto più pessimista, è che Wall Street sia drogata da quegli stessi fattori che hanno causato la crisi. Dopo lo scoppio della bolla Internet i bassi tassi di interesse hanno favorito la nascita della bolla immobiliare. Allo stesso modo oggi i bassi tassi di interesse e la massa di liquidità immessa dalla Federal Reserve creano le condizioni per la formazione di una nuova bolla. All'apice della crisi, quando si temeva che il sistema finanziario implodesse, i risparmiatori erano contenti di detenere contanti e titoli del Tesoro americano. Ma ora che questo rischio sembra rientrato, i risparmiatori cercano impieghi più redditizi per la liquidità in loro possesso. Questo li spinge verso investimenti più rischiosi. Il mercato ha ben recepito una cartolarizzazione di titoli cartolarizzati (in gergo Cdo al quadrato) fatta da Morgan Stanley. Con l'alchimia tipica di questi processi dei titoli cartolarizzati che erano stati downgraded dalle agenzie di rating sono stati trasformati in titoli da tripla A. E il mercato si è affrettato a comprarliGli operatori finanziari, lungi dall'essere contriti per gli errori passati, si sentono ringalluzziti. La storia recente ha dimostrato che è nel loro interesse assumersi rischi. Se le cose vanno bene guadagnano cifre favolose: su base annua i compensi di Goldman per il primo semestre 2009 corrispondono ad una media di 772.000 dollari per dipendente, segretarie e portieri inclusi. Se le cose vanno male, interviene lo Stato. E il gioco ricomincia.

Autore: Luigi Zingales

Fonte: http://espresso.repubblica.it

Inside The Great American Bubble Machine

Wirepullers: Goldman Sachs è forse la banca più importante al mondo, e non deve essere un caso se i suoi manager prima o poi finiscono in una qualche amministrazione pubblica (in Italia gli esempi di Romano Prodi e Mario Draghi). Qualcuno addirittura pensa che sia la stessa Goldman Sachs a piazzarli nei punti nevralgici della politica mondiale, per poterla controllare come una sorta di piovra che si muove nell'ombra. Non sappiamo se questo sia vero, è indubbio però che Goldman Sachs è un colosso economico molto potente. (3)

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.

But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline the committee to save the world. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Autore: Matt Taibbi

Fonte: www.rollingstone.com

Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools

Wirepullers: Goldman Sachs è forse la banca più importante al mondo, e non deve essere un caso se i suoi manager prima o poi finiscono in una qualche amministrazione pubblica (in Italia gli esempi di Romano Prodi e Mario Draghi). Qualcuno addirittura pensa che sia la stessa Goldman Sachs a piazzarli nei punti nevralgici della politica mondiale, per poterla controllare come una sorta di piovra che si muove nell'ombra. Non sappiamo se questo sia vero, è indubbio però che Goldman Sachs è un colosso economico molto potente. (2)

From the moment I left Yale and started working for Goldman Sachs, I’ve felt uneasy interacting with those who don’t.

It’s not that I think less of Goldman outsiders than I did while I remained among you. It’s just that I feel your envy, and know that nothing I can do or say will ever persuade you that I am no more than human.

Thus, like many of my colleagues, I have adopted a strategy of never leaving Goldman Sachs, apart from a few brief, spasmodic attempts to make what you outsiders call “love” or “the beast with two backs.” Goldman recognizes how important it is for its people to replicate themselves. We bill no performance fees for the service.

Today, the sheer volume of irresponsible media commentary has forced us to reconsider our public-relations strategy. With every uptick in our share price it’s grown clearer that we who are inside Goldman Sachs must open a dialogue with you who are not. Not for our benefit, but for yours.

America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.

Rumor No. 1: “Goldman Sachs controls the U.S. government.”
Every time we hear the phrase “the United States of Goldman Sachs” we shake our heads in wonder. Every ninth-grader knows that the U.S. government consists of three branches. Goldman owns just one of these outright; the second we simply rent, and the third we have no interest in at all. (Note there isn’t a single former Goldman employee on the Supreme Court.)
What small interest we maintain in the U.S. government is, we feel, in the public interest. Our current financial crisis has its roots in a single easily identifiable source: the envy others felt toward Goldman Sachs.

The bozos at Merrill Lynch, the dimwits at Citigroup, the nimrods at Lehman Brothers, the louts at Bear Stearns, even that momentarily useful lunatic Joe Cassano at AIG -- all of these people took risks that no non-Goldman person should ever take, in a pathetic attempt to replicate Goldman’s financial returns.
For too long we have allowed others to emulate us. Now we are working productively with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the Congress to ensure that we alone are allowed to take the sort of risks that might destroy the financial system.

Rumor No. 2: “When the U.S. government bailed out AIG, and paid off its gambling debts, it saved not AIG but Goldman Sachs.”

The charge isn’t merely insulting but ignorant. Less responsible journalists continue to bring up the $12.9 billion we received from AIG, as if that was some kind of big deal to us. But as our CFO David Viniar explained back in March, we were hedged. Our profits from AIG “rounded to zero.”

People who don’t work at Goldman Sachs, of course, find this implausible: How could $12.9 billion round to zero? Easy, but you just need to understand the mathematics.
Let’s assume AIG transferred $12,880,560,250.34 of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs. A Goldman outsider, asked to round this number, might call it $12,880,560,250.00. That’s not how we look at it; at Goldman we always round to the nearest $50 billion, so anything less than $25 billion rounds to zero.

Think of it that way and you can see that $12,880,560,250.34 isn’t even close to not rounding to zero.
Rumor No. 3: “As the U.S. government will eat the losses if Goldman Sachs goes bust, Goldman Sachs shouldn’t be allowed to keep making these massive financial bets. At the very least the $11.4 billion Goldman Sachs already has set aside for employees in 2009 -- $386,429 a head, just for the first six months -- is unfair, as the U.S. taxpayer has borne so much of the risk of the wagers that generated the profits.”
Really, we don’t know where to begin with this one. It is wrong-headed in so many different ways!

Let’s begin with the idea that the taxpayer is running a bigger risk than we are. The billions he stands to lose are trivial; after all, they round to zero.
The real risk, when you think about it even for a minute, is the risk we take ourselves: that Goldman will cease to exist and we will cease to be Goldman employees. To flirt with such tragedy we obviously need to be paid.

Rumor No. 4: “Goldman employees all look alike.”
Several recent newspaper photos have revealed that a surprising number of Goldman Sachs workers are white, male and bald. That non-Goldman people glance at such photos and think “Holy crap, they even look alike!” just shows how deeply anti- Goldman bigotry runs in American life.
We at Goldman represent unique clusters of DNA; if we bear some faint surface resemblance to one another, and to creatures from the 24th century, it is only because our superior powers of reasoning lead us to hold in our minds exactly the same thoughts, at exactly the same time.
A shared disinterest in growing hair, for instance, isn’t a coincidence of nature but an expression of healthy like- mindedness.
“The world is a pool table,” our naked-headed CEO likes to tell us. “And all the people in it are either stripes or solids. You alone are the cue balls.”

Rumor No. 5: Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Those words are of course taken from a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and they are transparently false.

For starters, the vampire squid doesn’t feed on human flesh. Ergo, no vampire squid would ever wrap itself around the face of humanity, except by accident. And nothing that happens at Goldman Sachs -- nothing that Goldman Sachs thinks, nothing that Goldman Sachs feels, nothing that Goldman Sachs does --ever happens by accident.

Autore: Michael Lewis

Fonte: www.bloomberg.com