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À partir d’avant-hierAnalyses, perspectives

Comment le Crédit Agricole fait des bénéfices colossaux sur votre dos…

Dans le capitalisme de connivence qui nous domine, les banques tiennent un rôle de choix : puissantes, elles ont la faculté d’obtenir des réglementations favorables et protectionnistes pour leurs intérêts, comme elles ont la faculté de bloquer des réformes qui pourraient leur nuire. L’affaire de l’assurance emprunteur illustre parfaitement ce type d’arrangements loin des regards. Une banque comme le Crédit Agricole a pu dégager des dizaines de milliards de bénéfices depuis des années grâce à ce dispositif pas complètement d’équerre avec les règles de la concurrence. Mais elle n’est pas la seule : quelques banques en ont bien profité.

L’assurance emprunteur est une assurance-vie que vous êtes obligé de souscrire lorsque vous contractez un emprunt.

  • très longtemps, les banques ont pu obliger les clients à souscrire au contrat d’assurance emprunteur qu’elles proposaient en même temps que le crédit
  • les politiques de défiscalisation dans l’immobilier ont permis aux banques de “caser” de nombreux contrats d’assurance emprunteur dans des conditions non-concurrentielles, et parfois opaques (sur ce point, voire notre article “patrimoine” du jour, sur l’intérêt ou non d’acheter de l’immobilier défiscalisé pour préparer sa retraite et la vidéo ci-dessous)
  • ce marché est très cartellisé
  • encore aujourd’hui, faute d’une concurrence suffisante, les banques peuvent placer ces contrats qui sont surfacturés
  • un rapport de l’IGF de 2013 affirme que la surfacturation des contrats était d’environ 50%
  • des évolutions législatives ont permis une mise en concurrence, mais leur effet reste encore limité

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Le fascisme christique, cadeau d’adieu de Joe Biden à l’Amérique

C'était la dernière chance du Parti démocrate de mettre en œuvre le genre de réformes type New Deal qui auraient pu nous sauver d'une autre présidence Trump & du fascisme […]

The post Le fascisme christique, cadeau d’adieu de Joe Biden à l’Amérique appeared first on Investig'action.

What is China’s Economic Future?

Par : AHH

Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by Beijing-based scholar Mick Dunford to discuss what is actually happening in China’s economy, explaining its technological development and transition toward a new industrial revolution.

Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson at The Geopolitical Economy Hour.

Video:

Podcast:

Transcript:

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 24th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton; our videographer, Paul Graham; and our transcriber, Zach Weiser.

And with us today we have, once again, Professor Mick Dunford, professor emeritus of geography at Sussex University and now working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, keeping a close watch, among other things, on China’s economy. So welcome, Mick.

MICK DUNFORD:  Thank you very much.

RADHIKA DESAI: So, China’s economy is what we’re going to talk about today. Where is it at after decades of breakneck growth, after executing the greatest industrial revolution ever? Where is it headed?

Trying to understand this is not easy. The disinformation that is fake news and even what I often call fake scholarship that distorts the view that any honest person may be trying to take on China’s economy is simply overwhelming. It’s absolutely wall-to-wall propaganda, no matter which Western publication or website you open.

If we are to believe the Western press and the leading scholarly lights of the West, who are the major generators of the Western discourse on China, we are at peak China. That is to say, they claim that China has reached a point, reached the highest point, that is, that it ever can. And from here on, it’s only going to be downhill, more or less rapidly.

They say that China has, in recent years, inflated a huge property bubble to compensate for the West’s inability to keep up imports. And this bubble is about to burst. And when it does, it will subject China to a 1980s and 1990s Japan-style long-term deflation or secular stagnation. They have even invented a word to talk about this: “Japanification”. We are told that the Japanification of China’s economy is impending.

They say that the U.S.’s trade and technology wars are hitting China where it hurts the most, at its export and its reliance on inward foreign investment. They are saying that China has grown only by stealing technology. And now that the U.S. is making it harder for it to do so, its technological development can only stall. They are saying that China followed disastrous COVID-19 policies, leading to mass death, draconian lockdowns, and economic disaster.

They are saying that China over-invests, and its growth will not pick up unless China now permits higher consumption levels. They are saying that China has a serious unemployment crisis, that the CPC, the Communist Party of China, is losing legitimacy, because it is failing to deliver ever-higher living standards. And they are saying that Xi Jinping’s authoritarian leadership is ensuring that the private sector will stall, and with it, so will China’s growth.

All this, they say, before even beginning to talk about China’s foreign policy. And there, of course, lie another long litany of alleged disasters and misdemeanors that China is responsible for, beginning with debt-trap diplomacy and China’s allegedly voracious appetite for the world’s resources.

The only reason why Western experts ever stress the strength of China’s economy is when they want to argue that the West must redouble its efforts to contain China and to stall its rise.

So today, we’re going to take a closer look at China’s economy, and in doing so, we’re going to bust a lot of these myths. We’re going to show you that, sadly, for the purveyors of the fake news and fake scholarship about China, no amount of their huffing and puffing has been able to blow down China’s house, because, like the good, the smart little pig, China is actually building its house with bricks.

So, we have a number of topics to discuss in this show. Here they are:

1.    Characterising China’s Economy: Capitalist? Socialist?

2.    Growth Story

3.    Covid Response

4.    The Alleged Debt and Property Bubble? And Japanification?

5.    Restricted Consumption? Stagnant living standards?

6.    Exports in the China Story

7.    China’s new growth strategy

8.    China’s foreign policy

So, these are the topics that we hope to discuss. We want to begin by talking about how to characterize China’s economy. Is it capitalist? Is it socialist? Then we will do the most important and primary basic thing, we will look at the growth story with some statistics. We will then look at China’s Covid response. We will look at the alleged debt and property bubble and whether China is being Japanified.

Then we will look at the issue of whether China is overinvesting and neglecting consumption and living standards, etc. How reliant is China on exports? What is China’s growth strategy? And what is China’s foreign policy? And are those myths about it true? So, this is what we hope to discuss.

So, Mick, why don’t you start us off with your thoughts on exactly how to characterize China’s economy?

MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the way I would characterize China is as a planned rational state. I mean, right the way through, it has maintained a system of national five-year planning, and it also produces longer-term plans. But it’s a planned rational state that uses market instruments.

China has a very large state sector. And of course, some people have claimed that this state sector is, in a sense, an impediment to growth. And we’ve seen a resurrection of this idea, guo jin min tui (国进民退), which is used to refer to the idea that the state sector is advancing and the private sector is retreating.

It’s a very, very strange concept, in fact, because the third word is min (民), and min refers to people. So, what they are actually, in a sense, saying – these ideas were invented by neoliberal economists in 2002 – the private sector is equated with the people, which I find absolutely astonishing. But, I mean, the country does have a very significant public sector.

What I find striking is that one can actually turn it around and say, what is it that these Western economists seem to think China should do? And they seem to think that China should privatize all assets into the hands of domestic and foreign capitalists. It should remove capital controls. It should open the door to foreign finance capital. It should transfer governance to liberal capitalist political parties that are actually controlled by capital.

I think one of the most fundamental features of the China system is actually that it’s the state that controls capital, rather than capital that controls the state. And it’s, in fact, this aspect of the Chinese model, and in particular, the rule of the Communist Party of China that has basically transformed China from what was, effectively one of the poorest countries in the world into one of its largest industrial powers.

So, in a way, it’s a planned rational state in which the CPC has played an absolutely fundamental role. And without it, I mean, China would never have established the national sovereignty that permitted it to choose a path that suited its conditions and to radically transform the lives and livelihoods of its people.

RADHIKA DESAI: Michael, do you want to [speak]?

MICHAEL HUDSON: The question is, what is the state? There are two aspects of the state with China. One is public infrastructure. And the purpose of China’s public infrastructure is to lower the cost of doing business because infrastructure is a monopoly.

That’s what really upsets the American investors. They wanted to buy the phone system, the transportation system, so that they could benefit from charging monopoly rents, just like under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The most important sector that China’s treated in the public is money creation and banks. Americans hope that American banks would come over and they would be making all the loans in China and benefiting from China’s growth and turning it into interest. And instead, the government’s doing that. And the government is deciding what to lend to.

And there’s a third aspect of what people think of when they say state. That’s a centralized economy, centralized planning, Soviet style.

China is one of the least centralized economies in the world because the central government has left the localities to go their own way. That’s part of the Hundred Flowers Bloom. Let’s see how each locality is going to maneuver on a pragmatic, ad hoc basis.

Well, the pragmatic ad hoc basis meant how are localities, villages, and small towns going to finance their budgets? Well, they financed it by real estate sales, and that’s going to be what we’re discussing later.

But once you realize that the state sector is so different from what a state sector is in America, centralized planning and the control of Wall Street for financial purposes, finance capitalism, hyper-centralized planning, you realize that China is the antithesis of what the usual view is.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And I’d just like to add a few points, which dovetail very nicely with what both of you have said.

The fact of the matter is that this was also true of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries when they were still ruled by communist parties. We generally refer to them as socialist or communist, but in reality, they themselves never claimed to be socialist or communist. They only said they were building socialism, especially in a country that was as poor as China was in 1949.

The leadership of the Communist Party of China has always understood that there has to be a long period of transition in which there will be a complex set of compromises that will have to be made in order to steer the economy in the direction of socialism, in order to build socialism.

So, from its beginnings, the revolutionary state in China was a multi-class state and a multi-party state. People don’t realize very often that while the Communist Party of China is the overwhelmingly most powerful party in China, there are other parties that exist as well, which reflect the originally multi-class character of China.

Now, it’s true that since 1978, the government has loosened much of its control over the economy. But the important thing here is that the Communist Party retains control of the Chinese state.

The way I like to put it is, yes, there are lots of capitalists in China. Yes, those capitalists are very powerful. They are at the head of some of the biggest corporations in the world, and they are quite influential within the Communist Party. But what makes China meaningfully socialist or meaningfully treading the path to socialism, let’s put it that way, is the fact that ultimately the reins of power are held in the hands of the Communist Party of China leadership, which owes its legitimacy to the people of China.

So, the reigns of power, the reigns of state power are not held by the capitalists; they are held by the Communist Party leadership.

So, in that sense, I would say that China is meaningfully socialist. Although, as Mick pointed out, there is a fairly large private sector in China, but so too is the state sector very large. And the extent of state ownership means that even though the private sector is very large, the state retains control over the overall pace and pattern of growth and development in the country.

And I just add one final thing here, which is going to become quite important as we discuss the various other points, and that is that the financial sector in China remains very heavily controlled by the state.

China has capital controls, China practices a fair degree of financial repression, and China’s financial system is geared to providing money for long-term investments that improve the productive capacities of the economy and the material welfare of the people. And this is completely different from the kind of financial sector we have today.

So, Mick or Michael, did you want to add anything?

MICK DUNFORD: Just to reiterate, I mean, the point is, the government sets strategic targets that relate to raising the quality of the life of all the Chinese people. And it has strategic autonomy, which gives China the opportunity or the possibility of actually choosing its own development path.

And I think that’s something that very strikingly marks China out from other parts of the Global South that have had much greater difficulty, in a sense, in accelerating their growth, partly because of debt and their subordination to the Washington financial institutions.

So I think that is critically important, the role of sovereignty and autonomy in enabling China to make choices that suited its conditions, and at the same time making choices that are driven by a long-term strategic goal to transform the quality of the lives of all Chinese people.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to put in one word about sovereignty. You put your finger on it. That’s really what makes it different.

What makes other countries lose their sovereignty is when they let go, how are they going to finance their investment? If they let foreign banks come in to finance their investment, if they let American and European banks come in, what do they do? They fund a real estate bubble, a different kind of a real estate bubble. They fund takeover loans. They fund privatization.

Banks don’t make loans for new investment. China makes great money to finance new tangible investment. Banks make money so you can buy a public utility or a railroad and then just load it down with debt, and you can borrow and borrow and use the money that you borrow to pay a special dividend if you’re a private capital company. Pretty soon, the country that follows this dependency on foreign credit ends up losing its sovereignty.

The way in which China has protected its sovereignty is to keep money in the public domain and to create money for actual tangible capital investment, not to take your property into a property-owning rentier class, largely foreign-owned.

RADHIKA DESAI: Thank you. Those are very important points. Thank you.

I’d just like to add one final point on the matter of how to characterize the Chinese economy and the Chinese state. At the end of the day, it’s not just important to say that the state controls the economy, but whose state is it?

The way to look at it as well is that in the United States, essentially we have a state that is controlled by the big corporations, which in our time have become exceedingly financialized corporations, so that they are directing the United States economy essentially towards ever more debt and ever less production, whereas that is not the case in China.

And the question of whose state it is makes use of the word autonomy. The autonomy refers to the fact that it is not subservient to any one section of society, but seeks to achieve the welfare of society as a whole and increase its productive capacity.

MICK DUNFORD: If I may just add, I think also it’s important that you pay attention to the policy-making process in China. It’s an example of what one might call substantive democracy. It delivers substantive results for the whole of the Chinese population.

In that sense, it delivers improvements in the quality of the lives of all the people, and therefore, in a sense, it’s a democratic system. But it’s also a country that actually has procedures of policy-making, experimentation, design, and choice and so on that are extremely important and that have fundamental aspects of democracy about them.

When Western countries characterize China as authoritarian, they’re actually fundamentally misrepresenting the character of the Chinese system and the way in which it works, because they, in a sense, merely equate democracy with a system, whereas China, of course, does have multiple political parties, but a system with competitive elections between different political parties. There are other models of democracy, and China is another model of democracy.

RADHIKA DESAI: Mick, you’re absolutely right to talk about the substantive democracy. Indeed, in China, they have recently developed a new term for it. They call it a “whole process democracy”, and it really involves multiple levels of consultation with the people, going down to the most basic village and township levels, and then all the way up the chain.

And I think this process does work, because the other remarkable thing about the CPC leadership is its ability to change direction pragmatically. If something does not work, then it assesses what it has attempted, why it has failed, and then it revises course. So, I think we will see several instances of this as we talk as well.

Michael, you want to add something?

MICHAEL HUDSON: One thing about democracy. The definition of a democracy traditionally is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. There’s only one way to prevent an oligarchy from developing as people get richer and richer, and that’s to have a strong state.

The role of a strong state is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. That’s why the oligarchy in America and Europe are libertarian, meaning get rid of government, because a government is strong enough to prevent us from gouging the economy, to prevent us from taking it over.

So, you need a strong central state in order to have a democracy. Americans call that socialism, and they say that’s the antithesis of democracy, which means a state that is loyal to the United States and follows U.S. policy and lets the U.S. banks financialize the economy. So, just to clarify the definitions here.

RADHIKA DESAI: Very, very true, Michael. But let’s not go, I mean, maybe we should do a separate show on political theory of the state, because that’s equally important.

But for now, let’s look at our next topic. We hope, of course, that everybody understands how we characterize China’s state. But now, let’s look at China’s GDP growth.

So, here you have a chart, and we have several charts on this matter, but we’ll take them one by one and comment on them:

gdp growth china west 1980 2028

So, here we have a chart showing the annual rate of GDP growth from 1980 to 2028. Of course, post-2023 are their projections, which are shown by the dotted lines. And I’ve only taken a few selected countries from the Our World in Data website, and anybody can go there and look at this data, by the way.

So, you can see China and then a handful of the most important Western countries. And you can see that going back to 1980, essentially China’s growth rate, which is here, the top red line here, has absolutely been massively higher on practically any year than the other countries.

In fact, you see I left Russia in here. I should probably have taken it out. It’s a bit of a distraction, because here you see Russia’s growth rate massively bouncing up from the late 90s financial crisis. But let’s leave that aside.

All the other major countries, which you see here, they are all showing considerably lower growth. So, the United States here is this orangish line. And essentially, they’re all showing much lower growth.

And more recently as well, this is the Covid-19 pandemic. And you can see that China, again, like all the other countries, it experienced a fairly sharp decline in the growth rate, but it still remained positive, unlike all the other countries.

And it remains substantially above that of the rest of the economies that constantly are telling China how to improve its economic policy. So, that’s what I want to say about this chart.

But Mick, go ahead.

MICK DUNFORD: Can you show that table that I sent?

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, sure. Yes, here we go:

gdp growth china west table

MICK DUNFORD: These are more recent growth rates for China, for the world, and for the G7. And I mean, first of all, they show absolutely clearly that China’s growth rate is still a long way in excess of the average growth rates of all G7 countries, many of which have actually performed abysmally. I mean, Germany is now in recession, it declined 0.3% per year this year. I mean, Italy has had extremely low rates of growth, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, all had extremely low rates of growth.

China last year achieved a growth rate of 5.2%. It itself expects to grow at 5% next year. The IMF forecast 4.6%. Even that 4.6% target is quite close to the average growth rate that China needs to achieve to meet its 2035 target. It has a 2035 target of doubling its GDP, its 2020 GDP by 2035. I think that that goal is perfectly realizable. And in that sense, I strongly disagree with people who argue that China has in a sense peaked.

But I do find it, really quite astonishing, that Western countries, whose economies have performed extremely poorly, feel in a position to lecture China about how it should address what is said to be an unsatisfactory rate of growth. That’s the first point I want to make.

I just want to say something else, if I may. When we talk about, I mean, China’s growth has slowed. And, there’s no doubt that in terms of people’s everyday lives, there are many difficulties. And I just want to quote something.

At New Year, Xi Jinping gave a speech. I wanted to cite his actual words. He recognised that in these years, China faces what he called the tests of the winds and rains. And then he said, when I see people rising to the occasion, reaching out to each other in adversity, meeting challenges head on and overcoming difficulties, I am deeply moved.

So, the leadership and all Chinese people are well aware that there are many, many difficulties and challenges confronted, because China is actually undergoing a major structural transformation about which we shall speak later. But China is also in the short term undertaking a lot of important actions that are actually designed to cope with some of the real difficulties that people confront.

So, if you listen to Li Qiang’s government work report, he addressed the problem of short-term employment generation. And there are proposals for 12 million new urban jobs to increase employment, especially for college graduates and other young people, because for young people, the unemployment rate, including college students, is in the region of 21 percent. Urban unemployment is 5 percent. So, there are issues to do with the generation of employment.

Government expenditure this year will target a whole series of strategic issues, but also livelihoods. So, affordable housing, youth unemployment, job security, insurance, pensions, preschool education, the living conditions in older communities. So, I’m just saying that, in the current context, difficult economic situation and a particularly turbulent global situation. I mean, China, as every other country in the world, faces challenges, and it is in many ways directly addressing them in very important ways.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great. Thanks, Mick. Michael, do you want to add anything?

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, I think that’s it. The question is, what is the GDP that is growing? There are a number of ways of looking at GDP. And when I went to school 60 years ago, economists usually thought of GDP as something industrial. They’d look at energy production. They’d look at railway cargo transportation.

If you look at the industrial component of what most economists used to look at, electricity is the power for industry, electricity is productivity growth for labor. If you look at these, what is the component of GDP, you realize that these differences in Mick’s charts are even wider than what he showed, because the American GDP, very largely interest, overdraft fees of credit card companies, as we’ve said, is providing a financial service. 7% of American GDP is the increase in homeowners’ view of what their rental value of their property is. That’s 7%.

Now, I doubt that China includes a measure like this in its GDP. But if it did, with all of its rise in real estate prices, its GDP would be even higher in a reality-based basis.

So real GDP, as we think of it, and the public thinks of it, is something useful and productive. Actually, China’s doing a much more efficient job in minimizing the kind of financial and rentier overhead that you have in the United States.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly, Michael. What I was going to point out as well is that these figures of U.S. GDP growth and the absolute level of U.S. GDP are heavily financialized.

The financial sector, which actually is not a force for good in general in the U.S. economy, it is out of which the indebtedness comes, out of which the productive weakening comes. The growth of the financial sector is counted as GDP in the United States and massively inflates U.S. GDP, which would not be as high as this.

And this is particularly important given that President Biden, for example, is congratulating himself now for having the strongest economy in the world or the Western world or whatever it is. Well, that’s what the U.S.’s boast is based on.

And China does not do that, nor does it have the kind of financial sector which creates, which destroys the productive economy. Rather, as we were saying, it has the kind of financial sector that supports it.

So, just another general point I want to make. We were talking about this chart:

gdp growth china west table

This shows from 1980 to 2028, and the projections remain, by the way, even from conservative sources, that China’s growth is going to remain higher than the rest of the world, particularly the Western countries, for a long time to come.

And I also decided to show you this chart:

gdp growth china west 2008 2028

This is the chart of growth, which is just a more focused version of the previous one, which shows growth rates from 2008 to 2028.

So 2008 is when we had what Michael and I call the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. And since then, what we’ve seen is, yes, of course, all countries have seen a sort of a reduction in their growth rate, and certainly China has. But even since then, you can see that China’s growth remains high and stable. So, that’s another thing that we wanted to show.

And this is a chart showing the rise of per capita GDP:

gdp per capita growth china west 1970 2021

That is to say, you can have a higher GDP, but if your population is expanding, then to what extent is per capita GDP rising? So, you can see here that, again, even in terms of per capita GDP, and this only again goes to 2021, but in terms of per capita GDP, China has remained head and shoulders above all the major Western countries.

And this bounce here that you see in the case of the US and the UK here, it is only a dead cat bounce from the absolute depths to which their economies had sunk during Covid, and so they came to some sort of normalcy.

Mick, you may want to say something about this chart, because you sent it to me. So, please go ahead:

gdp per capita ppp 2021 china west

MICK DUNFORD: It’s correct, of course, that China’s growth slowed. Now, in 2013, China entered what is called the New Era. At that time, China decided that its growth rate should slow. It chose slower growth. It spoke of 6 or 7 percent per year, and it more or less achieved that, until the Covid pandemic. So, China chose slower growth for very particular reasons, and I think in this discussion, we shall come to some of these reasons later on.

But in a sense, what they want is what they call high-quality growth. And what China is seeking to do is undertake a profound structural transformation of its economy, establishing new growth drivers by directing finance towards high-productivity sectors and directing finance towards the use of digital and green technologies in order to transform its traditional industries. So, in a sense, it’s undergoing a profound process of structural transformation.

And I mean, if you, for example, look at Li Qiang’s speech, the major tasks include invigorating China through science and education, so to strengthen the education, science and technology system, to improve the capabilities of the workforce, or promote innovation, industrial investment and skills, and another, striving to modernize the industrial system and accelerate the development of new productive forces, bearing in mind that we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution. But these are very important issues, fundamentally important issues.

RADHIKA DESAI: And I would say just, and I know we’ll talk about it at greater length later on, but it is really important to bear in mind that really, when the world stands at the cusp of being able to exploit new technologies like quantum computing or nanotechnology or artificial intelligence or what have you, a relatively centralized decision-making process about how to allocate resources, for what purposes, for what social benefits, etc., is likely to prove far superior, that is to say, China’s method is likely to prove far superior than the Western tactic of leaving private corporate capital in charge of the process.

And just to give you a couple of instances of this, the fact that private corporate capital is in charge of the development of digital technologies is already creating all sorts of social harms in our Western societies, whether it is harms to children’s mental health or even adults’ mental health, to political division that the algorithms sow and so on.

And also, it is leading to a situation where even these mega-corporations, these giant corporations, actually do not have the resources to invest, the scale of resources that will be needed to invest. So, for example, you hear in the Financial Times that Sam Altman is looking for people to invest in his artificial intelligence ventures, which will require trillions of dollars, and he cannot find private investors for it. So, this is really quite interesting.

Okay, so if we’re done with the growth rate story, oh, and I just want to say one other thing about this, which is, this is a GDP per capita in purchasing power parity, and China, in the space of a few decades, essentially, has experienced the biggest spurt in per capita well-being, etc., which includes important achievements like eliminating extreme poverty.

The Communist Party has brought China to essentially per capita GDP in purchasing power terms of next to nothing in 1980 to about $20,000 per annum in 2020. This is really quite an important achievement. And to do this for a country of 5 to 10 million people would be laudable, but to do this for a country of 1.3 billion people is a massive, historic achievement, and I think that’s something to remember.

MICK DUNFORD: I just, if you just go back for one minute, I mean, I absolutely agree with what you’ve just said, Radhika.

I’ll just make a comment about this chart. It’s because we were probably going to speak about Japanification:

gdp per capita ppp 2021 china west

It basically shows that the GDP per capita of Japan, and indeed of Germany, closed in on the United States, and actually Germany overtook it in the 1980s. But after that point in time, I mean, after the revaluation of their two respective currencies, and after the, the bubble, the stock market and property market bubble in Japan, you saw stagnation set in. And there’s a question as to whether that will happen with China.

But I mean, I think that one thing that’s striking in this diagram is that China is still at a much lower level of GDP per capita than Japan, or indeed Germany was at that time. And those economies, because, they were at the technological frontier to some extent, had to innovate, move into new technologies.

China, because there is still a technological gap, has enormous opportunities to accelerate its growth in a way in which, well, Japan failed because it chose not to take up opportunities, and it gave up semiconductors manufacture. But China has enormous opportunities, and that’s one reason why we must anticipate China’s growth as continuing.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Thank you, Mick. Okay, so if we’re done with the growth story, let’s go to our next topic, which is what happened in China under Covid-19. Now, of course, there is just so much dispute about and controversy around Covid and Covid strategies, etc. So we don’t want to get into all of them, but I just want to emphasize two things.

We’ve already looked at the growth figures, we looked at the growth figures around Covid:

gdp growth china west 2008 2028

So you can see here that in 2020, all economies had a big dip thanks to Covid in their economies, but China is alone among the major economies to have remained in positive growth territory, and to have, of course, remained much higher than the rest of the other major world economies. So essentially, China, whatever China did, it did not sacrifice growth.

Now, this is very ironical, because in the Western countries, we were told that we need to, in order to continue growing, we need to, so in order to preserve livelihoods, which was the euphemism for preserving the profits of big corporations, in order to preserve livelihoods, we may have to sacrifice some lives. And the Western economies went through an absolutely excruciating process of lockdown here, and opening there, and lockdown again, and opening again, and so on.

But all of this had devastating impacts on Western economies, whereas China prioritized the preservation of life above all. And it imposed a lockdown knowing that, okay, even if we are going to develop vaccines, and remember, China developed its own vaccines, and effectively inoculated over 70 percent of the population by the time they began reopening.

China prioritized the saving of lives, and it was accused of essentially creating world shortages by shutting down its economy, etc. But in reality, China’s strategy, which focused before the availability of vaccines, on essentially physical distancing, isolation, etc., as was necessary, but China managed to do it in a way as to keep up a relatively robust growth rate, and very importantly, lose very few lives.

This is a chart, again from Our World In Data, of cumulative Covid-19 deaths per million of population:

covid 19 deaths per million china us

So here we have all these countries, the United States and United Kingdom are these top two lines, Germany, Canada, Japan, even though we are told that East Asian economies did well because they had experience with SARS, etc., even then, compared to China, which is down here with a cumulative Covid death rate per million of about 149 or something people dying per million, and these numbers are over 3,000, almost 4,000 per million at this point in the United States and the UK, and then you have these other economies.

So China actually managed to avoid the worst of Covid, both in terms of lives and in terms of livelihood, and it did so because it did not compromise the saving of lives.

Does anyone else want to add anything? Mick? You were there.

MICK DUNFORD: Well, I mean, obviously, there were difficulties for some people in some places at some times. I was here right through it. All I can say is the impact personally on me was extremely limited.

It was a very effective system for protecting life. And if you lived in some places, then in fact the impact on your life, apart from having frequent nucleic acid tests and so on and ensuring that your health code was up to date, the impact on one’s life was relatively limited.

But in some places, obviously, in Wuhan at the outset, in Shanghai later on, the impact was very considerable.

But I think it’s an indication of the importance of a kind of collectivism, and the priority given to the protection of human life. And as you said, it is quite striking that actually through it, China’s economy actually kept ticking over.

And of course, China produces so many important intermediate goods that obviously it was also very important in providing things that were needed in many, many other parts of the world.

It also shared its drugs, its vaccines, which is really quite different, in a sense, from the conduct of the United States. And to some extent, the Western pharmaceutical companies.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Michael, go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON: In the United States, that would be considered a failure of policy. The United States used Covid as an opportunity to kill.

For instance, the governor of New York, Cuomo, took the Covid patients and he moved them into all of the assisted living and old people’s homes. And that had a great increase in productivity. It resulted in enormous death rates for the elderly.

That helped save New York’s pension plan system. It helped save other pension plans. It helped save Social Security because the dead people were no longer what America called “the dead weight”.

The American policy was to indeed infect as many people over the age of 65 as you could. And that helped balance state, local budgets, pension plan budgets.

The increase in the death rate is now the official policy of the Center for Disease Control in the United States. They say do not wear masks. They’ve blocked any kind of mask wearing. They’ve done everything they could to prevent the use of HIPAA filters or airborne disease. The Disease Control Center says that Covid is not an airborne disease. Therefore, do not protect yourself.

Well, the result is many children have been getting Covid and that weakens their resistance system. And they’re getting measles and all sorts of other things. And all of that is greatly increasing GDP in America. The health care costs of America’s destructive policy.

I think Marx made a joke about this in Capital. He said when more people get sick, the doctors and the economic output goes up. Are you really going to consider sickness and destruction and fires rebuilding and cleanup costs? Are you going to count all of this there?

RADHIKA DESAI: But the irony is Michael, even with all of that, America’s GDP plunged so deeply down.

Well, I think we should move on to the next topic, but I will just say one thing. It is generally said that China is in a panic, the Chinese government reversed its draconian Covid policies because there were popular protests, and blah blah and so on. I would not agree with that.

Certainly, there were some popular protests. It also seems as though at least some of them were being pushed by the National Endowment for Democracy with the typical color revolution style. They have one symbol that symbolizes it. So, they decided to put up blank pieces of paper, etc. So, there’s no doubt that there was some of this going on. And as Mick said, undoubtedly, there were local difficulties in many places.

But what becomes very clear is that China decided to lift Covid restrictions towards the end of 2022 only after it has satisfied itself that the risk. And I should also add one thing. It was under pressure to lift these restrictions a great deal because the fact was that the rest of the world was not following China’s footsteps apart from a handful of other countries. And they were socialist countries. They were not following China’s footsteps.

So, it’s very hard to be the only country that’s doing it. But nevertheless, despite all those pressures, China had a very deliberate policy. It lifted Covid restrictions after assuring itself that enough of the population had been vaccinated, as to achieve something close to herd immunity.

And these figures of deaths per million demonstrate that China’s bet proved right, and China continues to monitor the situation. Covid hasn’t gone away.

And so, in all of these ways, I think that it’s important for us to understand that China’s policy has actually been above all about protecting people’s lives.

MICK DUNFORD: Just from my recollection, the demonstrations of which you spoke, where the slogans were written in English, I wonder who they were talking to, were on the 1st of December. China had, on the 11th of November, already announced the steps of, in a sense, removing restrictions. And then they were finalized in early December. So, the change was already underway.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. Great. So, I think we are at almost, I think, 50 minutes or so. So, let’s do the next topic, which is the property bubble. And then we will stop this episode and we will do a part two of this episode, and do the other four topics that remain in part two.

So, Mick, do you want to start us off about the property bubble and the alleged Japanification, impending Japanification of China’s economy?

MICK DUNFORD: Okay. Well, if you want, you can just show the chart:

house property prices china us

Basically, you can see that throughout this period, Chinese house prices have risen quite substantially. You know, in a sense, the story started, with housing reform, after 1988, when China moved from a welfare to a commodity system. And then, in 1998, it actually privatized Danwei housing, and it adopted the view that housing should be provided, as a commodity by developers.

And in 2003, that course of action was confirmed. And from that point in time, one saw very, very substantial growth in the number of developers, many of which, the overwhelming majority of which were private developers. So, in a sense, they moved towards a fundamentally market system.

And they very quickly had to make certain adjustments because they found that while the quality of housing and the amount of housing space per person was going up, these developers were orienting their houses towards more affluent groups. So, there was an under-provision of housing for middle-income groups and for low-income groups.

And so, there were progressively, you saw over the years, increasing attention paid to the provision of low-cost housing and of low-cost rented housing. And in fact, in the current five-year plan, 25% of all housing is meant to be basically low-cost housing.

So, the important point is that this problem emerged in a system that was liberalized, actually, I mean, in line with recommendations that were made in 1993 by the World Bank.

So, in other words, it’s an example of a liberalized, predominantly market-led, private-led system, in which these difficulties and these problems have emerged.

So, that’s the first thing I want to say. And I mean, obviously, to address housing needs, China has had, over the course of time, to considerably move back in the direction of providing low-cost housing in order to meet the housing needs of the Chinese people.

But basically, in August 2020, the government got very, very deeply concerned about, on the one hand, increasing house prices and, on the other hand, the explosion of borrowing and the fact that the liabilities of many of these developers substantially exceeded their assets.

And of course, the other line on that chart is a line indicating house prices in the United States. And of course, it was the crash of prices in the subprime market that, in a sense, precipitated the financial crisis. So, China, in the first place, is absolutely determined that it should not confront that kind of problem that was generated by the liberalized housing system in the United States.

So, I mean, that’s the first thing I basically want to say.

If you want, I can say something about the case of Evergrande. But basically, what China did in 2020 was it introduced what it called Three Red Lines, which were basically designed to reduce financial risks.

But it had a number of consequences because it, to some extent, deflated the housing market. Housing prices started to fall. Some of these developers found themselves in a situation where their liabilities substantially exceeded their assets. There was a decline in housing investment.

But to some extent, I think this is a part of a deliberate goal of basically diverting capital towards, as I said earlier, high productivity activities and away from activities, especially the speculative side of the housing market. So, I’ll just say that for the moment, but I can come back and say something about Evergrande, if you wish, in a few minutes.

RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, great. Michael, do you want to add anything?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what I’d like to know as the background for this is what is the, how much of this housing is owner-occupied and how much is rental housing? That’s one question. The other question is how much is the ratio of housing costs to personal income? In America, it’s over 40% of personal income for housing. What’s the ratio in China?

I’d want to know the debt-equity ratio. How much debt, on the average, for different income groups? Debt relative to the value of housing. In America, for the real estate sector as a whole, debt is, the banker owns more of the house than the nominal house owner, whose equity ratio for the whole economy is under 50%.

These are the depth dimensions that I’d want to ask for these charts, if you know anything about them.

RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, thanks for that. And so, I just want to add one thing, which is that, this graph actually really says it all, and in some ways implicitly answers Michael’s questions:

house property prices china us

Because the blue line, which shows the United States property prices, you can see that they reached a certain peak at 150% of the value of its 2010 values in 2008. Then it went down to below the level of 2010.

But U.S. monetary policy, Federal Reserve policy, its continuing deregulated financial sector, the easy money policy that was applied in a big way with zero interest rate policies, with quantitative easing, etc., etc., has simply led to a new property boom, where the prices of property prices have reached a peak, which is even higher than that of 2007-8, which was such a disaster. And this was all made possible precisely by the, by increasing housing debt, etc.

Whereas in China, a big driver of the housing boom has actually been that people are investing their savings in it. So, by logically, it means that the extent of a debt in the housing market will be comparatively lower. The entities that are indebted are actually the developers.

And that’s a very different kind of problem than, than the, than the owners being indebted. So that’s the main thing I want to say.

And Mick, you wanted to come back about, about Evergrande, so please do. And then remember also that we want to talk about this chart in particular, and deal with the question of Japanification:

china loans real estate industry

So, please go ahead, Mick. Let’s talk about that.

MICK DUNFORD: Okay, well, I mean, as Radhika just said, the problem is, the indebtedness of developers, and the existence of debts that considerably exceed the value of their assets.

And the way in which this situation has come about, and I mean, as I said, the Chinese government, in a sense, wants to address the financial risks associated with that situation, and did so by introducing these so-called Three Red Lines.

It also is interested in reducing house prices, and it’s also interested in redirecting finance towards productivity-increasing activities.

So, Evergrande is an enormous real estate giant. It has debt of 300 billion dollars. It has 20 billion of overseas debt, and its assets, according to its accounts at the end of the last quarter of last year, are 242 billion. And 90 percent of those assets are in mainland China. So, its liability asset ratio was 84.7 percent, and the Three Red Lines set a limit of 70, 70 percent. So, it’s substantially in excess of the red line.

In 2021, it defaulted. And then, in January this year, it was told to liquidate after international creditors and the company failed to agree on a restructuring plan. In September, by the way, last year, its chair, Su Jiayin, was placed under mandatory measures, on suspicion of unspecified crimes. Basically, it was a Hong Kong court that called in the liquidators.

And the reason was that, in a way, outside China, Evergrande looked as a massively profitable distressed debt trade opportunity. There were 19 billion in defaulted offshore bonds with very substantial assets and, initially, a view that the Chinese government might prop up the property market.

So, large numbers of U.S. and European hedge funds basically piled into the debt, and they expected quite large payouts. But it seems as if this negotiation was, to some extent, controlled by a Guangdong risk management committee. And the authorities, basically, were very, very reluctant to allow offshore claimants to secure onshore revenues and onshore assets.

And, in fact, to stop the misuse of funds, I think about 10 Chinese local provinces actually took control of pre-sales revenues. They put it into custodial accounts, and the idea was that this money should basically—the priority is to ensure that the houses of people who’ve paid deposits on houses are actually built, and people who’ve undertaken work in building houses, are basically paid. So, that, then saw the value of these offshore bonds collapse very rapidly, indeed.

And I think that, to some extent, explains the concerns of the international financial market about the difficulties of this particular case. But I think, it’s clear that China intends, basically, to deflate this sector and to put an end to this speculative housing market as much as it possibly can, and to direct capital, towards productivity increasing, essentially, the industrial sector. And we shall talk about this direction of finance later on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Evergrande debt, and other real estate debt, is to domestic Chinese banks and lenders. Certainly, many Chinese home buyers did not borrow internationally.

So, I want to find out how much the domestic Chinese banking system, or near banking system — not the Bank of China itself, but the near banks intermediaries who lent — to what extent have the banks given guarantees for the loans for Evergrande and others?

I understand that there are some guarantees domestically, and if the banks have to pay them, the banks will go under, just as occurring here in New York City. Do you have any information on that?

MICK DUNFORD: No, I don’t really have any information, except, I mean, some of the literature that I’ve read suggests that these creditors, bondholders and also other creditors, basically shareholders, are going to take a very, very major haircut.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. I think that this is the key, that there will be an imposition of haircuts on the rich and the powerful, not just subjecting ordinary people to repossession of their homes, which they should have access to.

So, as Mick has already said, the Chinese government is doing everything possible to make sure that the ordinary buyers who have bought these houses do not lose out, which is the opposite of what was done in trying to resolve the housing and credit bubble in the United States.

So, I just want to say a couple of things. I mean, the Chinese government is quite aware, as Mick pointed out, the whole thing has begun by, this whole property bubble is in good part a product of the fact that when relations between China and the West were much better, China accepted some World Bank advice, and this is partly a result of that and the kind of deregulation that the World Bank had suggested.

But very clearly, now relations between China and the West are not good. In fact, they’re anything but good. China is unlikely, once bitten, twice shy, to accept such bad advice again, even if they were good. And now that they’re not good, there will be, and China is clearly looking at distinctively pragmatic, socialistic ways out.

And you see in the new address to the NPC by the Premier [Li Qiang], that social housing has become a major priority, not building houses for private ownership, but rather building houses which will be kept in the public sector and rented out at affordable rates. And I think this is really an important thing, really the way to go.

And finally, I would say that, the property bubble in Japan and the property bubble in the United States were bound to have very different consequences, partly because, well, for two reasons, mainly. Number one, the nature of their financial systems were very different.

In the case of Japan, the financial system was being transformed from one that resembles China’s financial system to something that resembles much more the US financial system. And Japan has continued this transformation and has suffered as a result. I would say in short, really, Japan has paid the price of keeping its economy capitalist. So in many ways is the United States.

And the second reason, of course, is that, funnily enough, one of the effects of the Plaza Accord was that, by the time the Plaza Accord came around, Japan was no longer interested in buying US treasuries. And as a result, the United States essentially restricted its access to US markets in a much bigger way. And so, essentially, Japan lost those export markets.

And it did not do what China is able to do. It perhaps could not do what China is able to do, being a capitalist country, which is massively reorient the stimulus for production away from exports and towards the domestic market, including the market for investment.

So I think that we are, maybe this is the cue at which we can talk about Japanification. So maybe you can start us off by commenting on this chart, and then Michael and I can jump in as well:

china loans real estate industry

MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the blue line, of course, is the flow of loans to different sectors. So the blue line is the flow of loans to the real estate sector.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Only the Bank of China or by?

MICK DUNFORD:  All the banks. You can see from 2016, the share going to real estate has diminished very significantly, whereas, where it says industrial MLT, that’s medium and long term loans for industrial investment, you can see a very, very strong, steady increase in the share of loans going to industrial investment. In agriculture, it declines. And then also, that has actually increased since 2016. So this is a directing of investment towards manufacturing and towards the industrial sector of the economy.

So why is that? Well, I think the first thing one can say is that, in the past, basically, the growth drivers of the Chinese economy were, to some extent, export manufactures. But China was predominantly involved in processing activities, employing very unskilled labor and associated with very low levels of labor productivity.

So one of China’s goals is to significantly, basically, strengthen, upgrade the quality of these traditional industries, to make them digital, to make them green, and to radically increase productivity through a large-scale investment wave.

And then, secondly, we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution, which Radhika has spoken about. So the aim in this case is, basically, to divert investment towards the industries that are associated with the next industrial revolution.

The other main growth drivers in the past, alongside this export sector, were obviously real estate, which, I mean, if you look at GDP by expenditure, was accounting probably with household appliances and furniture and household goods and so on, about 26, 27 percent of the economy.

But it’s a sector that’s associated with relatively low productivity, and of course, it was associated with very substantial speculation and generated very considerable financial instability.

So, as Radhika said, there will be, in dealing with this financial crisis, basically an underwriting of existing, of obligations to existing home buyers, and in the future, an attempt to establish a more sustainable housing market.

The other area of the economy was basically this sort of platform economy. But this platform economy was associated with very, very strong tendencies towards monopoly, and in the, about four or five years ago, a series of measures were adopted, basically, to restrict, some aspects of this platform economy, and other areas, like private tutoring, which was generating large disparities in the educational system, and is associated with the fact, that the cost of raising children in China is extremely high. I mean, it’s the second highest in the world after South Korea, actually.

So, these growth drivers, these old growth drivers, are basically seen as not offering potential to sustain the growth of the Chinese economy into the years ahead, and so there’s this attempt to look for new growth drivers. And basically, for that reason, you’ve seen this redirection of investment.

And I think one can distinguish that, from what happened to Japan, because basically, in Japan, industrial investment did not increase, largely, I think, because the profitability of investment was not sufficiently high. And also Japan, in a sense, adopted a neoliberal program. It didn’t implement industrial policies.

Whereas China is seeking to undertake this transformation, basically, through, it’s a kind of supply-side restructuring, driven by industrial policy, and driven by financial policies, providing strategic funding for industrial transformation.

Then linking that also to the transformation of education, to try to ensure that the output of the education system, in terms of skill profiles, and so on, corresponds much, much more closely with the profile of work and employment, with much more emphasis upon STEM, in the context of this new industrial revolution, radically raising productivity, and by radically raising productivity, you increase income, and ultimately, you’ll increase consumption, and so on.

So I think that the Japanification course is not one that China will follow, that China will actually address this need to innovate and transform its industrial system, in order to, in a sense, address the problems that are associated with the earlier drivers of Chinese development.

MICHAEL HUDSON: We probably need a whole other program to talk about the difference in structure. Real estate is the largest sector of every economy, and China is so different from Japan.

The Ginza district in Japan, right around the palace, that small district, was larger than all of the real estate value in California. So, we’re dealing with a huge debt finance explosion there, and then you have the largest collapse of property prices in Japan, everywhere, anywhere in the world.

In a way, what you’ve described brings us back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show, about China’s structure. The effect of the real estate slowdown and falling in prices has a disastrous effect on localities, small villages and towns in China, who are dependent on real estate sales as funding their budget.

So, the real estate crash in China, if we’re talking about what policy is China going to take, how is it going to solve the problem of local budgets without solving it by creating a booming real estate market for towns to sell off their property to developers, and developers to make a profit selling off a property to private buyers, mainly.

I assume they’re not just selling it to the government to make a profit. I think there’s a lot of structure that I’d like to know. I don’t know what it is now, but it’s so different from what you have everywhere else.

I think that really is what I hope will be the focus of our show, the geopolitics of different real estate structures and the real estate tax that goes with it.

RADHIKA DESAI: That’s a really interesting question, and much of that we will be discussing in the second part of this show, which we’ll be recording in a week or so, I think.

But let me maybe then just bring this to a conclusion by simply agreeing with what both of you have said, which is that China has a very good chance, in fact, very likely, China is not going to follow the Japanification model because, as Michael is emphasizing, the structure of China’s economy and the imperatives generated by that structure are very different.

To name just one, if something is not profitable in a capitalist economy, it will not get done. Whereas in the case of the Chinese economy, the Chinese government can always say, well, if it’s necessary, we’ll do it even if it isn’t profitable, because it is necessary for the welfare of the people or the productive capacity of the economy, etc. So, profitability just does not play the role of a brake in the same way as it does in capitalist societies.

Secondly, the role of the state, both in terms of initiating new projects and taking responsibility for new projects, and we can already see in the current NPC and the discussions there that the role of the state is already once again expanding again in China, and it can continue to do so. And I think that’s a very good thing.

And remember also that, Mick, you emphasized in the case of when you were discussing one of the graphs, that the per capita GDP of China today is considerably lower than what it was in Japan, even in the late 80s and early 90s.

And that means that, number one, domestic consumption can be a big stimulus for further economic expansion. And secondly, of course, the industrial opportunities, the opportunities for a new industrial revolution are many, and China in particular, because of the important state role in the Chinese economy, the centrality of the state role in the Chinese economy, and the aim of the Chinese economy and the Chinese economy’s managers to develop China’s productive capacity in whatever way that works, not necessarily through private ownership.

These elements are actually going to ensure that China will exploit the opportunities of the new technologies much more effectively and execute a transition to the next industrial revolution much more successfully, and that will be an important road to avoiding what’s called Japanification.

MICK DUNFORD: You know, I think the difference is that Japan, I thought, in the 1980s was at the technological frontier, and China is not. But just, what Michael was referring to is the fact that in China, local government revenue came to depend to a very considerable extent on what is called land revenue.

You know, basically all land is state-owned, is either state-owned or owned by the rural collectives. But what happened was that if land was converted for use for urbanization, was converted for use for urbanization, for housing, then basically the local government could in effect sell leases, 90-year leases, or depending on the activity, different lengths of lease. They could sell these leases to developers. And then that revenue was used by local government to fund infrastructure.

To some extent that model has come up against limits. And I think, the issue Michael raised really concerns how in future will local government be funded, and will there be a reform in the system of taxation?

Will a property tax be introduced in order to generate government revenue rather than relying upon this land tax? Because of course that did encourage local government to allocate that land to people who are going to build housing for upper-income groups, because the implications for land value were under that situation, they would actually be higher rather than providing that land to construct housing for low income groups.

So, this issue of land revenue is one that has to be addressed basically by someone who’s an expert in public finance.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That should be what we talk about in the next show, I think.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great. So I think that we should bring this part of the show, the first part of this show to an end. And let me just do that by going back to our list of topics.

So just to conclude, we managed to cover the first four, although the question of Japanification and the alleged property bubble will resonate into all the rest of the topics, certainly the question of consumption, exports and China’s new growth strategy. So we will return to it.

But in the next [Geopolitical Economy] Hour, we will be talking about these topics, restricted consumption, exports, new growth strategy, and of course, China’s foreign economic policy.

So thanks very much both. Thanks to all the listeners. And we look forward to seeing you in another week or two. Thank you and goodbye.

Le capitalisme, une histoire de sang, de mensonges et d'horreur ! -- Robert GIL

Par : Robert GIL

Je pourrais ajouter, d'exploitation, de répression, de guerre, de soumission, d'injustice, de manipulation, d'exécution... En fait pour nous occidentaux, le capitalisme a été une grande illusion, la face cachée d'une réalité beaucoup moins glamour. Comme dans tous les tours de prestidigitation et de passe-passe, le temps fait que l'on voit l'envers du décor et les fils qui le soutiennent. En occident, le capitalisme a indéniablement amélioré notre vie quotidienne, et notre existence en général. La partie (...)

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eCONomics Part IV: Interest Rates Manipulation

Par : AHH

In this part: Interest rates manipulation as a way of tackling inflation — one of the most shocking financial scams of all time; plus an update on de-dollarisation and No Plan B for Uncle $laughter

With thanks to our own Colin Maxwell of New Zealand.

Please see: Part 1 ; Part 2Part 3

The duck shooter’s clubhouse on Jekyll Island, Georgia, United States of America

Introduction

It should be of no shock to any of us by now as to the reason WW1 began a very short time after the U$ Fed was incorporated, and this set the tragic pattern for the next 111 years. This tiny group of bankster plutocrats were handed on a plate by Congress a giant counterfeit printing press – a privilege that these thieves would deploy to progressively impoverish the working classes of most of the planet.

I won’t go into this too deeply here as I covered the background of the Frankenstein-like creature from Jekyll Island in the link below – my April 2022 expose’, and the debilitating effect this dreadful bankster construct has had on the global financial scene ever since:

Midnight Train to Georgia

It remains my life’s mission to expose the fact that the Western central banking industry, and its plutocratic owners operating in the shadows, are the head of the human food chain and the underwriters of more than 90% of humanity’s wars, terrorism, and financial impoverishment.

The great news though is that humanity is being thrown a lifeline by the BRICS+/BRI blocs and their related initiatives. Indeed all we have to do is to summon up the presence of mind to recognise this new reality and to reach out and grab the opportunity with both hands. The background of this new global paradigm was explored in Part III of this sequel –

Banking 2.0

The solution will be multi-faceted as it will involve a new global paradigm – never again will a single national currency have dominance – the new system will include a novel trade-only settlement instrument which will be stable, hard backed, and yet still able to provide adequate liquidity for the participating members’ productive economies.

In reality, WW1 never ended – WW2 was a follow-on with a brief respite of barely one generation in between, paving the way for the future hybrid financial, and techno, forever-wars. These, including the COVID debacle and the great poisoning with chemicals and pharmaceutical toxins, are simply a continuation of the same families pulling the strings from the shadows.

This is the business of human butchery and their intentions are becoming more explicit and outrageous as each decade passes by. In every sense of the word, this plutocratic network is a blatant terrorist organisation and needs to be dealt with accordingly. The rules of engagement should be the same and history reminds us that the only sure-fire way to deal with organisations like this is to permanently cut off their funding.

Because the New York Fed is the most outrageous model ever devised and has become the number one money spigot of the globe, this is precisely the place to start. This has never been more urgent as it is painfully obvious that there is a push for another bank run crisis which the owners of the banking cartel think will give them the crisis excuse to usher in a new retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) system where every man and his dog can have an account within the “Federal Reserve” system. This is their grand plan, which if successful would give the commercial banking cartel total control of every aspect of our lives through a social credit control and tracking system of all retail account holders.

Prof Richard A. Werner of the University of Winchester

1. Professor Richard Werner

“empirical evidence is that interest rates are a lagging indicator and a farcically ineffective monetary tool”

paraphrased/quoted from… https://soranomics.com/#content_20_fancybox-8

As Werner points out, it is not interest rates, but bank credit that determines economic growth, simply because ~97% of the money supply in our Western fiat currencies is created out of thin air by privately owned commercial banks.

There is zero basis for the official narrative that higher interest rates lead to lower growth and that low interest rates lead to high growth.

As with most aspects of eCONomics the quickest way to get straight to the truth is to simply assume the 180˚ polar opposite of the official narratives. Interest rates are simply not useful as a monetary policy tool – PERIOD! (23:30)

Interest rates actually follow growth – so where on earth did this idea come from that interest rates are this key variable? – it is not based on empirical evidence but on the concept of equilibrium which is based on no less than 8 assumptions none of which hold up in the real world…

  1. Perfect information
  2. Complete markets
  3. Perfect competition
  4. Instantaneous price adjustment
  5. Zero transaction costs
  6. No time restraints
  7. Profit maximisation of rational agents
  8. Nobody is influenced in any way by the actions of others

(29:00) The methodology in Economics is the Deductive Method – reverse engineering AKA Charlatanism.


2. eCONomics

eCONomics — the pioneer pseudo-science that paved the way for other disciplines to follow as a tool of central planning and globalist agendas

Karl Popper

Karl Popper called this the ‘immunising stratagem’ which scientists fancied could guard their theories from being challenged by the use of reverse engineering in what became known as the ‘deductive approach.’  This is my interpretation of the process…

  1. Predetermine a conclusion that supports the banking cartels’ grand theft from Mainstreet
  2. Invent a model that can give you that contrived conclusion
  3. Identify the false maxims that can propagate the lie and present them as facts
  4. Present these steps in the reverse order
  5. The network that has the key to the giant printing press then buys up all of the networks and agencies required to manufacture the narrative, even when it is nothing more than a bunch of myths premised on deliberate lies

3. How high would hikes need to go to arrest inflation?

High enough that they cripple the real economy before there is any ‘measurable effect’ (sic) on what they labelled ‘inflation’

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti asked… “whether man must burn down his house to roast his pig…”

The current Western neo-classical monetary policy used to tackle inflation is precisely that scenario.

Worse still, history illustrates that interest rate hikes have to be so utterly brutal that they need to be at the very least at the level of the true inflation rate, or higher – Paul Volker did this in the 1980s when the rates were pushed above 20%. This was construed as successful from the point of view that it appeared to halt inflation when all it had done was destroy enough of the economy and liquidity to make sure ‘inflation’ was halted.

Ronny Raygun with Paul Volcker – confirmed in 1979 by the Senate as Fed Chair

In 1979 the federal funds rate had averaged 11.2% and Volker took them to a peak of 20% in March 1980. The prime rate topped out at 21.5% in 1981, which heralded (surprise, surprise, NOT) a rise in unemployment to over 10% and the 1980-1982 depression.

“Volcker’s Federal Reserve board elicited the strongest political attacks and most widespread protests in the history of the Federal Reserve (unlike any protests experienced since 1922), due to the effects of high-interest rates on the construction, farming, and industrial sectors, culminating in indebted farmers driving their tractors into Washington, D.C. and blockading the Eccles Building.
US monetary policy eased in 1982, helping lead to a resumption of economic growth.”… Wiki quote.

Although I am a great admirer of Ron Paul – IMO the quote below reveals that even he was not aware of the utter falsehood of attempting to use rate hikes as a constructive monetary tool to address inflation.

“Being in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s and serving on the House Banking Committee, I met and got to question several Federal Reserve chairmen: Arthur Burns, G. William Miller, and Paul Volcker. Of the three, I had the most interaction with Volcker. He was more personable and smarter than the others, including the more recent board chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.”

Volcker may well have been smartest, but in my opinion all three wreaked havoc on Mainstreet and massively rewarded the financial economy at the expense of families, SMEs, and the productive economy. As Volcker aged, he became more critical of the banking industry but that was long after he had spent his career indulging and implementing most of the destructive hoaxes of neo-classical eCONomics.

Other features of Volcker’s career…

  • A prominent member of the Trilateral Commission which was founded by David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Jimmy Carter
  • A long association with the Rockefeller family including in his position at Chase Bank
  • A long-standing member of the Bilderberg Group

SUMMARY:  interest rate hikes are not an effective monetary tool to address inflation – on the contrary, they instantly feed inflation just as hikes in energy prices do – you do not even require the most basic economic nouse to understand this principle – it should be self-evident to anyone with an IQ even approaching room temperature.


4. Safe Havens in times of financial strife – where are they now?

In the 1980s the level of total debt was so much less than it is now that the entire financial meltdown was at a totally different level. Today just the Govt debt alone is a death spiral in itself, with an extra $1 trillion added every 100 days.

In 2024 the U$ will have to issue $10 Trillion in Treasury paper to finance more deficits and to roll over old paper at much higher interest rates. The revised cost of this debt will rise from ~$1 Trillion to $1.5 Trillion. This is a debt spiral where more and more money has to be borrowed just to pay the interest back – paying down debt is not even on the radar.

All of the big 5 Western fiat currencies have this problem including the three sometimes referred to as ‘default currencies’ – the dollar, the Yen, and the Swiss Franc – these used to be seen as safe havens to hide when the financial/geopolitical shite hit the fan. Now none of these are safe any longer, and so the pressure will really come onto these currencies as there are now viable alternatives that countries can use in their accelerating de-dollarisation strategies – these include…

  • Gold stacking by central banks — this is at an all-time historical high at around 1000 tons per annum for the last few years – this is a no-brainer, especially now that Gold is a first-tier asset under the new Basel III regulations – this facilitates the process, out of plain sight.
  • Silver – although not monetized like gold under the new international banking regulations, at a 90:1 valuation compared to gold at a historical average ratio of ~16:1 this has to render silver the most undervalued commodity on the planet – silver makes for a fascinating story given that it is both a monetary and industrial commodity and the fact that 85% is mined as a by-product of other PMs. Silver is the absolute wildcard when the big reveal of the Western fiat currencies commences – at 16:1 with gold at $2,500 oz that would put silver at $156, with gold at $3,000 – silver would be at $187, gold at $5,000 – $312, and at $10,000 – $624! Another way of looking at it is that silver has basically been demonetised since 1873, and if it reverted back to its primary historical value as a monetary metal, then it would be around 1/10 of the value of gold per oz, which with gold at $2000 per oz, that would price silver at $200. IOW two entirely different methods render a similar result.
  • Any and all commodities that are needed in the future
  • Crypto-currencies — if you trust them enough – although arguably some are more trustworthy than certain national currencies – they also carry the added bonus of being another way of disenfranchising the private banking cartel


To me the Western safe havens no longer exist, as the main Western fiat currency economies now face a very unpleasant binary choice between either…

A. Severe hyper-inflationary depression, or
B. Severe and extended debt liquidating depression


5. A tribute to Pepe Escobar’s recent work in Russia

What a privilege for us all to have such direct access to Pepe’s insights. I regard him as the undisputed global high priest in terms of geopolitical analysis and journalism. I am most certainly not alone in this view, judging by the audiences he pulls in terms of readers and interviews with people of note in this fight for multi-polarity and who are involved in developing the architecture of a new paradigm in global socio-economic methods and relations.

His audience with Glazyev, whom I have enormous respect for as an honest and courageous economist, was particularly intriguing, and not the least because some of the revelations were done off the record. My own personal hypothesis is that the entire development of the new trade instrument is making great progress, but that there is no point in rushing the announcement of the final details, as long as there is still ample opportunity for BRICS+ countries to gold stack… see above chapter (4) first bullet point.

Of course, this opportunity is entirely courtesy of the U$ obsession with massively shorting gold in this pathetic attempt to hide the plummeting purchasing power of their currency. It could be any day now when an entity insists on a large physical tonnage and the physically driven price discovery process begins. When that happens the gold price will break out and it will be time for the various player’s hands to finally be revealed.

In the meantime, the RoW carries on carefully checking out further de-dollarisation strategies and putting the finishing touches on the new trade instrument. As I said previously, the BRICS+ bloc has an enormously strong hand, whilst all the West has is the grim reality of an impending debt spiral.

Glazyev sees the next stage as detaching commodity prices from the dollar and quoting them in other units. This involves the new model based on two different baskets – a basket of currencies of member countries, and also a basket of exchange commodities. The fact that this currency will be so inherently stable will make it more attractive than the dollar, the pound or the euro.

Technically the trade currency instrument is almost ready, and the process only requires the political will and acceptance by India and China. In the meantime, the transition to settlements in national currencies is well underway.

The trade instrument will be backed not only by the national currencies but by the huge reserves of the nominated commodities that combine to back up the new international settlement currency. This new currency is not a substitute for national currencies.

Once all of the technical issues are finalised, they will prepare an international treaty that will be open to accession by all other countries wanting to join. Glazyev is clearly in no hurry and has put a time frame of within 2 years from when he made these announcements back in late October 2023.

Gazyev listed these advantages…

  • Guarantees are created against attempts by outsider countries to interfere in mutual member relations
  • Each member country’s trade and position in the financial world is much more secure
  • Gives all members an opportunity for equal trade, economic, and investment opportunities
  • The distribution of commission income will be regulated by an international treaty
  • All of this will be transparent to make certain that no country abuses the issue of the trade currency


5. SUMMARY – The long and the short – literally!

None of this reality is being addressed by Uncle Slaughter and clearly, they have no plan B. A giveaway is the fact that actual military spending for 2022 ended up at a mind-boggling $1.537 Trillion – more than twice the publicly acknowledged level. If nominal GDP is around that $20 trillion then that military budget is a truly obscene 7% of GDP, and equal to more than the next 40 biggest spenders combined.

In fact, the next 40 countries spending totalled $1.431 trillion – some $100 billion short of the U$’s $1.537T and with Romania coming in at #39 in the list at $5.2 billion, it could well be the equivalent of the combined 60 or more highest military spenders.

I eventually got sick of adding and gave it up – besides, I was in dire need of a wee dram.

Colin Maxwell
( March 12, 2024)

Soutien des États-Unis à Israël : la faute à un puissant lobby ?

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La chute de l'URSS et l'illusion du paradis capitaliste -- Robert GIL

Par : Robert GIL

Les maîtres de l'Occident collectif ont mené habilement une guerre (froide) de l'information contre l'URSS. Diverses unités de la future cinquième colonne ont été soutenues et constituées : des dissidents aux séparatistes nationaux en passant par des « mafieux » purs et simples. L'opposition religieuse a également été soutenue de l'étranger. Les baptistes, les pentecôtistes et les adventistes menèrent des activités subversives actives. Des imprimeries clandestines furent créées. Des dissidents orthodoxes sont (...)

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Banking 2.0

Par : AHH

A New Global Trade Currency Paradigm and the End of the Era of Dominant Western-based Fiat Currencies

With thanks to our own Colin Maxwell of New Zealand.

Please read in order: Part 1 ; Part 2

Preamble

My apologies in advance to the vibrant GS community for Part III being so wordy. I have really struggled with this task, as the entire subject is so monumental in all of its interconnected elements.

To try to avoid it becoming too tedious I have broken it down into multiple chapters to try to make the weight of the subject matter a bit more palatable, and to hopefully avoid losing readers within the first few paragraphs.

None of this is intended as gospel or sermon, but simply as a discussion document that endeavours to pull together as many of the current contrasting thought threads as possible.

It is also part of my own personal intellectual journey, and extremely steep learning curve. I learn the most by writing on subject matter like this.

Critique and suggestions are very much welcomed.

1. Operation Sandman – to use or not to use?

In 2022 the Saudi MOF revealed in a WEF/Davos interview that ‘Operation Sandman’ was activated and that the KSA would now gladly accept all currencies for settling oil transactions.

The theory was that when it is properly launched, at least 100 countries would conduct a coordinated sell off of their trillions of dollars worth of US government debt to break the U$ dominance of the global economy. This would immediately open the door for a completely new financial hierarchy.

According to Stephen Jen, CE of Eurizon SLJ Capital, the share of global reserves held in U$ dollars eroded in 2022 at 10x the average pace of the last 20 years, and stood at 47% – a much lower estimate than that of the IMF. This represents a plunge, especially in relation to the 15 year trend.

Multiple factors include…

  • Gold being declared a Tier 1 asset under Basel III rules from January 2023* – although this intention was announced right back in 2012 in the Lehman aftermath
  • Digital currencies
  • Strong political elements including the US-China relations worsening
  • Avoidance of future sanctions
  • Avoiding reserves being stolen
  • Aggressive interest rate hikes by the U$ widening the gap in exchange rates between other countries and the US

<< *This was effectively a move from Tier 3 class for commercial banks holding it as an asset on their balance sheets. The BCBS (Basel Committee for Bank Supervision) is arguably the highest global authority on banking supervision, with the key role of defining capital requirements.

Ironically with the latest developments with the BRICS+ bloc and the revelations of just how precarious some of the Western fiat countries are in being underpinned by their ability to sell government bonds, the new physical gold Tier 1 designation could really put the skids under this  entire fiat edifice.

Prior to this new ruling, banks were very much dis-incentivised to hold gold, and instead to hold risky assets such as equity capital, currencies, and debt instruments. IMO opinion the fiat currencies carry significant risk already, let alone when the new hard backed BRICS+ instrument comes into play. >>

This erosion of support for the existing reserve main currencies will inevitably lead to…

  • Lower stock prices
  • Higher bond yields
  • More expensive imports
  • The US geopolitical standing taking a big hit

2. Why I doubt that Operation Sandman will be invoked…

a crucial historical review

It is a pointless exercise and counterproductive for the entire planet, including the BRICS+, and the RoW to do this in unison. They can all simply gradually dedollarise by stealth, and in doing so maximise the benefits whilst transitioning in an orderly fashion.

Besides, the US is massively naked shorting gold anyway, in the vain hope of hiding the massively eroding purchasing power of king dollar. This is a godsend for the RoW central banks – the US is idiotically accommodating their rival’s gold bullion stacking binge at massively discounted and contrived synthetic prices – they must be laughing all the way to their central banks.

For more than half a century, since Nixon took the dollar off the international gold standard, all currencies became fiat. Prior to that event, they all were hard backed and most of all  by that barbarous relic, gold. The way things are panning out the 50 year experiment of a non hardbacked reserve currency is coming to a close very soon. In the context of some 5000 years of financial history this is barely a drop in the bucket.

Essentially, from 1971 on, there was a divergence of investment in the U$, and many other Western financial systems, away from the industrial capitalism of the real world economy, into what would turn out to be ruinous financial capitalism. Surely fiat currencies, coupled with a greedy obsession with financial rentier capitalism, is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

3. Is The U$ Pinning its Hopes On Discovering Alchemy?

Europe’s tiny central bank gold holdings are probably accurate and likely not rehypothecated to any great extent, but the same cannot be said for the US’s claimed 8133 tons of US gold holdings.

It is almost certain that there are multiple ownership claims on each ounce, and this is why global central banks are quietly repatriating physical bullion. The same with silver, as the paper claims for each physical ounce are at least 90:1. The silver price discovery market is even more broken with the true G:S ratio needing to be more in the realms of between 8 -16:1.

Texas is very wisely building its permanent state depository and recategorising gold as legal tender. They do not trust the centralised system, and now at least six other states are looking to follow their lead, because they too are losing trust in the federal system, and in the management of US Treasury gold.

If Texas doesn’t trust the U$ system, then why on earth would the RoW?

4. Foreign Exchange Reserves Quietly Converted Into Gold Bars

It turns out that the massive global shadow banking industry, and with gold being auto-categorised as foreign exchange reserve, that this combination has hidden the fact that large swaths of foreign exchange reserves are being converted into physical gold.

This trend dates back to at least 2010 but really ramped up when the US weaponised the dollar in March 2022 with Russia’s SMO in Ukraine.

This makes a ton of sense (literally) for the RoW, as it amounts to de-dollarisation by stealth – converting incumbent US dollar debt into stacks of debt-free bullion.

Furthermore, this sanction-proofs potentially trillions of excess reserves – a no-brainer when the entire globe is in such a state of financial and military turmoil.

Estimates are that China has around $6 trillion in excess FX reserves giving a truly staggering gold/GDP ratio compared to Europe with a pitiful 4% average and the US potentially massively negative.

Robert Triffin, Belgian-American economist (1911–1993)

5. Another new Global Paradigm — no national currency having the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of reserve currency status

indeed a first for humanity…

Why on earth would any country, especially China, want its currency to have overwhelming reserve currency status anyway? A very bright spark, Robert Triffin, predicted back in 1959 that the Bretton woods system, with the U$ dollar as the world’s utterly dominant reserve currency, was doomed because of fundamental flaws.

Triffin was right – the Belgian born Yale professor predicted that by definition a reserve currency would run increasing deficits. The more popular a reserve currency is, the higher its exchange rate tends to be and the less competitive its domestic exporting industries become.

This means trade deficits for the country issuing the currency. They love the effectively ‘interest free loan’ generated by selling their currency, or in essence their debt, to other countries, but at the same time they need to raise capital for dollar denominated bonds. This is part of the paradox – cheap sources of capital and positive trade balances rarely coincide.

6. Implications of Gold Backing – a national currency versus a trade only international instrument 

History has proven that gold is inappropriate for domestic monetary backing. Michael Hudson covered this on page 433 of his epic book Super Imperialism quoted/paraphrased…

‘Freeing domestic credit from gold backing has been a precondition for promoting rising employment and production of goods and services. But in the international setting gold backing is a positive because it serves as a very real constraint on trade imbalances but not on domestic production and employment.

You could say that Europe and Japan abandoned gold prematurely before developing an alternative to the U$ dollar or the dollar-proxy SDRs issued by the IMF, as an effective arm of the U$ government.

Only the U$ has shown the will to create international structures, and to restructure them to fit its financial ‘needs’ as they devolved from a hyper-creditor to a hyper-debtor nation.

Removing the gold convertibility of the dollar enabled them to unilaterally pursue protectionist trade and cold war military practices simultaneously. The US claim that their surplus dollars act as a ‘growth locomotive’ for other countries by expanding their credit creating powers – as if they need US dollars to do this.

Meanwhile they were able to derail foreign attempts to break free from what has become a tidal wave of US deficit dollars. History will reflect on the remarkable asymmetry  between the U$ and the RoW.” … end quote.

Of course public utility models, like the incredibly successful Commonwealth Bank of Australia, prove that assumption to be patently and tragically false, as this model went on to be arguably the most successful public utility equivalent to a reserve bank in world history.

7. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia — a Pubic Banking Utility Masterstroke

I have included this long chapter, because it is actually an integral part of this entire subject of eCONomics – which is to say that everything about neo-classical economics is based on false maxims and lies, designed to enrich the financial kleptocrats ensconced at the head of the human food chain.

This is integral because it illustrates the fact that in so many cases countries do not even need to borrow from abroad if they effectively deploy the PBS at reserve bank or treasury level. This is another key piece in the global jigsaw puzzle where the global economy could be transformed into a completely new egalitarian paradigm.

The public banking model in itself would become a huge source of liquidity and capital for the entire domestic economy. This would replace the status quo con where nations allow a parasitic global banking cabal to constantly thieve from them like a giant squid, sucking the lifeblood out of the entire nation.

This concept is extremely simple – it means that the public creates their own money and liquidity and to reap the benefits of any interest paid domestically, rather than third parties creating that money and subsequently allowing them to charge us as a nation for that privilege. In the current broken model, we annually allow billions of dollars to disappear overseas into these parasitic global banking institutions.

The exciting part of it all this is that incredibly successful public banking utility models have already been tried and proven to work, and to generate huge sustainable wealth for entire national economies.

One of the most stunning examples was the Commonwealth Bank of Australia which Ellen Brown details in her awesome book ‘The Public Bank Solution‘. Of course, history informs us of the tragedy that this incredible model didn’t last – it actually became a victim of its own astonishing success, and it was destroyed by the combined might of the parasitic global central banking cartel.

While the US was setting up its privately owned central bank, for the Federal Reserve, to become a parasite on  the productive economy of most of the world, Australia was at the exact same time taking the bold step of establishing a PBS bank that issued credit for the sole benefit of – wait for it – Australians!

The huge irony is that Denison Miller, the bank’s first Governor, was allowed to try this model only because he was considered by the other existing bankers of the day to be one of their own thieving ilk, and that therefore they would be able to keep this new bank in line.

In essence, Miller understood how the commercial banks thieved from the nation at large and he set about creating this new model that could very rapidly revive a struggling economy and create long-term wealth for the entire Australian society. The first branch opened in Melbourne in July 1912 and Miller was the only employee.

Somehow he had persuaded the Treasury to advance him £10,000 as seeding money – the first and last time this version of the CBA was lent any money. Of course, this money didn’t even exist – it was simply created as a ledger entry.

Miller subsequently promised that the CBA would at all times be the people’s bank. It slowly dawned on the private bankers, who were so intent on having to guard against the socialisation of their own banks, that they completely underestimated the power of an orthodox banker who simply mobilised the resources of the entire country to enable the CBA to quickly grow into one of the greatest banking models the world had ever seen.

The bank began advancing massive sums of money simply on the credit of the Australian Nation. An early example was the Melbourne Board of Works which went to the market for money to redeem existing loans and to raise new capital – normally they relied on loans from the viper’s nest residing in The City of London. Instead, this time they approached Dennison Miller and were loaned £3 million at 4% – this was an enormous sum at that time.


In 1914 during WW1, citizens started rushing into their banks to withdraw their funds – Miller quickly put a stop to these bank runs by simply declaring that the CBA would support any banks in difficulty – that was the end of the panic immediately. It was a dramatic demonstration of the power of the Govt to stabilise the financial system without relying on any other parties.

In just 2 years from the creation of this bank, Miller was basically in control of financing Australia’s war effort and ZERO money was borrowed from overseas. It was the first bank in Australia to receive a Federal Govt guarantee and offered both savings and general transactional services. By 1912 it took over the State Savings Bank of Tasmania, and by the following year, it had branches in all 6 states.

In 1920 it began acquiring central bank powers and took over the responsibility of issuing Australian bank notes from the Dept of the Treasury. In 1924 a board was appointed with 6 members as the new governing body. During WW2 emergency legislation was passed and the CBA was granted almost full central bank powers.

The CBA was a remarkable success, but was subsequently seen to be threatening the hegemony of the City of London thieves. Prior to the establishment of the CBA, London capital had always dominated the Australian financial system.

This was  the colonial model of the time – ie financial colonialism, where the colonies were granted the right to “govern” themselves – provided they obeyed the financial rules of the COL (City of London) – shame about this acronym!. As such the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street (The Bank of England) presided over the financial dynasty of the empire.

Australia was a debtor nation until WW1 when it suddenly demonstrated its ability to independently finance its war effort. It also used the CBA to finance its own shipping line which was poised to smash the City’s shipping monopoly – the old bitch from Threadneedle Street was not amused.

Miller calmly told the big bankers at a dinner in London that Australia could meet any demand, simply because it had the capital of the entire country behind it. When he arrived home in Aus he was asked by a deputation of the unemployed for a loan of £350 million for productive purposes – he advanced the money immediately, and news of this caused panic within the COL, as they realised that if other countries adopted this model their entire financial edifice could collapse.

The COL immediately set about devising a plan that would enable overseas national institutions to be drawn into its squid-like network. The plan was to centralise all banking throughout the empire over to the supervision of the Bank of England – it would become the super banker’s bank.

The horrible old lady got her way and as such the modern parasitic and hegemonic central banking model was born. The head of the bloodsucking squid would eventually moved from London to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel Switzerland – a model originally designed to launder Nazi war loot pilfered from their rampage across Europe during WW2.

This is the disgustingly parasitic model that survives to this day, and New Zealand (NZ) is a paid-up member of this bankster club too – our RBNZ dances to their tune and as a result we squander billions of dollars annually overseas to thieving institutions when we could create our own money and credit just as the CBA did in Australia.

Sergey Glazyev, Russian politician and economist, with Vladimir Putin

8. Whats is the new BRICS+ Instrument to be – a basket of 20 commodities including gold, or gold alone?

Some very astute financial analysts, including  Alasdair Macleod have thought all along that Sergey Glazyev, the Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union, was never that serious about the new trade instrument being backed by a basket of around 20 major commodities including gold and silver.

Their theory was that this multiple hard-backing would be too hard to bring to fruition and to administer. Personally, I always liked the idea because I thought it could have had a smoothing effect on the volatility of the trade instrument. This would be very much the case until the market discovery of G & S finally kicked in to properly expose the true purchasing power of the dominant Western fiat currencies.

Certainly though, the gold only backing could be easily instigated, with a brand new issuer of this currency that would not be taking a central bank style role, but to simply become an institute of issuance.

Gazyev has publicly written in a Moscow based business paper that it is time for the Russian rouble to be on a gold standard – given this was co-written by the deputy of the EUEA Committee, this must carry some weight, but it was written back before the Johannesburg BRICS+ Summit meeting, in which no decision or announcement was made about the new instrument.

Also at that time there were statements from Indian officials that there was no way they would go along with this gold-backed currency. Remember too that BRICS+ requires a unanimous vote for this new currency instrument to be accepted.

Also Lavrov has mentioned that Russia had accumulated a large quantity of Indian rupees which were difficult to convert – a new trade instrument would make the  process of trade a breeze, and stop the third party ticket clipping too. No sooner was this intent announced than both the odious Yellen and Kissinger visited Beijing to try to pressure China from joining in this new initiative, presumerably using the argument that it would undermine their export market.

It appears that China is more concerned about the vulnerability of the new BRICS+ members stress arising from high interest rate loans, than they are about the welfare of the Western hegemon – who could blame them for that – the economic hybrid war waged against the RoW is hardly a secret.

Also the new trade-only currency is very different from normal bank credit, as this form of credit is self-extinguishing when trades are completed. I assume the importer would get access to the trade currency through its central bank. This would be credit created on the back of this new currency and tied to gold, not just created out of thin air.

Presumably this would make the politics a lot more simple because there would be no interference with the management of the individual member’s sovereign currencies. This also explains why the idea of the new trade instrument being just a mix of all of these currencies was probably a bad idea.

This system would also have required endless reconfiguring as a growing procession of new members joined up. I view the 153 BRI members as a precursor to a massive watershed of new BRICS+ members adding exponentially to the size of this new bloc.

Incidentally, the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) and BRICS+ are becoming more and more aligned too, with the SCO having nine full members, two observer nations, fourteen dialog members and another six pending applications, giving a grand total of 31 nations as members and associates. Kuwait, UAE, Maldives, Myanmar and Bahrain are all new dialog members just since May 2023


9. China is under no illusions about the serial economic hitman antics of the Western financial hegemon

They have witnessed the Latin American (LatAm) crises of the 1970s US orchestrated pump and dump schemes that effectively bankrupted their victim nations and allowed U$ corporations to pick up assets and public utilities for pennies on the pound.

Closer to home was the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which originated in Thailand with the collapse of the Thai baht and the capital flight after they were forced to float because of their lack of foreign currency to support the peg to the U$ dollar.

This spread quickly to many other southeast (SE) Asian countries and later to Japan and South Korea as well. The result was slumping currencies, stock markets, other asset prices, and a massive rise in debt with debt:GDP ratios rising by 100-180% in all of the largest economies.

China assisted in the damage control by making $4 billion available in bailout money, and by not devaluing its own currency. However the tide of capital fleeing these countries was not stopped and the authorities had to cease defending their exchange rates and allow their currencies to float. Their foreign liabilities grew massively in domestic currency terms, causing even more extended carnage.

The  ASEAN countries believed that the well co-ordinated manipulation of their currencies was a deliberate attempt to destabilise their economies. The Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad accused George Soros and other currency traders of ruining Malaysia’s economy with currency speculation.

Long story short, the carnage from this Western contrived pump and dump debacle was right on their doorstep and it remains very vivid in the minds of all of these SE Asian BRICS+ bloc members.

The NDB (New Development Bank) was tasked with helping to finance developing countries, and Russia in 2023 offered 25-50,000 tons of free grain to six struggling African nations.

In short it is obvious that China sees the real priority is to support Russia and the BRICS+ bloc, together in mutual cooperation in a 21st Century industrial revolution for the benefit of all member countries, their productive economies, and to build sustainable future wealth.

Halford Mackinder’s Heartland Theory: the Afro-Asian “World-Island” at permanent struggle with the Rimlands

10. Mackinder’s 1904 theory was right – the ‘World Island’ he predicted has indeed become a reality.

This could well be recorded for posterity as the major geopolitical pivot in the history of our species.

Now we await the announcement of the new hard backed trade instrument as soon as the BRICS+ nations are satisfied with their bullion stacking, and a non synthetic market driven price discovery for gold and silver takes place. IMO it will work admirably because a better alternative to the unbacked fiat countries will be, not only available, but utterly compelling for trade settlement purposes, but also in terms of stable and secure reserves.

The US is in an impossible debt trap now and the Fed has lost control – the cost of credit is too high for the massive amount of debt entrenched in the system and if the dollar weakens, inflation will be off to the races even further.

Official inflation figures are a complete croc anyway, and as John Williams reported 5 months ago for August 2023, when the official CPI was headlined at 3.7% YOY, his estimate was 11.5%. If the changes weren’t made to the calculation formula between the 80s and the early 2000s, they would be forced to report the double digit number.

When the inflation figure is manipulated to this degree it means that the Fed is in reality, operating outside of the price stability mandate. Given that employment figures are completely fictitious too, that many part time jobs are included in the total, and people no longer looking for jobs are excluded in the formula, this figure is a complete croc too.

To me this means that the 100% privately owned Fed is not operating within any effective mandate whatsoever, and even more outrageous is the fact it hasn’t had a proper audit for over 70 years!


11. Has the U$ and the West reached peak stupidity yet?

No, it seems they are still working on it – figures below are from…

US Debt Clock.org

  • US National debt $34.34 Trillion – 123% of GDP
  • National debt per citizen $102,000
  • National debt per taxpayer $ $265,000
  • Social Security Liability $26.6 Trillion
  • Medicare Liability $40.8 Trillion
  • Unfunded Liabilities $213 Trillion
  • Liability per citizen $633,000
  • Liability per taxpayer ~$850,000
  • Student debt $1.7 Trillion = per student $38,900
  • Credit card debt #1.38 trillion = per holder $8,131

To try to put the public debt into perspective I compared the US External National debt to the highest 30 debtor nations of the world. I took out the 17 of those that were NIIP positive (Net International Investment Position) – ie net external assets less liabilities, and at the current $34.34 trillion, this was more than double the debt of all the rest  of the remaining 13 net indebted countries combined.

On present trends by 2031 every single penny of tax revenue will go just to pay interest on debt and spending on social security, which is already in a $70 trillion dollar hole.

Even more crazy is the fact that the U$ informed Saudi Arabia of its intention to transition into ‘green’ energy ASAP, when the KSA was the key lynchpin to saving the petrodollar, which was in turn the only possible saviour of U$ reserve currency status.

One of the common criticisms of BRICS+ bloc is its incredible diversity – I see this diversity as a strength, with each country bringing varying degrees of raw materials, energy resources, manufacturing prowess, and logistics, to the table, in a giant bloc that is no longer beholden to the West.

12. Overseas Investment in the US

Around $33 Trillion in total – made up of…
— $7.5T in short term investments – bank deposits, treasury bills, and corporate bills
— $14.5 is invested in equities and the balance in Treasury bonds

If the confidence in the U$ economy and its fiat currency starts to slide, will these foreigners stay in these investments if they have viable alternatives? Some of this $33T will obviously flee into gold. Some will go into China because with its massive infrastructural investments in Africa, Asia, and LatAm they will be seeking these capital inflows. Some of this capital will flow into entities stockpiling commodities, as this is a hedge against the fiat currencies’ declining purchasing power.

The West is hamstrung though, as it probably has at least 10,000 tons of gold with multiple ownership, as so much has been swapped and leased out.

Investing in real estate in countries where their currencies plummet can be problematic too. History showed that rents in Germany in the 1920s fell so much in real terms that a property could become a liability because maintenance and ownership costs could overtake income. This effect does not happen with money held in gold and silver. In a currency crisis this effect can become a deterrence to invest in some normally reasonably hard asset classes.


Conclusion

Clearly this monumental transition won’t be just about sound money and economic principles. This fix requires genuine statesman and the governance structures that have their citizens and nations egalitarian and long term interests at heart. This is evident within the RoW and BRICS+ governance and leaders, but is sadly lacking within in the Western train wreck.

Tragically it seems that the West will need to comprehensively crash and burn before the political appetite ousts the current treasonous bunch from office.  Of course, there remains the danger during the transition period, of even more dangerous tyrants gaining power.

I predict an imminent watershed of U$ states seceding from the Union without radical changes in the behaviour of central government.  So much for Uncle $laughter’s obsession with endeavouring to carve up the Russian Federation like a side of beef for the taking – the shoe could well end up on the other foot.

The BRICS+ bloc members don’t even need to interfere, as the West is doing far more to self-destruct than if all of their rivals combined together to deliberately try to undermine the hegemon.

I think the formal announcement of the new trade instrument will only eventuate when the BRICS+ bloc members have completed their bullion stacking, and as the new physical market discovery process begins in earnest.

The entire process to date amounts to a period of ~17 years or so. The new bloc has had all that time to carefully study historical models, and to design the new functional model accordingly.

Methinks they will get it right, especially since they hold a full hand of trump cards – including the left and right bowers, the Joker (Mr Putin) and enormous stacks of chips on the table as well.

Colin Maxwell

Haiti – A Paradise for State Crime

Par : AHH

Haiti: shaping the terrain for massive exploitation and extraction of huge hydrocarbon reserves

For GlobalSouth.co by Peter Koenig
Economist, Geopolitical Analyst
26 February 2024

In his recent article “The Destabilization of Haiti: Anatomy of a Military Coup d’Etat“, Professor Michel Chossudovsky memorializes 29 February 2024 as the 20th anniversary of the coup d’État against Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

He also describes the military motives for controlling Haiti, namely to destabilize the country and to plunge it into constant chaos. This is precisely what has happened. Haiti is in a constant state of near absolute poverty – by far the poorest country in all Latin America – according to official UN / World Bank indices.

Is there a reason?

As we will see, Haiti is also one of the world’s richest countries, per capita, judged by available natural resources – oil and gas. Discovered before the 2010 earthquake and confirmed by the tremendous 7.0 Richter seism.

Haiti’s Potential Hydrocarbon Deposits

The Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), issued in May 1980 a report under the Caribbean Development and Cooperation Committee (CDCC), describing the likelihood of large oil deposits in the Caribbean, including off-shore of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (See this) Haiti is also said to have trillions of dollars-worth of off-shore natural gas. (See this)

These discoveries were likely made in the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps earlier, by US satellite imaging. US satellites have mapped the world for hydrocarbon resources already at least 50 years ago. Such information used to be available on internet – no longer.


Brief Haitian History and Background

François Duvalier, also known as Papa Doc, served as the president of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971. He was succeeded by his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed “Baby Doc”.

The Duvalier dynasty was an autocratic hereditary dictatorship, indiscriminately killing people who dared interfere with their government style. The dynasty empire lasted almost 29 years, from 1957 until 1986, spanning the rule of the father-and-son duo, François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. Both served the United States’ political and economic interests.

The sociopolitical situation in Haiti deteriorated seriously under the regime of Baby Doc and his powerful wife. In 1986, President Reagon asked Jean-Claude to leave Haiti, so that the US could “help install” a more stable and serious government. In February 1986 Baby Doc fled to France in a US Airforce jet.

The end of the Duvalier dynasty brought hope for “freedom” and democracy to the Haitian people. There was a succession of short-lived Presidents until 1991, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was first elected in February 1991. His Presidency lasted 234 days, when a brief military government took over.

In the ten years following Mr. Aristide’s first election, the US-supported political turmoil in Haiti, with a succession of Heads of State, during which Mr. Aristide was four times elected President.

His last Presidency started in February 2001 and ended 3 years later, when Mr. Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected President, was quietly deposed by a US-guided coup on 29 February 2004 and deported to South Africa, where he presumably still lives in exile. He was discouraged by the US State Department from returning to Haiti.

This coup was planned well in advance, by such unlikely allies, as progressive “socialist” President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – Lula, for short – and George W. Bush, both then Presidents of their respective countries – Brazil and United States.

By now we know that Lula has nothing of progressive, and even less of “socialist” in him. He is and has been totally sold to the usurping west, to Wall Street and the IMF – and that already during his first two terms as President of Brazil, 2003 – 2011.

Both, Lula and Bush are traitors of their countries – but Lula, a make-believe socialist — has deeply betrayed his country during his first two terms, and now, since 1 January 2023, in his third term, but also the people of Haiti.

After associating with Wall Street and the IMF during his first two terms, Lula is again allying with the money brokers – the debt machines, as one may call them.

Toussaint l’Ouverture (1743–1803) Haitian statesman and general

Humiliation of the French and Exceptionalism

Remember – during the French Revolution (1789-99), French black slaves in Haiti launched the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, a former slave and black general of the French Army. After 12 years of struggle and conflict, Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces were defeated, and on 1 January 1804 Haiti declared her sovereign independence.

Haiti, thus, became the first independent nation of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the first country in the Americas to eliminate slavery. Haiti is the only state in history established by a successful slave revolt. See Wikipedia for more details.

In the 1980s, with close to 200 years of independence (on January 1, 2024 Haiti celebrated 220 years of independence), a black, sovereign, autonomous island in the Caribbean was perceived as a “danger” for the Unted States’ “National Security”. There was already a “Communist Cuba” to deal with just 90 miles (150 km) from the southern Florida border. A black independent, uncontrolled, Haiti was beyond limits for a still racist white US supremacy.

Plus, at that time, Haiti’s riches in petrol and gas were already known to Washington, though, most likely not to Haiti.

Thus, the US, French and Canada ganged up against Haiti’s government to control the island and her riches. Chaos was the modus operandi – and US-induced chaos and crime reign up to this day over Haiti.


What is important to know – that there are no coincidences.

In the 1970’s / 1980s and perhaps up to early 1990s, huge petrol resources were satellite-discovered deep under the sea floor off-shore from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. To get to these resources is expensive. Unless they are brought up closer to the surface – for example by an earthquake, that cracks the tectonic plates, letting pressure bring the oil closer into shallower areas.

The 2010 earthquake was planned for precisely that purpose.

On 12 January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, leaving its capital Port-au-Prince devastated. About 220,000 people were reportedly killed.

Among other aid, the Clinton Foundation was supposed to bring order and development back to Haiti, after the seismic devastation. In fact, the contrary is true. More than ten years later, chaos and crime continue dominating the Haitian part of the island of Hispaniola.

Is there a purpose behind it, other than that the Clinton Foundation enriched itself by the multi-million-dollar donations it received to help restore social and economic order in Haiti?

According to the World Atlas (January 2019), recent findings have confirmed Haiti’s enormous oil and gas reserves. Discoveries show that the nation of Haiti might have some of the largest oil reserves in the world. They are estimated to be potentially larger than those of Venezuela. See this for more details.

This amply explains why the United States will not leave Haiti to her independence. The monetary stakes, the riches are too high.

———

Today, the same Lula, who helped instigate the 2004 coup against President Aristide, is “volunteering” in setting up a UN occupation / security force in Haiti, consisting mainly of Brazilian troops. This military occupation is supposed to bring back order and promote economic development.

They will also prepare the ground – or waters – for massive exploitation and extraction of the huge hydrocarbon reserves. This is the military’s hidden agenda. Of course, not part of the official terms of reference.

May Haiti remember her status of the first independent state in Latin America – and rise again.
These hydrocarbon riches belong to the people of Haiti.

——-


Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Le satanisme comme grammaire cachée de l’Amérique

L’Amérique fait face à une défaite en Ukraine à cause de la disparition complète du fondement chrétien de sa culture, «un phénomène historique crucial qui, justement, explique la pulvérisation des classes dirigeantes américaines».

La seule solution à la « suprématie de la richesse » est une économie démocratique

Selon Marjorie Kelly, théoricienne sociale et autrice, notre économie doit être fondée sur le bien-être humain plutôt que sur l’augmentation du cours des actions.

Source : Truthout, C.J Polychroniou
Traduit par les lecteurs du site Les-Crises

AYO WALKER / TRUTHOUT

La captation de la richesse est une pathologie inhérente au capitalisme contemporain et se définit par les processus culturels et politiques par lesquels les riches s’établissent comme classe dominante. La théoricienne sociale Marjorie Kelly qualifie ce phénomène de Wealth supremacy (supématie de la richesse) qui est aussi le titre de son dernier livre. Mais comme elle le souligne dans cette interview exclusive pour Truthout, cette suprématie, qui a institutionnalisé la cupidité, définit un système qui est non seulement biaisé mais ausi truqué au détriment de la grande majorité de la population et qui est donc préjudiciable à l’économie, aux citoyens et à la planète. Elle soutient qu’un mouvement visant à bâtir une économie démocratique est notre seule issue. Marjorie Kelly est membre émérite du Democracy Collaborative. En plus de Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Howard Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises (2023) (La suprématie de la richesse: comment une économie de capatation des richesses et les règles biaisées du capitalisme conduisent aux crises actuelles), elle est l’autrice de The Making of a Democratic Economy: Building Prosperity for the Many, Not Just the Few (La création d’une économie démocratique : construire la prospérité pour le plus grand nombre et non pour quelques-uns) (co-écrit avec Ted ; 2019). L’interview qui suit a été légèrement modifiée pour plus de clarté.

C. J. Polychroniou: Au cours des 40 dernières années, l’une des évolutions les plus marquantes de l’économie mondiale, en particulier dans les pays développés, est la financiarisation – cela veut dire que la finance en est venue à dominer notre économie, notre culture, le monde naturel, voire nos choix politiques en apparence démocratiques. Certains affirment que la financiarisation représente une nouvelle phase du capitalisme, tandis que d’autres y voient une conséquence du néolibéralisme. Votre récent ouvrage, Wealth supremacy, analyse la structure actuelle du capitalisme et met en lumière ce que vous considérez comme son principal problème, tout en ouvrant la voie à un système alternatif, une économie démocratique, ainsi que des pistes pour y parvenir. Commençons par ce que vous entendez par suprématie de la richesse, et comment, selon vous, la financiarisation en est venue à dominer toutes les autres formes d’activité économique.

Lire la suite

Les globalistes contre les souverainistes -- Stefano AZZARA

Un conflit entièrement interne aux classes dirigeantes.
Puisque vous êtes marxiste, je commencerai par la critique. L'un des paradigmes interprétatifs qui s'affirme clairement, non seulement parmi les représentants de l'establishment (le directeur du Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker, l'a déclaré il y a quelques semaines dans une interview au Corriere della Sera) mais aussi parmi de nombreux camarades, concernant la réaction qui monte en Occident contre ceux qui ont gouverné la mondialisation au (...)

Nos lecteurs proposent / ,

La désindustrialisation coïncide avec la croissance du micro-crédit -- Comidad repris par sinistrainrete

Beaucoup de commentateurs ont cru liquider l'interview accordée par Poutine à Tucker Carlson en la présentant comme de la propagande. Bien sûr qu'il s'agit de propagande, et on ne voit pas ce que cela aurait dû être d'autre. Cela n'exempterait pourtant pas nos gouvernements de répondre à certaines déclarations précises plutôt embarrassantes.
Poutine a en particulier reconfirmé ce qu'on avait déjà dit immédiatement après l'attentat sur le gazoduc North Stream, à savoir que, bien que grave, ce sabotage (...)

Nos lecteurs proposent / , ,

The Fraud of Plastic Recycling

Par : AHH

How Big Oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis

by The Center for Climate Integrity: https://climateintegrity.org/plastics-fraud

Underpinning the plastic waste crisis is a campaign of fraud and deception that fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies have created and perpetuated for decades.

Through new and existing research, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” shows how Big Oil and the plastics industry have deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale.

Now it’s time for accountability. |PDF|

Polluters knew decades ago that plastic recycling was “virtually hopeless.”

Explore the evidence that Big Oil and the plastics industry knew they were deceiving the public about plastic recycling, including never-before-seen documents published here for the first time. |documents|

Like permanent wars, the contrived environmental waste worldwide is staggering. Not merely to dump unwanted waste that is expensive to process at home abroad among the poor nations, but it appears an excessive, ostentatious effort as well — to lower beauty worldwide, fostering uglier lower thoughts and a submissive sheeple, and to help legitimize the coming wars on petroleum producers — of which Russia, Iran, Libya and Venezuela are merely the first wave. It has led to the Climate Agenda of disinvestment in new energy exploration, “decarbonization” and withdrawal of petroleum from developed countries, as seen in Europe most vividly. All the justifications used are illogical and unscientific, as with the premise above of recycling.. No crisis is wasted, pun unintended. We observe the metrics of increased societal controls, depopulation and relentless work to control energy sources..

Defusing the Derivatives Time Bomb

Par : AHH

The “protected class” is granted “safe harbor” only because their bets are so risky that to let them fail could crash the economy. But why let them bet at all?

by Ellen Brown at the ScheerPost.

This is a sequel to a Jan. 15 article titled “Casino Capitalism and the Derivatives Market: Time for Another ‘Lehman Moment’?”, discussing the threat of a 2024 “black swan” event that could pop the derivatives bubble. That bubble is now over ten times the GDP of the world and is so interconnected and fragile that an unanticipated crisis could trigger the collapse not just of the bubble but of the economy. To avoid that result, in the event of the bankruptcy of a major financial institution, derivative claimants are put first in line to grab the assets — not just the deposits of customers but their stocks and bonds. This is made possible by the Uniform Commercial Code, under which all assets held by brokers, banks and “central clearing parties” have been “dematerialized” into fungible pools and are held in “street name.”

This article will consider several proposed alternatives for diffusing what Warren Buffett called a time bomb waiting to go off. That sort of bomb just detonated in the Chinese stock market, contributing to its fall; and the result could be much worse in the U.S., where the stock market plays a much larger role in the economy.

The Chinese Derivative Crisis

A Jan.30 article on Bloomberg News notes that “Chinese stocks’ brutal start to the year is being at least partly blamed on the impact of a relatively new financial derivative known as a snowball. The products are tied to indexes, and a key feature is that when the gauges fall below built-in levels, brokerages will sell their related futures positions.”

Further details are in a Jan. 23rd article titled “’Snowball’ Derivatives Feed China’s Stock Market Avalanche.” It states, “China’s plunging stock market is leading to losses on billions of dollars worth of derivatives linked to the country’s equity indexes, fuelling further selling as retail investors offload their positions…. Snowball products are similar to the index-linked products sold in the 2008 financial crisis, with investors betting that U.S. equities would not fall more than 25% or 30%,” which they did.

Chinese shares rose on Feb. 6, as officials took measures to prop up the ailing market, including imposing new “zero tolerance” curbs for malicious short selling.

The Greater U.S. Threat

The Chinese stock market is much younger and smaller than that in the U.S., with a much smaller role in the economy. Thus China’s economy remains relatively protected from disruptive ups and downs in the stock market. Not so in the U.S., where speculating in the derivatives casino brought down international insurer AIG and investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008, triggering the global financial crisis of 2008-09. AIG had to be bailed out by the taxpayers to prevent collapse of the too-big-to-fail derivative banks, and Lehman Brothers went through a messy bankruptcy that took years to resolve.

In a December 2010 article on Seeking Alpha titled “Derivatives: The Big Banks’ Quadrillion-Dollar Financial Casino,” attorney Michael Snyder wrote, “derivatives were at the heart of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, and whenever the next financial crisis happens, derivatives will undoubtedly play a huge role once again…. Today, the world financial system has been turned into a giant casino where bets are made on just about anything you can possibly imagine, and the major Wall Street banks make a ton of money from it. The system … is totally dominated by the big international banks.”

The Speculators Dominate the Regulators

In a 2009 Cornell Law Faculty publication titled How Deregulating Derivatives Led to Disaster, and Why Re-Regulating Them Can Prevent Another, Prof. Lynn Stout proposed stabilizing the market by returning to 20th century derivative rules. She noted that derivatives are basically wagers or bets, and that before 2000, the U.S. and U.K. regulated derivatives primarily by a common‐law rule known as the “rule against difference contracts.” She explained:

“The rule against difference contracts did not stop you from wagering on anything you liked: sporting contests, wheat prices, interest rates. But if you wanted to go to a court to have your wager enforced, you had to demonstrate to a judge’s satisfaction that at least one of the parties to the wager had a real economic interest in the underlying and was using the derivative contract to hedge against a risk to that interest.… Using derivatives this way is truly hedging, and it serves a useful social purpose by reducing risk.

… Under the rule against difference contracts and its sister doctrine in insurance law (the requirement of “insurable interest”), derivative contracts that couldn’t be proved to hedge an economic interest in the underlying were deemed nothing more than legally unenforceable wagers.

… Hedge funds, for example, should really call themselves “speculation funds,” as it is quite clear they are using derivatives to try to reap profits at the other traders’ expense.”

The rule against difference contracts died in 2000, when the US embraced wholesale deregulation with the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA):

“The CFMA not only declared financial derivatives exempt from CFTC or SEC oversight, it also declared all financial derivatives legally enforceable. The CFMA thus eliminated, in one fell swoop, a legal constraint on derivatives speculation that dated back not just decades, but centuries. It was this change in the law—not some flash of genius on Wall Street—that created today’s $600 trillion financial derivatives market.”

The Casino Gets Special Privileges

Not only are speculative derivatives now legally enforceable, but under the Bankruptcy Act of 2005, derivative securities enjoy special protections. Most creditors are “stayed” from enforcing their rights while a firm is in bankruptcy, but many derivative contracts are exempt from these stays. Similarly, under the Dodd Frank Act of 2010, derivative claimants have “super-priority” in the bankruptcy of a financial institution. They are privileged to claim collateral immediately without judicial review, before bankruptcy proceedings even begin. Depositors become “unsecured creditors” who can recover their funds only after derivative, repo and other secured claims, assuming there is anything left to recover, which in the event of a major derivative crisis would be unlikely.

That’s true not only of the deposits in a bankrupt bank but of stocks, bonds and money market funds held by a broker/dealer that goes bankrupt. Under the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 and Sections 8 and 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), “safe harbor” is provided to entities described in court documents as “the protected class.” The customers who purchased the assets have only a “security entitlement,” a weak contractual claim to a pro rata share of a residual pool of fungible assets all held in the name of Cede & Co., the proxy of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC). As Wall Street financial analyst John Rubino put it in a Jan. 27 podcast:

“What we used to think of as a bank bail-in where they take your deposit in order to support a failing bank, that is now spread across the entire financial economy where whatever you have in an account anywhere can just disappear, because they’re going to transfer ownership of it to these big dominant entities out there in the financial system that need those assets in order to keep from blowing up.”

Derivative speculators are considered “secured” because they post a portion of what they could wind up owing as “margin,” but why that partial security is superior to the 100% security posted by the depositor or purchaser is not explained. The “protected class” is granted “safe harbor” only because their bets are so risky that to let them fail could crash the economy. But why let them bet at all?

The Solution of the Regulators

The fix of the G20 leaders following the global financial crisis, however, was to force banks to clear over-the-counter derivatives through central counterparties (CCPs), which stand between buyer and seller and protect either party if the other blows up. By March 2020, 60% of credit default swaps and 80% of interest rate swaps were centrally cleared. The problem, as noted in a December 2023 publication by the Bank for International Settlements, is that these measures taken to protect the system can actually amplify risk.

CCPs tend to ask for more collateral than banks did in the pre-crisis world; and when a CCP hikes its initial margin requirement to cover the risk of default, this applies to everyone in the market, meaning cash calls are synchronized. As explained in a May 2022 Reuters article:

“It’s logical that CCPs ask for more collateral during a panic: that’s when defaults are most likely. The problem is that margin calls seem to have made things worse. In March 2020, for example, a so-called “dash for cash” saw investors liquidate even prime money-market funds and U.S. Treasury securities.

… [R]ampant margin calls have intensified a financial panic twice in as many years, with central banks effectively bailing out markets in 2020. That’s better than in 2008, when taxpayers had to step in. But the problem of margin calls remains unsolved.

… Central counterparty (CCP) clearing houses should consider asking clients for more collateral during good times to reduce the risk of destabilising margin calls during a financial panic, a Bank of England official said on May 19.”

Yet all this, as Michael Snyder observes, is to allow the big international banks to run the largest derivatives casino that the world has ever seen. Why not just shut down the casino? Prof. Stout’s suggested solution is for Congress to return to the pre-2000 rule under which speculative derivative bets were not enforceable in court. That would include reversing the “superpriority” privileges in the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 and the Dodd-Frank Act. But it won’t be a quick fix, as Wall Street and our divided Congress can be expected to put up a protracted fight.

What If the DTCC Goes Bankrupt?

In a 2015 law review article titled “Failure of the Clearinghouse: Dodd-Frank’s Fatal Flaw?,” Prof. Stephen Lubben points to a more ominous risk from pushing all derivatives onto exchanges; and that concern is shared by former hedge fund manager David Rogers Webb in his 2024 book “The Great Taking.” The exchanges are supposed to be safer than private over-the-counter trades because the exchange steps in as market maker, accepting the risk for both sides of the trade. But in a general economic depression, the exchanges themselves could go bankrupt. No provision for that is made in the Dodd-Frank Act, which purports to decree “no more bailouts.” Still, reasons Prof. Lubben, the government would undoubtedly step in to save the market from collapse.

His proposed solution is for Congress to make legislative provision for nationalizing any bankrupt exchange, brokerage or Central Clearing Counterparty before it fails. This is something to which our gridlocked Congress might agree, since under current circumstances it would not involve any major changes, wealth confiscation or new tax burdens; and it could protect their own fortunes from confiscation if the DTCC were to go bankrupt.

Other Possible Federal Solutions

Another alternative that not only could work but could fix Congress’s budget problems at the same time is to impose a 0.1% tax on all financial transactions. See Scott Smith, A Tale of Two Economies: A New Financial Operating System, showing that U.S. financial transactions (the financialized economy) are over $7.6 quadrillion, more than 350 times the U.S. national income (the productive economy). See my earlier article summarizing all that here. On a financial transaction tax curbing speculation in derivatives, see also herehere and here.

There are other possible solutions to customer title concerns. There is no longer a need for the archaic practice of holding all securitized assets in the street name of Cede & Co. The digitization of stocks and bonds was a reasonable and efficient step in the 1970s, but today digital cryptography has gotten so sophisticated that “smart contracts” can be attached by blockchain-like distributed ledger technology (DLT) to digital assets, tracking participants, dates, terms and other contractual details. The states of Delaware and Wyoming have explored maintaining corporate lists of stockholders on a state-run blockchain; but predictably, the measures were opposed. The practice of holding assets in street name has proven very lucrative for the DTCC’s member brokers and banks, as it facilitates short selling and the “rehypothecation” of collateral.

In October 2023, the DTCC reported that it has been exploring adopting DLT; but the goal seems only to be speedier and safer trades. No mention was made of returning registered title to the purchasers of the traded assets, which could be done with distributed ledger technology.

South Dakota’s Innovative Solution

The most readily achievable solution is probably that in a South Dakota bill filed on Jan. 29.  The bill is detailed in a Feb. 2 article titled “You Could Lose Your Retirement Savings in the Next Financial Crash Unless Others Follow This State’s Lead”, which observes:

“… [I]f your broker … were to go bankrupt, the broker’s secured creditors (the people to whom the broker owes money) would be empowered to take the investments that you paid for in order to settle outstanding debts….

To avoid a catastrophe in the future, a nationwide movement is desperately needed to alter the existing Uniform Commercial Code. Of course, that won’t be easy to accomplish, especially because bank lobbyists and other powerful financial interests will almost certainly fight kicking and screaming to stop policymakers from taking away their advantage over consumers.

The good news is, this “great taking” can be stopped at the state level. Americans don’t need to count on a divided Congress to get the job done. Because the UCC is state law, state lawmakers can take concrete steps to restore the property rights of their constituents and protect them in the event of a financial crisis.

On Monday, South Dakota legislators introduced a bill that would do just that. The legislation would ensure that individual investors have priority over securities held by brokerage firms and other intermediaries.

It would also alter jurisdictional provisions so that cases are determined in the state of the individual investor, rather than the state of the broker, custodian or clearing corporation. This would ensure that individual investors are able to rely on the laws of their local state.”

Hopefully, other states will follow South Dakota’s lead. Tennessee, for one, is reported to have such a bill in the works.

~~~

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book is Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age and her 400+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

Alliance États-Unis Israël : pourquoi ce sera la dernière guerre étasunienne

Les États-Unis soutiennent Israël inconditionnellement parce qu’ils voient que l’ensemble du projet occidental au Moyen-Orient est aujourd’hui menacé à Gaza. Bien qu’il puisse sembler que ce sont nos jours les […]

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Peut-on compter sur Biden pour sauver le climat?

Fin janvier, Joe Biden annonçait un moratoire sur les nouvelles autorisations de construction de sites d’exportation de gaz naturel liquéfié. Ce qui met au frigo le titanesque projet CP2, mais […]

The post Peut-on compter sur Biden pour sauver le climat? appeared first on Investig'action.

Faillite d’Atos : échec de la connivence

Par : h16

Un article de Henry Bonner

La dégringolade en Bourse d’Atos, à présent en procédure de renégociation de sa dette avec ses créanciers, attire l’attention ; son action baisse en bourse de 95 % sur les cinq dernières années en raison des déceptions sur les revenus et bénéfices.

Cette chute entraîne bien de l’embarras dans les milieux du pouvoir, notamment parce que Thierry Breton, à présent Commissaire de l’Union européenne et à ce titre, un des directeurs des politiques de l’Union, fait partie des raisons de la débâcle : en effet, il prend les rênes d’Atos en 2009 et jusqu’en 2019.

La dette à long-terme (qui cause à présent le danger de faillite) passe alors de 416 millions d’euros en 2013 à 2,6 milliards à présent. La part de la dette qui arrive à maturité dans les 12 prochains mois augmente, de 106 millions d’euros en 2013, à 2,9 milliards d’euros aux chiffres de décembre 2022. Selon les actualités, la société doit plus de 3 milliards d’euros de dette à maturité à fin 2025.

En plus de la dette, l’entreprise subit des pertes de fonds en trésorerie, à hauteur de plus d’un milliard d’euros en 2023.

Le groupe génère, en théorie, de l’ordre de 400 à 500 millions d’euros d’excédent par an, une fraction de la dette, même sans prendre en compte le risque de dépenses élevées pour une réorganisation de l’entreprise.

De plus, les ventes baissent, en particulier en Amérique du Nord. En dollar, elles reculent ainsi de 20 % sur un an.

La société fait concurrence à des géants comme Amazon et Google dans le domaine du cloud. Selon les infos, elle a aussi des activités en lien à la cybersécurité du gouvernement.

La perte d’Atos – en cas de vente des activités à la casse par exemple – crée une perte d’emprise des dirigeants sur le monde de l’informatique.

Sans surprise, le gouvernement français entre dans la partie : il met en avant l’idée d’un rachat d’une partie des activités d’Atos par Airbus, une entreprise de l’entourage des dirigeants.

Les Echos rapportent ainsi :

“Depuis janvier, l’avionneur franco-allemand Airbus est officiellement sur les rangs pour reprendre BDS [la partie des activités dans le cloud et la cybersécurité], avec une offre correspondant à une valeur d’entreprise comprise entre 1,5 et 1,8 milliard d’euros … Selon nos informations, l’option Airbus aurait les faveurs de Bercy parce que les activités seraient plus complémentaires et permettraient de développer l’avionneur dans les jumeaux numériques.”

Le gouvernement veut le maintien des activités d’informatique à l’intérieur du pays, sous le contrôle des dirigeants :

“En tout cas, Bruno Le Maire semble sous-entendre qu’il compte dissuader tout repreneur étranger de mettre la main sur cet actif sensible. Cela pourrait-il passer par une nationalisation, comme le proposaient des parlementaires il y a encore quelques mois ? Des offres par des groupes étrangers auraient été découragées, selon nos informations…”

Capitalisme de connivence

Le gouvernement préfère le maintien du contrôle sur les activités dans l’économie, et trouve en général des prétextes à des sauvetages, ou des subventions. L’Union européenne crée – par exemple – des barrières aux échanges afin, selon elle, de protéger l’industrie des renouvelables. Les dirigeants protègent le citoyen de la concurrence !

Selon Montel News,

“Les gouvernements nationaux devront tenir compte des critères non liés au prix dans leurs appels d’offres d’énergies renouvelables, selon un projet de loi sur l’industrie à zéro émission nette (NZIA) approuvé par les représentants de l’UE mardi en fin de journée…

Les gouvernements devront tenir compte de ces critères pour au moins 30% de volumes appelés, ou pour jusqu’à 6 GW/an, a déclaré le Parlement européen…”

Comme avec Atos, les dirigeants veulent le maintien du contrôle sur une industrie, et mettent en place des blocages au fonctionnement du marché – contre la concurrence.

Commodément, un livre sort actuellement en librairies, en soutien à la participation de gouvernements dans le marché. L’auteur, Naomi Oreskes, professeur à l’université de Harvard, veut plus de régulations, et de barrières à la création d’entreprise.

Elle fait une interview pour FranceTVInfo, en promotion du livre, Le Grand Mythe : comment les industriels nous ont appris à détester l’État et à vénérer le libre marché.

Elle évoque par exemple les causes – selon elle – de la crise de 2008 : bien sûr, c’est le manque de régulation !

Elle explique même :

“Alors la déréglementation financière va démanteler des mesures qui avaient été mises en place en termes bancaires après la Grande Dépression. Ça, ça va être complètement démantelé et comme par hasard, en 2008, une grande crise financière arrive. Et nombreux sont les économistes qui pensent que s’il y a eu cette crise en 2008, c’est probablement parce qu’on a eu ces garde-fous qui ont été supprimés à ce moment-là.”

Les marchés, en général, ajustent l’offre et la demande via le mécanisme des prix. En revanche, ils peuvent aussi provoquer des échecs pour les dirigeants, comme la faillite d’Atos, ou l’éclatement de la bulle de l’immobilier en 2008 – le résultat d’années de stimulation des crédits pour l’achat de logements par les banques centrales, et le gouvernement américain.

Les marchés évaluent la valeur des actifs, comme l’immobilier, selon la réalité de l’offre et de la demande. Ils mènent aussi à la faillite d’entreprises, dont l’échec des favoris du gouvernement – comme Atos.

L’opposition au mécanisme de marché provient non d’une préoccupation pour le bien du citoyen contre la menace de la concurrence – mais d’une volonté de contrôle par les dirigeants. Elle fait partie du capitalisme de connivence, c’est-à-dire le transfert de la richesse d’un pays vers une poignée de gens aux commandes, sous couvert de capitalisme.

Dans mes écrits réguliers, je partage des idées de placements – pour la recherche de gains et la protection de notre patrimoine. Nous évitons les renouvelables, l’hydrogène, et, justement, les entreprises comme Atos ou Airbus. Vous pouvez me suivre gratuitement en vous inscrivant ici.

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Solutions to the Western Train Wreck

Par : AHH

For GlobalSouth.co by our Colin from New Zealand

Solutions Unearthed by a Tale of Two Economies

A SEQUEL TO PART 1 – The Western Train Wreck – and an effort to promote a solution orientated discussion

It seems that what I regard as an extremely important book , Scott Andrew Smith’s, ‘A Tale Of Two Economies’ released in 2023, has gone relatively unnoticed.

Of course this is entirely to be expected because of the entrenched ‘thinking’ of the eCONomists and commentators who nurture and cheerlead the ruinous Western status quo.

It turns out that the staggering size of the total volume of payments in the highly financialised U$ economy was not even known until the Fed began building the means to track payments in collaboration with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Indeed, given the degree to which the Fed is compartmentalised, only a select few of them even now have a clue about this. Politicians of course were just as out of touch – I imagine that this remains the case as to date I have seen no mention of this on the MSM, let alone alternative media – hence the idea to make this subject part II of my sequel.

The Dream Team – FTT and the PBS

FTT = Financial Transaction Tax
PBS = Public Banking Solution

What I see are two distinctly different, although complimentary, initiatives which between the two could turn even the most broken financial model into a socio-economic miracle within a few short years – indeed, most often within as little as one term of government.

Both systems are stunningly simple mechanisms, which is frustrating as all hell, because that in turn generates the default reaction of at least 95% of the population – they dismiss the concept without knowing any details on the grounds that if it is that simple, it would have been done long before now.

The other automatic default reaction is that these solutions (especially any mention of Basic Income) are seen as far too ‘socialist’ and as such are the thin edge of the wedge in a slide back into communism.

Scott Smith addresses this reaction directly…

“Communism is premised on the notion that it is the worker who creates profit in the products that are produced, so if a company makes a profit after having paid its workers, the worker has been shortchanged for the value they created.

Communism was conceived of before automation as a response to the abject poverty of the 19th century. It was fuelled by the huge gap between the rich and poor, and it rejected the notion that profiting from capital investments could ever be good for society.

The issues that communism sought to address were real, and these issues still exist as shown in this book, though not to the extent they did in the 19th century. The fact that we have a middle class today shows that workers are better paid. Yet there are many who work hard and still live in poverty. The solutions in this book address these problems in a way that fuels economic growth instead of destroying the engine of our wealth, as communism does.”

Of course a huge part of the neoliberal strategy to engineer their vision of a new world ‘order’ (sic) is to point the finger at a communist takeover when in essence it is already a dead duck – NB – from 30% in the 1980s the percentage of global population ruled by technically communist governments is today down to a minuscule 0.5%.

And why the massive plummet down to 1/60th of its former glory within 40 years – BECAUSE COMMUNISM SIMPLY DOESN’T WORK – PERIOD!

In fact I have pointed out before that the U$ fought a horrible war in Vietnam, ostensibly with the aim of stamping out communism. The U$ lost the war, and then in the height of irony within a few decades communism actually defeated itself as the country of 99 million people organically transitioned into a free-market capitalist model.

The current 0.5% remnant consists of minnows Laos, North Korea and of course Cuba. What the socialist!, socialist!, socialist! panic brigade seems to miss is the fact that the US economy is ‘socialist’ anyway, only in the most obscene way possible, where the costs are born by Mainstreet, and the profits are socialised and funnelled directly into the pockets of the thieving kleptocrats.

Mainstreet and the Productive Economy Languishes

Meanwhile the bottom 50% of the population’s share of financial assets shrinks in spite of the trillions of dollars of stimulus flooding the economy.

Charles Hugh Smith has just written an excellent article pointing out how these “recession proofing” machinations by the criminal Fed have once again robbed Main Street and made a monster recession a mathematical certainty – his chart here is a real eye-opener – a reminder that everything the ‘Creature from Jekyll Island’ turns its hand to is a rich man’s trick.

The bottom 50% cohorts share of the financial assets gained a minuscule 0.2%, whilst the kleptocrats pocketed around $10 trillion.


The Two Economies

#1 Is the real and productive economy that generates genuine wealth but is penalised because it carries the vast majority of the tax burden.

#2 Is the parasitic casino financial economy that pays negligible taxes with the cartel-style commercial banks diverting multi-billions in interest payments into the hands of their oligarch owners.

This is the very foundation of the network that orchestrates the forever wars which are now hybrid techno/military in nature, in which the global private banking industry finances both sides of all of these conflicts.

The billions of interest payments that get sucked out of Western domestic economies go straight into their coffers. This same network brought us the COVID war as well. They have literally trillions of dollars at their disposal to finance ever more innovative ways of killing and thieving from Main Street.

A MINUSCULE 0.25% FTT – replacing all other taxes and funding Basic Income, Earned Income Credits, Healthcare, child care credits, free college and higher education – it sounds too good to be true doesn’t it – where on earth will this money come from?

The fact is that there is a monumental disparity between the material and monetary economies with the size of the material economy being roughly the size of the GDP, which in the U$ example in 2020 was $25.6 trillion.

However as the illustration shows, in the year 2020 the total payments were $7,625 trillion or $7.625 quadrillion!

Even though many payments like commodity trading, various options, cryptocurrency trades and EFFs have been left out, the monetary economy is still ~350x the material economy. The US GDP only represents ~0.33% of the payments made in the total economy.

Being able to see the big picture, makes the solution all the more obvious – payments need to be taxed NOT INCOME.

Basic Income Payments – Eliminating the Welfare Trap

Basic Income monthly payments for 18-69 year olds of $2,000 per month and 70+ year olds of $3,000 per month would be affordable.

The hurdle has always been how to create a basic income structure without increasing taxes. This is the whole point of FTT – the extra tax take would be from the parasitic financial economy, NOT from the productive economy.

Eliminating income tax would immediately give everyone a huge boost in their take-home pay. With the basic income payment each week added in, all wage earners would enjoy increases in disposable income.

In America with their huge income disparity, 90% of the country’s population would significantly improve their living standard.

The welfare trap and the fear of rampant socialism are the overarching concerns of the critics – IOW, how can you have a social welfare system that provides for the genuinely disadvantaged whilst not propagating an institutionalised multigenerational welfare trap?

In existing models, including within New Zealand (NZ) and the U$, when someone gets a job, they usually lose some or all of their existing benefits – as such this disincentives them from finding a job. Basic income models are the polar opposite – they incentivise beneficiaries to work.

The basic income model also encourages new business start-ups by allowing them the wherewithal and the confidence to try to establish a business that they may have always dreamed of.

Earned Income Credits

To encourage beneficiaries to work, earned income credits could be paid when they find a job. Coupled with the basic income payment this could add up to a very liveable income.

Based on Smiths figures, someone earning $15,000 would receive an extra $7,500 in earned income credits, and that bumps up to a total income of $46,500 per year when you add in basic income.

0.25% FTT was Modelled in France back in 2010

The brilliant Simon Thorpe from Toulouse in France ran the models completely independently from Smith in the U$. He came up with the exact same figure of 0.25%. Once again is is clear that in highly financially orientated economies this rate provides far more revenue to the Govt than all the other taxes combined.

In the U$ it is enough revenue to provide universal free basic health care, childcare credits, and free higher education. Within 7 years the U$ could pay off its rapidly spiralling public debt as well.

This model could work in NZ too, and if it was implemented along with Ellen Brown’s PBS (Public Banking Solution) NZ could become the sustainable socioeconomic miracle of the planet within one term of government.


Everyone is a Winner Except for the 0.1% Plutocrats

The most astonishing result that these models uncovered was the fact that all cohorts of Mainstreet benefited enormously – the only ones worse off were the thieves positioned at the apex of the human feed chain.

These were the increases in net income…

  • A couple with no job – $15,000 – $47,880
  • A retired couple – $30,000 – $71,820
  • A couple earning $30,000 with a $100k mortgage – $18,764 – $81,953
  • A couple earning $100,000 with a $300k mortgage – $51,243 – $137,630
  • A couple earning $250,000 with a $500K mortgage – $145,718 – $280,588

But Won’t This Increase in Disposable Income Spell Massive Inflation?

As Smith explains…

“Inflation is always a risk whenever people have additional money to spend, but if the production capacity of the material economy, including that of foreign companies, is sufficient to support the additional spending there will be very little inflation – the key to minimizing inflation is to finance a diverse and robust supply chain.”

Furthermore, this new paradigm would encourage the return of a savings culture, and this would make low-interest rate liquidity available at a local level where moral hazard restraints would once more play a big part in making soundly based loans. Lower interest rates are disinflationary too.

Budget Surpluses Could Be Used to Generate Future Wealth

some examples…

  1. Building up reserves for rainy days and natural disasters
  2. Improving infrastructure
  3. Funding desalinisation projects in countries with water challenges
  4. Funding improvements in manufacturing capacity
  5. Developing new high-tech technologies
  6. Developing new value-added industries so as to maximise existing production
  7. Funding projects that strengthen the nation’s general well-being, including education, health/mental wellbeing, arts and crafts, and cottage industries etc.

Summary

“The marvel of all of human history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid on them by their governments.” – George Washington

BTW, Washington was the first, and sadly the last, independent candidate ever to become POTUS – incidentally, he was successful twice. These massive burdens have remained on the nation’s shoulders now for another 226 years – when on earth will our species ever learn?

Cheers to all
Colin Maxwell

Planned Part III — Banking 2.0

A discussion of the fact that ~97% of the money supply is already digital and created instantly out of thin air by the touch of a button. National and international implications and the financial instruments that could work in this brave new financial world without causing inflation and liquidity squeezes.

This is another reason why BANKING 2.0 needs to be run as a public utility and as the first key step in a transition to the PBS in which all tiers of banking are available as public utilities – this would not preclude privately owned banks, it just means that they would have to compete with the PBS model to remain in business.

Elga Bartsch: de BlackRock à un poste-clé du Ministère allemand de l’économie

Le parcours d’Elga Bartsch est représentatif de l’évolution de l’économie allemande. C’est cette ancienne de Morgan Stanley et Blackrock que le ministre allemand de l’économie, Robert Habeck a installée, voici un an, comme directrice du département des études du Ministère. Madame Bartsch témoigne de la transformation, en vingt ans, du capitalisme allemand, passé du vieux modèle du “capitalisme rhénan” à un système dirigé par les choix d’investissement de la finance anglo-américaine. Et tombé dans un conformisme destructeur

Hier nous évoquions le ralentissement de la croissance allemande et les vulgaires petites manipulations statistiques auxquelles s’est livré le gouvernement allemand pour éviter d’avoir à afficher une récession. L’interrogation est fréquente, surtout chez tous ceux qui vivent avec un “modèle allemand” dans la tête: celui d’une Allemagne industrielle et puissante, dominant l’Europe.

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Rien ne dure éternellement - et cela inclut le capitalisme -- Le correspondant socialiste

L'establishment politico-économique britannique a tout intérêt à maintenir le statu quo. « Le capitalisme est là pour rester », telle est leur inculcation.
L'histoire suggère le contraire. Alors que les nomades chasseurs-cueilleurs sans classes ont parcouru la Terre pendant environ 200 000 ans, la société de classes n'existe que depuis 8 000 à 10 000 ans. L'humanité s'est accélérée à travers trois phases de société de classes : l'esclavage ancien, la féodalité et le capitalisme. Chaque phase historique a été (...)

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Le Capitalisme s’est déjà effondré ! (On vous explique tout)

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À Davos, Javier Milei a défendu « La supériorité écrasante du capitalisme »

Mercredi 17 janvier dernier, le président argentin Javier Milei a prononcé un discours enflammé et disruptif au Forum économique mondial de Davos. Son éloge de la croissance et des entrepreneurs, tout comme sa mise en garde contre les dangers du socialisme ont déjà fait couler beaucoup d’encre. En réalité, l’économiste n’a fait que reprendre, à quelques expressions près, le contenu d’une conférence TED donnée en 2019 à San Nicolás, au cours de laquelle il expliquait comment, tout au long de l’histoire, le capitalisme s’était avéré supérieur aux autres systèmes.

Les thèses mises en avant à Davos s’inscrivent dans le corpus classique de la défense des libertés économiques. Qu’elles soient mises en avant, de manière décomplexée, par un chef d’État est, en revanche, beaucoup plus inhabituel.

Dans cet article, l’essayiste Rainer Zitelmann revient sur les principales thèses économiques défendues par Javier Milei, tant comme économiste que comme chef d’État.

 

Thèse 1 : le capitalisme est la seule recette contre la pauvreté

Le discours de Milei commence par un examen historique, précisant que la révolution industrielle a donné à une grande partie de la population mondiale la possibilité d’échapper à la pauvreté.

« … Lorsque vous regardez le PIB par habitant depuis l’an 1800 et jusqu’à aujourd’hui, vous verrez qu’après la révolution industrielle, le PIB mondial par habitant a été multiplié par plus de 15. Ce qui s’est traduit par un boom de la croissance qui a permis à 90 % de la population mondiale de sortir de la pauvreté. N’oublions pas qu’en 1800, environ 95 % de la population mondiale vivait dans l’extrême pauvreté et que ce chiffre est tombé à 5 % en 2020, avant la pandémie. La conclusion s’impose. Loin d’être la cause de nos problèmes, le capitalisme libre-échangiste en tant que système économique est le seul instrument dont nous disposons pour mettre fin à la faim, à la pauvreté et à l’extrême pauvreté sur notre planète.

Avant les commencements de la révolution industrielle, il y a environ deux siècles, 90 % de la population mondiale était effectivement embourbée dans l’extrême pauvreté. Aujourd’hui, selon les chiffres de la Banque mondiale, cette proportion n’est plus que de 8,5 %.

 

Thèse 2 :  la « justice sociale » est injuste

Le président-économiste soutient que la redistribution n’est pas le moyen de résoudre les inégalités sociales et qu’elle ne fait en réalité que les accroître. Les anticapitalistes pensent que l’économie est un jeu à somme nulle – ils croient qu’un gâteau économique prédéfini doit être distribué, alors qu’en fait, le but est d’augmenter la taille du gâteau.

Milei : « Le problème, c’est que la justice sociale n’est pas juste – et qu’elle ne contribue pas non plus – au bien-être général… Ceux qui font la promotion de la justice sociale, les défenseurs, partent de l’idée que l’ensemble de l’économie est un gâteau qui peut être partagé différemment, mais que ce gâteau n’est pas acquis. C’est la richesse qui est générée dans ce qu’Israël Kirzner, par exemple, appelle un processus de découverte du marché. Si les biens ou services offerts par une entreprise ne sont pas désirés, l’entreprise échouera, à moins qu’elle ne s’adapte à ce que le marché exige. Si elle fabrique un produit de bonne qualité à un prix attractif, elle s’en sortira bien et produiront davantage. Le marché est donc un processus de découverte dans lequel les capitalistes trouveront le bon chemin au fur et à mesure qu’ils avanceront. »

 

Thèse 3 : l’Occident est menacé par le socialisme moderne

La thèse la plus importante est celle-ci : l’Occident est menacé par le socialisme.

Milei répond à l’objection selon laquelle, aujourd’hui, comme pour le socialisme classique, la question n’est pas la nationalisation des moyens de production. Selon lui, le marché libre est de plus en plus étouffé par l’intervention gouvernementale, la réglementation excessive, la fiscalité et les politiques des banques centrales.

Les moyens de production ou les biens immobiliers relèvent théoriquement de la propriété privée, mais dans le réalité les propriétaires perdent de plus en plus le contrôle de leurs biens au profit de l’État.

Milei : « L’Occident a malheureusement déjà commencé à s’engager dans cette voie. Je sais que pour beaucoup, il peut sembler ridicule de suggérer que l’Occident s’est tourné vers le socialisme, mais ce n’est ridicule que si vous vous limitez à la définition économique traditionnelle du socialisme, qui dit qu’il s’agit d’un système économique où l’État possède les moyens de production. À mon avis, cette définition devrait être mise à jour à la lumière des circonstances actuelles. Aujourd’hui, les États n’ont pas besoin de contrôler directement les moyens de production pour contrôler tous les aspects de la vie des individus. Avec des outils tels que la planche à billets, la dette, les subventions, le contrôle des taux d’intérêt, le contrôle des prix et la réglementation pour corriger les soi-disant défaillances du marché, ils peuvent contrôler la vie et le destin de millions d’individus.

 

Thèse 4 : les entrepreneurs doivent commencer à se défendre

Le discours de Milei ne se borne pas à constater, il appelle aussi à l’engagement. Il cible en particulier les entrepreneurs, qui « se plient trop souvent à l’air du temps et aux puissants politiques », les enjoignant à ne plus se laisser intimider par les politiciens, à être « fiers » et à commencer « à se battre ».

« C’est pourquoi, en terminant, j’aimerais laisser un message à tous les hommes d’affaires ici présents et à ceux qui ne sont pas ici en personne, mais qui nous suivent du monde entier. Ne vous laissez intimider ni par la caste politique ni par les parasites qui vivent aux crochets de l’État. Ne capitulez pas devant une classe politique qui ne veut que rester au pouvoir et conserver ses privilèges. Vous êtes des bienfaiteurs sociaux, vous êtes des héros, vous êtes les créateurs de la période de prospérité la plus extraordinaire que nous ayons jamais connue. Que personne ne vous dise que votre ambition est immorale. Si vous gagnez de l’argent, c’est parce que vous offrez un meilleur produit à un meilleur prix, contribuant ainsi au bien-être général. »

Comment ce discours se traduira-t-il dans la réalité ? Milei réussira-t-il à mettre en œuvre la supériorité écrasante du capitalisme en Argentine ? Réponse dans les semaines et les mois qui viennent.

Massacre à la tronçonneuse! à Davos, le libertarien Milei démolit le Great Reset

Javier Milei a prononcé un discours détonnant à Davos, mercredi 17 janvier. Il s’est assumé comme libertarien. Et il a rappelé aux représentants du capitalisme de connivence que seule l’économie de marché et le capitalisme des entrepreneurs ont sorti le monde de la pauvreté. Il a dit,sans aucun respect du “politiquement correct”, que le monde occidental était menacé dans sa liberté par le nouvel interventionnisme de l’Etat, qu’il agisse au nom du socialisme, du féminisme ou de l’écologie. Cela ne manque pas de sel: le vrai successeur de Margaret Thatcher est argentin. Le journaliste Jean Robin a eu la bonne idée de proposer rapidement une traduction française sur You Tube

Le discours de Javier Milei à Davos, avec une traduction simultanée en français assurée par le journaliste Jean Robin.

Il y a quelques jours, un montage vidéo humoristique imaginait un orateur montant sur scène à Davos pour insulter Klaus Schwab. Certains twittos s’y sont laissé prendre:

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À l’origine de l’oppression des femmes – Entretien avec Mary Davis

D’où viennent l’oppression et l’exploitation des femmes ? Quel est le lien avec la lutte des classes et le capitalisme ? Nous sommes revenus sur les fondements du féminisme marxiste […]

The post À l’origine de l’oppression des femmes – Entretien avec Mary Davis appeared first on Investig'action.

McDonald’s et Starbucks coulent alors que la campagne de boycott anti-Israël progresse

Dépourvu de l’agitation qui est sa marque de fabrique, on voit un travailleur solitaire nettoyer les tables de la franchise McDonald, autrefois dynamique en Égypte et aujourd’hui sujette à la […]

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L’art de nous faire gober des mouches

La production d’insectes pour l’alimentation humaine et animale, comme source de protéine, a le vent en poupe… Les mouches « soldat noires » sont très convoitées. En France, plusieurs entreprises, […]

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À qui profite la flambée des prix alimentaires ?

Les prix alimentaires ont été l’un des moteurs de l’inflation des mois écoulés. Au passage à la caisse, les prix avaient cru de 17% en moyenne sur un an pour […]

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Des métiers en pénurie pour des chômeurs fainéants ?

Sur La première, ce matin de septembre, quelques commentateurs glosent sur le chômage en Wallonie, et s’étonnent que malgré les nombreux métiers en pénurie, malgré les 40.000 offres d’emploi, il […]

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En Argentine, un cataclysme à arrière-goût de FMI

« La situation est critique. Les changements dont notre pays a besoin sont radicaux. Il n’y a pas de place pour le gradualisme, pas de place pour la tiédeur, pas […]

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Comment les États-Unis ont sous-développé la Somalie

Le 6 septembre 2023, l'armée américaine aurait aidé le gouvernement somalien dans une opération antiterroriste meurtrière qui a tué cinq civils. Pour de nombreux américains, la pensée immédiate qu’ils ont […]

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Isabelle Minnon: “Pour l’impérialisme, il ne faut surtout pas que le Congo se développe”

La République démocratique du Congo (RDC) organise ses prochaines élections présidentielles dans moins d'une semaine, le 20 décembre prochain. Près de 50 millions de Congolais et Congolaises sont appelés aux […]

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Au-delà de l’État : plaidoyer pour l’anarchocapitalisme

Un article de Anthony P. Mueller. 

La politique sous toutes ses formes, en particulier celle des partis politiques, est l’ennemi juré de la liberté, de la prospérité et de la paix. Pourtant, où que l’on regarde, le renforcement du gouvernement est invoqué comme la solution.

Rares sont les voix qui affirment qu’une autre voie est possible. Peu d’entre elles s’expriment en faveur de l’anarchocapitalisme et d’un ordre social libertarien.

Il est assez courant aujourd’hui d’annoncer avec assurance le verdict selon lequel l’anarchocapitalisme, une société sans État répressif, n’est pas réaliste. Pour la plupart des gens, un ordre social libertarien est une chimère. Les fausses accusations abondent, comme celle selon laquelle l’anarchocapitalisme serait source d’injustice et désavantagerait les pauvres.

 

La situation précaire du libertarianisme est en partie liée à l’évolution de l’histoire.

L’évolution sociétale a pris un mauvais tournant lorsque Rome a vaincu Carthage, et qu’au lieu d’une société commerciale, c’est une société étatique militariste qui a pris le dessus. Plus de deux mille ans de césarisme ont répandu la croyance qu’il n’y a pas d’alternative à la politique et à l’État. La hiérarchie et l’autoritarisme en sont venus à être considérés comme le mode naturel d’organisation de la société, sans reconnaître que ces ordres sont imposés.

Le libertarianisme est une société de droit privé. Dans une société de droit commun, les entreprises privées sur le marché remplissent les fonctions traditionnelles de l’État. L’ordre contractuel volontaire de l’anarchocapitalisme remplace la coordination hiérarchique des activités de l’État. Le sens premier de l’anarchocapitalisme est un ordre où la coopération horizontale basée sur l’échange volontaire domine la coordination des activités humaines.

L’ordre spontané d’une société anarchocapitaliste exige qu’il se réalise sous la forme d’un processus graduel de privatisation. Commençant par la suppression des subventions et des réglementations, ainsi que par la vente des entreprises semi-publiques et des services publics, la privatisation devrait s’étendre progressivement à l’éducation et à la santé, et finalement englober la sécurité et le système judiciaire.

Il existe de nombreuses preuves que les soi-disant services publics deviendront meilleurs et moins chers dans le cadre de l’anarchocapitalisme. Dans le cadre d’un système global de libre marché, la demande et l’offre en matière d’éducation, de soins de santé, de défense et de sécurité intérieure seraient très différentes de ce qu’elles sont aujourd’hui. La privatisation de ces activités, qui sont actuellement sous l’autorité de l’État, entraînerait non seulement une diminution des coûts unitaires des services, mais changerait également la nature des produits.

Étant donné que la majeure partie de l’offre actuelle de biens dits publics est un gaspillage inutile, une charge énorme pèserait sur les contribuables une fois que ces produits seraient privatisés. Sans perdre les avantages réels de l’éducation, des soins de santé et de la défense, ces biens seraient adaptés aux souhaits des consommateurs, et fournis de la manière la plus efficace. Les coûts seraient réduits à une fraction de leur taille actuelle.

Si l’on inclut l’appareil judiciaire et l’administration publique hypertrophiés dans la réduction de l’activité de l’État, les dépenses publiques – qui représentent aujourd’hui près de 50 % du produit intérieur brut dans la plupart des pays industrialisés – seraient ramenées à des pourcentages à un chiffre. Les contributions diminueraient de 90 %, tandis que la qualité des services augmenterait.

 

Contrairement à la croyance dominante, la privatisation des fonctions policières et judiciaires n’est pas un problème majeur. Il s’agirait d’étendre ce qui se fait déjà. Dans plusieurs pays, dont les États-Unis, le nombre de policiers et d’agents de sécurité privés dépasse déjà le nombre de policiers officiels. La prestation privée de services judiciaires est également en augmentation. Les tribunaux d’arbitrage ont fait l’objet d’une demande forte et croissante, y compris pour les litiges transfrontaliers.

Ces tendances se poursuivront, car la protection et l’arbitrage privés sont moins coûteux et de meilleure qualité que les services publics.

Au Brésil, par exemple, qui possède l’un des systèmes judiciaires les plus coûteux au monde, environ quatre-vingt millions d’affaires sont actuellement en attente de décision, et l’incertitude juridique est devenue monstrueuse. Aux États-Unis, de nombreux secteurs du système judiciaire sont en déliquescence.

 

La solution aux problèmes actuels n’est pas plus mais moins de gouvernement, pas plus mais moins d’État, pas plus mais moins de politique. La malédiction qui pèse actuellement sur les jeunes, à savoir avoir un emploi fixe bien rémunéré ou vivre à la limite de l’autonomie, disparaîtrait. L’anarchocapitalisme est synonyme de productivité élevée et de temps libre abondant. Dans une société anarchocapitaliste, la pénibilité du travail salarié ne sera plus la norme et sera remplacée par le travail indépendant.

L’anarchocapitalisme n’est pas un système qui doit être établi par un parti ou un homme fort.

 

Une communauté libérale devrait émerger comme un ordre spontané. La bonne voie vers une telle société est donc l’action négative. La tâche qui nous attend est la suppression des subventions et des réglementations. Au lieu de créer de nouvelles lois et de nouvelles institutions, la mission consiste à abolir les lois et les institutions. Pour ce faire, un changement de l’opinion publique est nécessaire.

Plus l’idée que la solution réside dans la réduction de la politique et de l’État gagnera du terrain, plus le mouvement libertarien prendra de l’ampleur. Pour ce faire, il faut avoir la volonté d’exiger et de réaliser la privatisation du plus grand nombre possible d’institutions publiques.

La privatisation est un moyen, pas un but. Elle sert à placer un fournisseur de biens sous le contrôle du grand public. Sur le marché libre, ce sont les clients qui déterminent les entreprises qui restent en activité et celles qui doivent fermer. Avec le système actuel du capitalisme d’État, de larges pans de l’économie sont contrôlés par la politique et l’appareil technocratique.

La privatisation place les entreprises sous le régime du profit et de la perte, et donc sous le contrôle du client. Le profit est la clé de l’accumulation du capital, et donc de la prospérité. Le profit des entreprises est le moteur et en même temps le résultat du progrès économique. Seule une économie prospère génère des profits. Dans la même logique, on peut dire que les profits poussent l’économie vers la prospérité.

Pour les entreprises privées, l’importance des bénéfices dépend du degré d’efficacité de l’entreprise et de l’utilité de son produit pour satisfaire les goûts du public. Cependant, la privatisation en soi ne suffit pas. Elle doit s’accompagner d’une déréglementation. Dans le passé, de nombreux cas de privatisation ont échoué parce que le cadre réglementaire n’avait pas été supprimé. Les anciennes barrières à l’entrée ont continué à exister.

 

Une autre erreur souvent commise a été de privatiser à la hâte des entreprises publiques qui fournissent des services essentiels, au lieu de commencer par l’évidence : supprimer les subventions. La déréglementation et la suppression des subventions sont des conditions préalables essentielles à la réussite de la privatisation. Le capitalisme a besoin de concurrence, et la concurrence a besoin de faibles barrières à l’entrée.

L’anarchocapitalisme dessine un ordre économique dans lequel l’entrepreneur dirige l’entreprise selon les règles du profit et de la perte. Ceux-ci, à leur tour, dépendent directement des actions des clients. Les lois du profit et de la perte obligent l’entrepreneur à employer son capital au profit des consommateurs. En ce sens, l’économie de marché fonctionne comme un mécanisme de sélection permanent en faveur de l’allocation des ressources, là où le degré de productivité et de bien-être est le plus élevé.

Pour réussir, la privatisation doit être considérée comme une étape dans un ensemble de mesures visant à établir une économie de marché. Pour bien fonctionner, la privatisation doit s’accompagner de l’ouverture des marchés – y compris le libre-échange international – en réduisant la bureaucratie et en rendant le marché du travail plus flexible.

 

Une monnaie saine et une faible pression fiscale sont des conditions préalables fondamentales au bon fonctionnement des marchés libres. La privatisation de l’économie échouera tant que le système monétaire sera soumis à un contrôle politique et technocratique et que des charges fiscales élevées limiteront les actions économiques de l’individu.

Dans l’économie de marché, les idées des entrepreneurs font l’objet d’un plébiscite permanent. Les entreprises privées doivent répondre aux désirs des consommateurs, car ce sont eux qui indiquent leurs préférences par leurs actes d’achat. Le choix démocratique en politique est systématiquement moins bon que les décisions sur le marché. Alors que la plupart des décisions d’achat peuvent être corrigées et remplacées immédiatement ou dans un court laps de temps, les décisions politiques ont des conséquences à long terme qui dépassent souvent le contrôle et l’horizon intellectuel de l’électorat.

La prospérité est l’objectif, et l’anarchocapitalisme l’apporte.

Le principe de base en faveur de la privatisation découle de l’idée que la propriété privée des moyens de production – et donc la privatisation – garantit le progrès économique et la prospérité pour tous. Les marchés ne sont pas parfaits, pas plus que les entrepreneurs ou les consommateurs. La production capitaliste ne peut pas répondre à tous les désirs ou besoins de chacun. Aucun système ne le peut. Le système de marché n’élimine pas la pénurie pour tout le monde, mais le système de marché est l’ordre économique qui gère le mieux la présence universelle de la pénurie.

L’anarchocapitalisme correctement compris n’entre pas dans la même catégorie que le socialisme. Le socialisme doit être imposé. Sa mise en place et son maintien requièrent la violence. Avec l’anarchocapitalisme, c’est différent. Il naîtra spontanément de la suppression des barrières qui s’opposent à l’ordre naturel des choses.

Un article traduit par la rédaction de Contrepoints. Voir sur le web.

La grogne sociale monte dans l’indifférence de la presse subventionnée

À bas bruit, la grogne sociale monte en France. Plusieurs mouvements sociaux se développent sans être signalés par le cartel de la presse subventionnée. Pourtant, chacun d’entre eux mérite que l’on s’y arrête, car tous sont révélateurs d’un malaise face aux blocages et aux évolutions néfastes de la société française. Ces mouvements sont “spontanés” et échappent au contrôle des corps intermédiaires.

Des agriculteurs bloquent plusieurs accès aux autoroutes A20 et A62 depuis ce matin dans le Tarn-et-Garonne pour protester contre la hausse des taxes et des charges. pic.twitter.com/JhbzHhfRi6

🍓Sined Warrior🐭🍓 (@SinedWarrior) December 4, 2023

Les agriculteurs retournent les pancartes

Les agriculteurs ont subi les intempéries de juin 2023 de plein fouet. Les coûts de production explosent, notamment du fait d’une inflation sur les intrants. Pour protester, ils retournent les pancartes indiquant les entrées de ville.

Les sans-papiers font les JO en toute clandestinité

Beaucoup de Français hurlent contre les sans-papiers et les clandestins, présentés comme des terroristes en puissance. En attendant, ils sont à pied d’oeuvre pour construire le village olympique et les infrastructures qui accueilleront les athlètes. Ils réclament leur régularisation en occupant des sites en construction.

Les travailleurs d’UBER en grève

De leur côté, les travailleurs Uber (conducteurs de VTC et livreurs en tous genres) se mettent en grève dans toute la France pour protester contre un nouveau système de commissionnement qui devrait aboutir à une baisse de leur rémunération.

D’une manière générale, on voit bien que l’économie française est aujourd’hui paralysée par une réglementation (notamment socio-fiscale) qui contraint à fabriquer un lumpenproletariat là où la production n’est plus possible du fait des règlements. Cette situation ne peut durer.

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Victoire de l’extrême droite aux Pays-Bas : trois leçons pour la Flandre

"La politique n'a pas suffisamment écouté les préoccupations des gens", a répété la présidente du VVD, Dilan Yesilgöz, dans sa réaction à la victoire de l'extrême droite aux Pays-Bas. Et […]

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Milei et les médias : extrême droite, un mot tabou

Nouveau membre des BRICS, deuxième plus grand pays d’Amérique du Sud, l’Argentine votait le week-end passé pour le deuxième tour des élections présidentielles. Un homme de centre-droit face à un […]

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Argentine: le jour d’après

Ils ont gagné. Avec le pire des leurs, avec le plus grossier des leurs. Qui n’a jamais modéré son discours, qui a proposé de vendre des organes et des enfants, […]

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Trois questions à Martin Willems sur le procès Deliveroo en appel

Le procès pour faire reconnaître le statut de salarié des livreurs Deliveroo s'est ouvert ce jeudi 16 novembre à la Cour du travail de Bruxelles. Il s’agit du procès en […]

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Enfin ! bientôt la fin des aides aux entreprises ?

La semaine dernière, Elisabeth Borne a tenu une réunion pour préparer le budget 2025… et les économies à prévoir. Il faut dire qu’on imaginait, en juin, que Bruno Le Maire baisserait les dépenses publiques pour 2024, et, comme nous l’avons abondamment souligné, il s’est montré incapable d’atteindre son objectif… Pour 2025, Elisabeth Borne devrait donc, enfin ! mettre sur la table les aides aux entreprises. On sait que cette politique, qui coûterait 110 milliards, profite essentiellement aux entreprises proches du pouvoir, les moins vertueuses, celles qui tassent l’échelle des salaires et mènent le lobbying le plus efficace. Cela s’appelle le capitalisme de connivence, et c’est insupportable ! C’est précisément ce point qui mérite notre vigilance : et si le gouvernement s’apprêtait à accroître les inégalités de concurrence en favorisant encore plus les copains, et en pénalisant ceux qui se contentent d’essayer de vivre honnêtement de leur travail ?

Donc, face à la perspective de voir les intérêts de la dette passer à 70 milliards (en fourchette basse) par an, le gouvernement commence à s’inquiéter. Et si, face à la rigidité des dépenses publiques (que personne ne parvient à baisser), la note de la France était dégradée en décembre ?

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Javier Milei profite de la perte de confiance en l’État des Argentins

Le 19 novembre est le jour du second tour des élections en Argentine entre le péroniste Sergio Massa et l’anarcho-capitaliste Javier Milei.

Dans les années à venir, l’Argentine pourrait être gouvernée par un pro-capitaliste passionné. Ce serait un évènement qui marquerait un changement fondamental dans l’attitude des Argentins vis-à-vis de l’économie de marché et du rôle de l’État. Mais ce changement, en réalité, se profile à l’horizon depuis un certain temps.

Au cours des deux dernières années, j’ai étudié le mouvement libertarien dans 30 pays. Je n’ai rencontré dans aucun de ces pays un mouvement libertaire aussi fort qu’en Argentine. En temps normal, lorsqu’un pays traverse une crise grave, un grand nombre de personnes ont tendance à se tourner vers l’extrême gauche ou l’extrême droite de l’échiquier politique. En Argentine, les libertariens sont les phares de l’espoir, en particulier pour les jeunes. Parmi les électeurs de moins de trente ans, une majorité a voté pour Milei.

Les élections se déroulent dans le contexte d’une crise économique dramatique, avec un taux d’inflation de plus de 100 %, l’un des plus élevés au monde. Il n’y a probablement aucun pays qui se soit dégradé de manière aussi spectaculaire au cours des 100 dernières années que l’Argentine. Au début du XXe siècle, le revenu moyen par habitant était l’un des plus élevés au monde, comme en témoigne l’expression, courante à l’époque, de « riche comme un Argentin ». Depuis, l’histoire de l’Argentine est marquée par l’inflation, l’hyperinflation, les faillites d’État et l’appauvrissement. Le pays a connu neuf faillites souveraines au cours de son histoire, la dernière datant de 2020. Une histoire tragique pour un pays si fier qui était autrefois l’un des plus riches du monde. L’inflation a été à deux chiffres chaque année depuis 1945 (sauf dans les années 1990).

 

L’Argentine a été dirigée par des étatistes pendant des décennies et il est aujourd’hui l’un des pays les moins libres du monde sur le plan économique.

Dans l’indice de liberté économique 2023 de la Heritage Foundation, l’Argentine se classe 144e sur 177 pays – et même en Amérique latine, seuls quelques pays (en particulier le Venezuela) sont moins libres économiquement que l’Argentine. À titre de comparaison : bien que sa position se soit dégradée depuis l’arrivée au pouvoir du socialiste Gabriel Boric en mars 2022, le Chili est toujours le 22e pays le plus libre économiquement au monde, et l’Uruguay est le 27e (les États-Unis sont 25e).

Pour l’opinion populaire cependant, de nombreux Argentins en ont tout simplement assez du péronisme de gauche et se détournent de l’étatisme qui a dominé leur pays pendant des décennies. Dans un sondage que j’ai réalisé l’année dernière, l’Argentine faisait partie du groupe de pays où les gens étaient les plus favorables à l’économie de marché. Du 12 au 20 avril 2022, j’ai demandé à l’institut d’études d’opinion Ipsos MORI d’interroger un échantillon représentatif de 1000 Argentins sur leur attitude à l’égard de l’économie de marché et du capitalisme.

Tout d’abord, nous avons voulu savoir ce que les Argentins pensent de l’économie de marché.

Nous avons présenté aux personnes interrogées en Argentine six énoncés sur l’économie de marché dans lesquels le mot capitalisme n’était pas utilisé. Il s’est avéré que les affirmations en faveur d’une plus grande influence de l’État ont recueilli le soutien de 19 % des personnes interrogées, et que les affirmations en faveur d’une plus grande liberté du marché ont été approuvées par 24 % d’entre elles.

En Argentine, l’affirmation « Dans un bon système économique, je pense que l’État ne devrait posséder des biens que dans certains domaines ; la majeure partie des biens devrait être détenue par des particuliers » a reçu le plus haut niveau d’approbation. L’affirmation « La justice sociale est plus importante dans un système économique que la liberté économique » a reçu le plus faible niveau d’approbation.

Nous avons mené la même enquête dans 34 autres pays et n’avons trouvé que cinq pays (Pologne, États-Unis, République tchèque, Corée du Sud et Japon) dans lesquels l’approbation de l’économie de marché était encore plus forte qu’en Argentine ; dans 29 pays, l’approbation de l’économie de marché était plus faible.

En outre, tous les répondants se sont vu présenter 10 termes – positifs et négatifs – et ont été invités à choisir ceux qu’ils associaient au mot capitalisme, ainsi qu’à répondre à 18 autres questions sur le capitalisme.

Le niveau de soutien au capitalisme n’était pas aussi élevé que dans la première série de questions sur l’économie de marché, où le terme capitalisme n’était pas utilisé. Mais même lorsque ce mot était mentionné, notre enquête n’a trouvé seulement sept pays sur 35 dans lesquels l’image du capitalisme est plus positive qu’en Argentine, contrairement à 27 pays dans lesquels les gens ont une opinion plus négative du capitalisme qu’en Argentine.

C’est pourquoi un partisan avoué du capitalisme comme Javier Milei, professeur d’économie autrichienne, a des chances de remporter les élections dans le pays.

Milei est entré en campagne électorale en appelant à l’abolition de la banque centrale argentine et à la libre concurrence entre les monnaies, ce qui conduirait probablement à ce que le dollar américain devienne le moyen de paiement le plus populaire. Il a également appelé à la privatisation des entreprises publiques, à l’élimination de nombreuses subventions, à une réduction des impôts ou à la suppression de 90 % d’entre eux, ainsi qu’à des réformes radicales du droit du travail. Dans le secteur de l’éducation, Milei a demandé que le financement soit remplacé par un système de bons, comme l’avait proposé Milton Friedman.

Par ailleurs, l’Argentine est un exemple de l’importance des groupes de réflexion (think-tanks) pour ouvrir la voie à des changements intellectuels, qui sont ensuite suivis par des changements politiques. En Argentine, par exemple, il s’agit de la Fundación para la Responsabilidad Intelectual et de la Fundación para la Libertad ou Federalismo y Libertad.

J’ai rencontré des groupes de réflexion libertaires dans 30 pays, mais ils sont rarement aussi actifs que ceux d’Argentine. Reste à voir si les graines qu’ils ont semées porteront leurs fruits le 19 novembre.

2.13.0.0
2.13.0.0

Le complexe de l’industrie (8/8) – 12 recommandations pour enrayer la décomposition

Une traduction d’un article du Risk-Monger.

Pour lire les parties précédentes : partie 1, partie 2, partie 3, partie 4, partie 5, partie 6, partie 7.

Au cours de ma vie, les sociétés occidentales ont bénéficié d’innovations qui ont immensément amélioré la santé publique et la qualité de la vie ainsi que le progrès économique et social, la sécurité alimentaire et énergétique ; et aussi de technologies qui ont assuré une aisance bien au-delà de celle dont nos grands-parents auraient jamais rêvé. Et en dehors de l’Occident, le commerce mondial et les transferts de technologie ont amené des opportunités économiques et le développement social à des nations autrefois pauvres. Et pourtant, les entreprises et les individus qui ont pris des risques et réalisé ces avancées sont largement méprisés par un grand nombre d’influenceurs militants, de parties prenantes, de discoureurs et de décideurs politiques.

Il y a presque un an, j’ai commencé cette série d’articles sur la manière dont l’industrie paye un lourd tribut en termes de confiance du public et d’équité réglementaire en raison d’une stratégie de campagne agressive coordonnée ONG / militants / politiques. Je l’ai appelée « le complexe de l’industrie » parce que je n’arrivais pas comprendre pourquoi l’industrie ne réagissait pas à ces absurdités, et que tous les remèdes à la perte de la confiance du public devenaient plus complexes de jour en jour.

Le « complexe de l’industrie » comportait sept chapitres qui ont posé des questions qui fâchent.

Pourquoi les dirigeants de l’industrie n’ont-ils pas réagi, mais se sont-ils contentés de rester assis, comme le zèbre pas-tout-à-fait-le-plus-lent, alors que les militants anti-industrie appliquaient la même stratégie de tabassage à chaque industrie ?

Pourquoi ont-ils toléré qu’une industrie de la haine anticapitaliste contrôle le discours (qui s’est transformé en un massacre de communication bien coordonné) et détruise la confiance du public envers les entreprises ?

Pourquoi ont-ils permis à une idéologie post-industrielle naïve de se répandre dans le cadre des médias, de la politique et de la réglementation, à un point tel que l’industrie a été vilipendée et n’est plus en mesure de fonctionner dans les limites irréalistes que les gouvernements occidentaux ont créées ?

L’industrie est maintenant dans une cage bien verrouillée par un petit groupe de militants idéalistes anti-entreprises. Comment sortir de la cage ? Après sept chapitres de questions, cette conclusion tentera de fournir quelques recommandations.

 

Musclez votre discours

Au fond, le complexe de l’industrie est une crise narrative.

Les campagnes de communication réussissent si elles suivent sans faillir le discours principal. Un discours est un panier largement accepté de valeurs partagées, d’idéaux et de croyances qui façonnent les histoires que nous racontons. Les discours évoluent souvent après des générations de narration, mais peuvent parfois changer soudainement lors d’un événement extrême (une guerre, un effondrement du marché, un accident nucléaire…).

Les discours n’ont pas besoin de refléter des faits, mais ils doivent accorder les valeurs avec les perceptions. Parmi les discours dominants que les sociétés occidentales partagent actuellement on trouve le changement climatique catastrophique, l’effondrement de la biodiversité et le déclin de la santé publique. Les histoires racontées avec ces discours désignent toutes l’industrie comme la cause de ces crises. La confiance du public est étroitement associée aux héros de ces discours (les chevaliers blancs) qui combattent les méchants dissimulés sous leurs masques (l’industrie et le capitalisme).

Les discours des militants sont dirigés par la peur et la crise : selon eux, ce que l’industrie et le capitalisme ont fait à l’humanité et à l’environnement est tout simplement catastrophique.

Les histoires qui soutiennent ces discours portent généralement sur la façon dont la pollution industrielle et l’exploitation technocratique sont responsables de cette dégradation de l’environnement, de la santé humaine et des valeurs. Dans tout dialogue sociétal, il existe des discours concurrents, mais ceux qui prévalent, au fil du temps, dominent les politiques et les décisions des consommateurs.

Pourquoi les consommateurs pensent-ils que les aliments bios sont meilleurs, que l’énergie nucléaire est dangereuse, et que les produits chimiques sont mauvais ? Les histoires basées sur un discours d’innovation et de technologie résolvant des problèmes mondiaux ne parlent pas à un public qui a été amené à ne pas faire confiance aux institutions de recherche qui ont toujours le rôle des méchants et des pervers. Le message tombe dans l’oreille d’un sourd s’il ne colle pas avec les discours dominants.

Les ONG et les militants de la justice sociale ont consacré une énergie énorme à développer et à renforcer leurs discours tout en contrant activement les discours concurrents. C’est un processus long et patient, et leur coordination intensive a fini par payer. Les ONG travaillent maintenant avec des avocats américains en responsabilité civile et un petit groupe de scientifiques militants pour remodeler les histoires sur la façon dont la recherche et l’innovation devraient être menées. J’ai récemment montré comment quelques avocats spécialisés en responsabilité civile ont financé un film sur la façon dont ils sont les gentils qui se battent pour sauver l’humanité d’une industrie maléfique.

Les discours, comme les paradigmes, ne sont pas logiques mais composent le canevas (la toile) sur lequel nos histoires peuvent être brodées et nos valeurs acceptées. Les croyances façonnées par les discours des militants nous assurent que nous pouvons très bien nous passer du capitalisme, des technologies, des innovations et du commerce international. L’humanité n’aurait aucun problème à prospérer sans l’agriculture moderne ou les combustibles fossiles. Le naturel est toujours bon et le synthétique est a priori mauvais… un point c’est tout ! Les scientifiques et les acteurs industriels sont les forces du mal dans ce discours anticapitaliste avec des malédictions inattendues qui s’échappent de leurs laboratoires.

Les décideurs politiques, les journalistes et les acteurs sociaux qui ne respectent pas ces discours sociétaux dominants ont des carrières courtes. Et donc ils ignorent les solutions technologiques prometteuses à des problèmes comme le changement climatique, choisissant de renforcer les histoires sur la manière dont nous devons cesser de compter sur les innovations, freiner la croissance et le développement, et prendre des mesures de précaution.

Mais les discours évoluent avec les événements.

Après deux ans de confinements liés au coronavirus, la promotion des nouvelles technologies de vaccins à ARNm a été largement acceptée. Le discours antivax était faible pour une population prête à accepter n’importe quel risque si cela signifiait qu’elle pouvait retourner au bistrot (les taux de vaccination ont donc été très élevés). Près de 18 mois après l’invasion russe de l’Ukraine, avec l’inflation nuisant à la plupart des pays européens, le public occidental, autrefois aisé, s’est montré assez ouvert à l’augmentation de la production d’énergie nucléaire et à combustible fossile, adoptant une position plus rationnelle envers une transition énergétique plus graduelle et moins coûteuse.

 

Le pendule des technologies de communication

Je garde également espoir que les récentes révolutions des technologies de la communication (Internet, médias sociaux, IA) et les bouleversements sociétaux qu’elles apportent finiront par rétablir un équilibre à mesure que les gens se rendront compte que les déclarations de leurs chambres d’écho peuvent être ni factuelles ni dignes de confiance.

J’ai écrit par ailleurs comment chaque révolution des technologies de communication a entraîné des tensions importantes sur les institutions dominantes de l’époque (l’imprimerie menant à la Réforme protestante ; le cinéma et la radio permettant l’extrémisme politique et la propagande dans les années 1930 ; le consumérisme de masse émergeant de l’ère de la télévision des années 1950). Il n’y a jamais eu de révolution des technologies de la communication aussi importante que la numérisation et la mise en réseaux sociaux de toutes les informations.

À un moment donné, ces silos d’intolérance sur les réseaux sociaux cesseront de défier les institutions démocratiques et disparaîtront dans le bruit de fond. Mais nous devrons peut-être endurer quelques décennies d’extrémisme politique lorsque des robots d’IA personnifiés prendront le contrôle des prochains cycles électoraux dans les pays démocratiques.

Nous ne pouvons pas compter sur le hasard des événements pour sauver les innovateurs et les scientifiques des conséquences des discours hostiles et de l’extrémisme détruisant la confiance du public. Et s’appuyer sur les conséquences négatives du fascisme, des famines et des crises énergétiques pour (en fin de compte) libérer l’humanité d’une telle irrationalité est, eh bien, affreux. Les scientifiques et les innovateurs doivent apprendre de cette époque militante et jouer à long terme, comme les ONG l’ont fait, en accordant leurs messages sur plusieurs fronts pour composer un discours public plus fort sur ce que la recherche et la technologie ont fait et continueront de faire pour l’humanité. La confiance repose sur des valeurs, les scientifiques doivent donc exprimer leurs valeurs dans leurs histoires.

Il y a beaucoup d’histoires à raconter sur la manière dont la science, la technologie et le capitalisme ont rendu notre monde tellement meilleur. Mais si le récit public ne permet pas à ces histoires d’être entendues plus largement, alors les militants anti-technologie gagneront.

Est-il temps de contre-attaquer ? Cette série plutôt longue sur le complexe de l’industrie se terminera par 12 recommandations à l’industrie pour reconquérir le discours, arrêter la perte constante de confiance du public et remettre l’innovation et la technologie au cœur de ce que signifie être humain. Tous ces points ne s’appliqueront pas à toutes les industries en difficulté mais il y aura, espérons-le, de quoi relever le niveau afin que les industries aient ce débat en interne.

Voici 12 recommandations pour stopper le complexe de l’industrie.

 

1. Serrez-vous les coudes

L’un des principaux succès de communication du lobbying militant des ONG est de toujours parler d’une seule voix. Ils se joignent à eux lorsque d’autres groupes mènent des campagnes (même si elles ne sont pas liées à leurs propres objectifs), ne critiquent jamais publiquement d’autres points de vue (aussi atroces soient-ils) et amplifient leur nombre pour donner l’impression d’un front large et fort. L’industrie ne le fait pas, et même lorsqu’une industrie (ou, généralement, une entreprise) est attaquée sans relâche, les autres restent silencieuses plutôt que de rester unies pour riposter.

Attaquer l’industrie, répandre la peur et créer la méfiance sont des cibles faciles pour les groupes d’ONG qui profitent de la crainte et de l’indignation. Ils ne peuvent pas attaquer un produit sur des faits scientifiques, sa qualité ou son efficacité, alors ils l’attaquent comme un produit qui vient gonfler les bénéfices de Big Pharma, Big Oil, le cartel de l’industrie chimique… et le public gobe ça (en même temps que les produits de ces entreprises).

Et lorsque les militants pointent leurs armes vers une cible, toutes les autres entreprises, comme le zèbre pas-tout-à-fait-le-plus-lent, gardent la tête baissée, reconnaissantes de ne pas être au menu du jour des militants. Sans une réponse coordonnée contre ces artistes du dénigrement, le public se laisse convaincre par leur rhétorique. L’industrie doit retirer une des armes de la panoplie des militants et se tenir unie, s’exprimer lorsque (la plupart) des affirmations sont infondées et laisser les hypocrites se vautrer dans la fange de leurs mensonges.

Tant que l’industrie ne sera pas unie pour défendre toutes les entreprises, tant qu’elle ne luttera pas d’une seule voix contre toute accusation infondée, elle sera une proie facile pour les vautours de la confiance qui lui tournent autour.

 

2. Parlez haut et fort

L’industrie peut revendiquer certaines réalisations exceptionnelles au cours du siècle dernier, créant des produits et des procédés qui ont amélioré notre qualité de vie, notre bien-être, notre sécurité, notre santé publique, notre richesse économique et les plaisirs de la détente. Nous vivons mieux et plus longtemps grâce aux innovations et aux technologies qui sont en amélioration continue. Sans l’ingéniosité, l’efficacité et la capacité de l’industrie, nous souffririons encore des confinements liés au covid, et de nombreux autres êtres chers seraient morts.

Pourtant, nous n’entendons parler que des (très rares) revers ou des inégalités que toute technologie disruptive crée à ses débuts. Il est facile pour les critiques de donner une image biaisée de la réalité lorsque les groupes industriels ne répondent pas ou ne font pas face, et ne promeuvent pas leurs réalisations (sauf en interne). L’industrie doit parler haut et fort des avantages quotidiens dont les sociétés ont pu bénéficier grâce à leurs développements entrepreneuriaux et innovants continus.

Surtout après que tant d’entreprises se soient engagées pendant la pandémie pour trouver des solutions et des soulagements, n’est-il pas temps pour l’industrie de de dresser pour revendiquer le mérite de tout ce qu’elle a accompli ?

 

3. Luttez contre l’hypocrisie

Les acteurs de l’industrie sont tellement habitués à être critiqués au quotidien qu’ils restent silencieux, même face à la pure hypocrisie.

De grandes ONG internationales comme Greenpeace ou les Amis de la Terre ne sont pas transparentes, mentent ouvertement et se financent auprès d’acteurs peu scrupuleux, mais de tels comportements restent sans réponse comme si les règles ne s’appliquaient pas à elles. Et apparemment c’est le cas. Les groupes militants ont tellement harcelé la Commission européenne à propos de la consultation des acteurs de l’industrie que l’UE a effectivement imposé une interdiction à ses fonctionnaires de rencontrer des acteurs de l’industrie en dehors des associations professionnelles (mais cela ne s’applique pas aux rencontres avec des représentants d’ONG).

Pendant ce temps, le Parti vert européen utilise les fonds des contribuables pour que les ONG mènent des campagnes à partir du Parlement européen (et seul le Risk-Monger essaie de les interpeller pour cela). Dans le cas du dérisoire document du Pesticide Action Network sur le glyphosate, il ne s’agit pas tant de la mauvaise qualité de la recherche ou du fait qu’ils ont fait venir tant de militants à Bruxelles pour une semaine de campagnes et d’auditions au Parlement européen, mais qu’ils l’ont fait aux frais des contribuables européens grâce aux fonctionnaires du Parti vert européen. Si l’industrie tentait un tel numéro, l’enfer se déchaînerait.

L’industrie devrait s’exprimer pour exiger les mêmes règles et restrictions pour tout le monde, plutôt que de laisser les ONG avoir le champ libre dans l’arène politique. Au lieu de cela, ces petits putois rusés tentent d’interdire aux acteurs de l’industrie d’être juste présents au Parlement européen. Ils ont fait ça aux compagnies de produits chimiques et de tabac, alors pourquoi pas les autres ? Big Oil est le prochain zèbre le plus lent. Quand donc l’industrie se réveillera-t-elle toute et comprendra que cette stratégie s’applique à tous. L’industrie n’est pas la bienvenue.

 

4. Exigez de tous les acteurs des codes de bonne conduite

Lorsque j’ai rejoint Solvay, à l’époque une entreprise chimique et pharmaceutique belge, l’une des premières choses que j’ai faites a été de signer un code de bonne conduite. Compte tenu de ma formation universitaire, j’ai trouvé beaucoup d’intérêt à ce document, et j’ai été très impressionné. Les entreprises ne peuvent pas se permettre que leurs employés se comportent mal, non seulement pour des raisons de relations publiques mais aussi pour des raisons juridiques, et elles appliquent régulièrement, sinon discrètement, ces codes. Je n’ai jamais signé de code de bonne conduite dans mon université, et il est clair que ce que j’ai vu mon patron faire à des étudiantes a été une raison suffisante pour que je parte.

La plupart des ONG n’ont pas de code de bonne conduite – en fait, elles se réjouissent lorsque leurs militants enfreignent les lois, attaquent les autres ou induisent le public en erreur. Il y a une dizaine d’années, j’ai mis Greenpeace au défi d’arrêter leur hypocrisie et de développer un code, et finalement ils l’ont fait ! Mais même là il s’agit d’un vague ensemble de pontifications plutôt que de règles pour guider les actions de leurs équipes. Peu d’autres ONG se sont souciées d’en faire autant et beaucoup, comme Extinction Rebellion ou Just Stop Oil, se félicitent lorsque leurs militants enfreignent la loi.

 

5.  Reprenez le contrôle du discours

De nombreux partis de gauche en Occident ont utilisé la crise climatique comme une opportunité pour appeler à une désindustrialisation, abandonner le capitalisme, faire reculer la croissance économique et redéfinir la prospérité. « Pas de temps à perdre ! » C’est quelque chose qu’ils ne peuvent revendiquer qu’en raison de la richesse que l’industrie, le commerce international et le capitalisme ont apporté aux sociétés occidentales. Des points de vues comme cellui de Naomi Klein, selon laquelle nous ne pouvons pas avoir à la fois le capitalisme et lutter contre le changement climatique (par conséquent, pour sauver la planète, nous devons virer fortement vers la gauche). D’autres, du WEF à la Commission européenne, parlent de la remise à zéro du capitalisme ou de la décroissance comme si c’était la seule alternative.

C’est de la folie. L’atténuation du changement climatique ne peut être obtenue efficacement par une solution militante de précaution et la réduction de toute activité humaine. Comme pour d’autres crises observées dans le passé, nous devons trouver des solutions technologiques et des innovations, et pour ce faire nous avons besoin de l’industrie, d’entrepreneurs et d’investissements en capital. Ce discours est rarement entendu (à moins qu’il y ait une pandémie ou une crise sanitaire où l’on voit ces mêmes acteurs sociaux critiques implorer l’industrie de trouver une solution).

 

6. Refusez de participer à la guerre culturelle

L’industrie et le capitalisme ont été dépeints comme une malédiction de mâles blancs d’âge moyen envers l’humanité, créant une souffrance mondiale au profit de quelques-uns.

De nombreux groupes d’activistes, des Amis de la Terre à Greenpeace, ont endossé des causes de justice sociale allant des droits des femmes à la diversité raciale dans le cadre de leur lutte contre l’industrie et le capitalisme ; les agro-écologistes ont transformé le développement rural en une lutte de petits paysans contre des grandes entreprises ; Big Pharma est considérée comme négligeant les maladies des femmes et ne cherchant que des solutions rentables pour l’establishment médical occidental…

L’industrie doit raconter de nouveau son histoire, comment elle a trouvé des solutions pour les plus vulnérables, et comment elle a innové en tant que leader de la justice sociale. Des entreprises privées comme Solvay et J&J ont été les premières à garantir des pensions de retraite à leurs travailleurs, des semaines de travail plus courtes, des congés de maternité… Les entreprises figurent parmi les principaux donateurs d’aide, que ce soit via des médicaments aux pays en développement, des paiements monétaires, des écoles ou des projets d’infrastructure. Les ONG anti-industrie qui parlent beaucoup de justice sociale font peu en comparaison (au contraire, beaucoup d’entre elles pompent des finances publiques pour leurs salaires).

Pourquoi l’industrie a-t-elle permis à ces mécontents de leur voler la justice et de draper leur intolérance dans la vertu ?

 

7. Défendez la bonne science

Les entreprises industrielles dépensent des milliards pour investir dans les nouvelles technologies. Leurs travaux scientifiques doivent être corrects, ne serait-ce que pour des raisons existentielles. Leur engagement envers les bonnes pratiques de laboratoire (BPL) et la recherche responsable sont des éléments clés de leur stratégie d’innovation. Aujourd’hui, je ne peux pas imaginer une entreprise ou une industrie qui ne pratique pas la conception durable dans son approche de la recherche (une évolution de la culture de gestion de produits qui a façonné la RSE dans les années 1990).

Cinq ans de travail dans un campus de recherche d’entreprise attestent que les entreprises paient le prix fort pour faire venir les meilleurs scientifiques des programmes d’études supérieures et s’efforcent de leur fournir les moyens de développer une recherche de pointe. L’enjeu d’une bonne méthodologie est tel que l’intégrité de la recherche est gravée dans leurs codes de bonne conduite. Alors pourquoi est-ce que j’entends constamment dire que les résultats de la recherche ne sont pas fiables parce qu’ils sont soit basés sur l’industrie, soit financés par l’industrie ? Ces chercheurs de second ordre sont-ils toujours aussi aigris que leurs anciens camarades de classe aient obtenu de bons emplois et pas eux ?

 

8. Dénoncez la science militante

De leur côté, les scientifiques militants n’existent que pour essayer de créer le doute et la méfiance envers l’innovation.

Il n’y a aucune conséquence si ces tumeurs malignes de la communauté de la recherche font du picorage ou induisent le public en erreur — elles sont payées pour le faire et dans une nette majorité des cas, leurs affirmations sont fausses et finalement réfutées (non sans créer d’abord l’inquiétude et une perte de confiance dans les innovations de la recherche). Lorsque les militants essaient d’ignorer les résultats de la recherche industrielle simplement parce qu’elle est financée par l’industrie, ou lorsqu’ils essaient de discréditer des chercheurs distingués pour avoir travaillé avec l’industrie, il est temps que la communauté scientifique se dresse pour remette les pendules à l’heure.

Mais les dirigeants industriels ne dénoncent pas les pires scientifiques les plus corrompus. Ce blog a récemment montré comment un groupe de scientifiques de la réglementation anti-industrie à la retraite s’est réuni autour d’un organisme à but non lucratif axé sur les relations publiques appelé Collège Ramazzini, prenant de l’argent de dommages-intérêts des cabinets d’avocats américains en responsabilité civile poursuivant des entreprises sur la base d’allégations trompeuses qu’ils font via des canaux malléables d’influence comme le CIRC. Au lieu de cela, les entreprises transigent à l’amiable avec ces avocats prédateurs, fournissant plus de fonds pour plus de fabrication de preuves par ces lamentables scientifiques militants.

Avec le succès des ONG qui ont fait supprimer le poste de conseiller scientifique en chef auprès de l’Union européenne, il n’y a pas de voix forte pour la science dans le processus réglementaire de l’UE, de sorte que nous voyons des politiques basées sur des idéologies ambitieuses plutôt que sur la science. L’industrie doit s’exprimer en faveur d’un retour à des politiques fondées sur des données probantes appuyées sur les meilleures données scientifiques disponibles.

J’ai, avec d’autres, appelé à la création d’une sorte d’organisation scientifique bruxelloise qui puisse défendre la culture scientifique et les preuves issues de la recherche dans le cadre du processus réglementaire.

 

9. Adoptez la politique de la chaise vide

L’industrie s’en tient toujours à sa stratégie RSE des années 1990, selon laquelle le dialogue avec les parties prenantes est le meilleur moyen de gagner la confiance du public.

Écoutez et dialoguez avec ceux qui ont d’autres points de vue, et ils prendront également en compte vos points de vue, créant ainsi une atmosphère propice à un meilleur dialogue dans la démarche réglementaire. Quel tombereau de baratin cela s’est révélé être. En laissant les militants s’asseoir à table, la première chose qu’ils ont fait a été de s’efforcer d’exclure l’industrie de la salle avant de manger leur repas.

À Bruxelles dans les années 2000, les militants des ONG ont menacé de se retirer des processus participatifs tels que les plateformes technologiques européennes (ETP) à moins qu’on les écoute plus, qu’on leur donne plus d’argent et que l’industrie soit moins impliquée. L’industrie a rapidement perdu sa voix dans la démarche réglementaire, alors que les militants continuaient de discréditer les entreprises, leur interdisant souvent de rencontrer les décideurs politiques, ou même d’être autorisés à pénétrer dans des institutions comme le Parlement européen. Et personne dans l’industrie ne s’exprime lorsque d’autres industries sont attaquées ou interdites. C’est honteux.

L’industrie doit cesser de se laisser malmener par la Commission européenne et les ONG. Comme la menace des ONG de quitter les ETP, l’industrie devrait être prête à se retirer de la démarche réglementaire de l’UE jusqu’à ce que sa voix soit également prise en compte, jusqu’à ce que les règles de lobbying soient appliquées équitablement à toutes les parties, et jusqu’à ce que les ONG soient également tenues responsables de leurs mensonges et de leurs campagnes de peur. La démarche réglementaire de Bruxelles repose sur une procédure de consultation des parties prenantes ; si l’industrie refuse de jouer le jeu lorsque les règles sont contre elle, Bruxelles risque de se délégitimer (encore plus). Si l’industrie se retire, les acteurs de la réglementation seront obligés d’être équitables.

Bien sûr, les associations professionnelles européennes existent pour être cette voix à Bruxelles, donc l’initiative ne viendra jamais de ceux qui vendent encore le mantra « l’engagement est la clé ». Les leaders de l’industrie doivent se demander d’où vient la cause profonde de ce problème.

 

10. Soyez exigeant envers les acteurs de la réglementation

La démarche réglementaire (en particulier à Bruxelles) doit changer.

Le simple recours au principe de précaution et à une approche basée sur les dangers a conduit à l’incapacité des décideurs à gérer les risques. La précaution est un outil qui doit être appliqué lorsque la démarche de gestion des risques a échoué, et non à la place de l’ensemble de la démarche. L’industrie devrait abandonner la démarche réglementaire de l’UE jusqu’à ce que la Commission publie un livre blanc sur la gestion des risques. Il faut également une délimitation claire de quand et comment des approches basées sur les dangers doivent ou ne doivent pas être utilisées.

Les 7 étapes de la gestion des risques :

  1. Élaboration de scénarios. Envisager et dérouler toutes les options.
  2. Évaluation des risques. Collecter et affiner les données et les observations.
  3. Analyse des risques. Évaluer les données en termes d’avantages et de conséquences.
  4. Réduction des risques. Identifier les groupes vulnérables et réduire leur exposition.
  5. Publication des risques. Informer le public sur les risques et les moyens de protection : construire la confiance, donner au public les moyens d’agir.
  6. Aussi bas que raisonnablement atteignable. Réduire l’exposition autant que possible dans le respect du bien-être sociétal.
  7. Amélioration continue. Réduire continuellement les niveaux d’exposition afin de bénéficier des avantages avec un meilleur niveau de sûreté.

 

En dernier recours, principe de précaution. Renoncer à tous les avantages ; cette solution ne doit être envisagée que lorsque tout le reste a échoué, et elle devrait être temporaire.

La précaution, interdire toute incertitude et promettre de garder les populations « en sûreté » est en fait assez irresponsable. Il s’agit d’un échec institutionnalisé lorsque l’inaction par précaution met en péril les biens sociétaux, prive les sociétés des avantages, des innovations et des technologies dont elles ont besoin pour bien vivre, prospérer et s’assurer que les générations futures disposent des outils nécessaires pour continuer à trouver des solutions à tous les défis.

Ceux qui plaident pour la précaution plaident aussi pour amener les sociétés « au-delà de la croissance ». Ces gens sont bien nourris, jouissent d’une aisance sans précédent dans l’histoire, et ne se soucient pas de leur avenir économique. Ils sont trop égocentriques pour se rendre compte que la majeure partie de l’humanité ne peut que rêver de la bonne fortune que ces fanatiques ont reçue. L’industrie a fourni d’énormes biens sociétaux, mais il y a encore tant de manques et de besoins, et les voix du monde en développement doivent être amplifiées.

 

11. Félicitez les leaders

Il y a très peu de vrais leaders aujourd’hui dans les administrations.

La plupart prétendent pratiquer la politique de la vertu, l’inclusion et la recherche de consensus, ce qui, ironiquement, crée une société plus clivante, intolérante et inégale. Les leaders dirigent en gagnant la confiance, en inspirant et en étant des modèles. Les chefs d’entreprise ont gravi les échelons en présentant ces traits (… à moins d’être des sociopathes impitoyables et performants). Lorsque les leaders de l’industrie se mettent la tête dans le sable ou transmettent le leadership public à leurs gratte-papier ESG, le public n’identifie pas les chefs d’entreprise comme des Titans de l’industrie, créant de la valeur et changeant le monde.

L’histoire des Titans de l’entreprise – qui capturent les rêves et suscitent la confiance – est rarement racontée aujourd’hui. Lorsque Jamie Dimon de JP Morgan a un jour laissé entendre à un journaliste qu’il « ne serait pas réticent » à occuper des fonctions publiques, le lendemain, il a reçu des appels de hauts placés pour qu’il se présente à la présidence. (mais où sont les neiges d’antan ???) Il est facile de dépeindre les PDG comme des milliardaires déconnectés et avides s’ils ne montrent pas leurs talents inspirants et ne célèbrent pas leurs réussites.

Le complexe de l’industrie pourrait être traité si les chefs d’entreprise avaient le courage de se dresser pour monter en première ligne. Pour chaque Steve Jobs ou Jeff Bezos qui quitte la scène, nous trouvons des fonctionnaires et des ombres qui ne parviennent pas à être des meneurs. Sans chef d’entreprise à l’avant-plan, les jeunes se laissent inspirer par des influenceurs et des professeurs militants (dont aucun n’est là six mois plus tard).

 

12. Revenez à la realpolitik

La politique ne consiste pas à donner à chacun ce qu’il veut, mais à trouver des solutions pratiques pour que chacun puisse obtenir ce dont il a besoin.

Des décennies d’abondance post-guerre froide en Occident ont créé une forme de gouvernance de luxe et simplifié l’élaboration de la réglementation : toute incertitude ou tout risque pourrait simplement être « évacué par précaution » (nous pourrions simplement importer ce dont nous avons besoin pour l’alimentation et l’énergie, et faire un chèque à quelqu’un d’autre). Mais ce n’est pas le but de la politique et, comme nous avons dilapidé notre prospérité, nous devons revenir à des décisions difficiles, à des solutions pragmatiques et trouver des moyens de minimiser les besoins et les pénuries. Dans les années 1970 et 1980, cela s’appelait realpolitik et le concept doit revenir dans notre discours politique.

Les idéologues militants qui ne supportent pas le risque devront reconnaître que nous avons besoin de technologies innovantes, d’une énergie accessible et d’un certain niveau d’acceptation du risque social. Nous ne pouvons pas faire fonctionner des usines uniquement avec des panneaux solaires sur un toit, ou nourrir le monde avec des haricots bios cultivés sur le rebord de la fenêtre.

L’industrie doit promouvoir cette réalité politique et continuer à proposer des solutions pour réduire l’impact des sacrifices socio-économiques nécessaires.

 

Conclusion

Ces 12 recommandations ne résolvent peut-être pas tous les problèmes de confiance auxquels l’industrie est confrontée aujourd’hui, mais elles offrent un moyen potentiel d’au moins enrayer la décomposition.

Ce sont de bien meilleures réponses que la stratégie de l’autruche que nous voyons actuellement et qui n’a fait qu’aggraver le complexe de l’industrie. Il faut de la force pour essayer d’être raisonnable avec des irrationnels sans scrupule. Il faut du courage pour tenir tête à une bande d’idéologues bien financés communiquant via des campagnes astucieuses et coordonnées et des attaques personnelles.

Mais sans un tel leadership, quel avenir aura l’industrie ? Quel avenir auront les sociétés occidentales développées ?

Chine: les nouvelles routes de la soie, à l’heure de ses 10 ans – par Eurasiareview

Pendant que se déroulent les conflits en Ukraine et en Israël, avec de graves craintes sur l’équilibre mondial, Pékin poursuit, presque tranquillement, le développement de son projet « Belt and Road ». Alors que la diplomatie américaine s’appuie sur le rapport force, si ce n’est la menace militaire, la Chine exploite – à grand renfort financier il est vrai – ses relations de proximité dans l’Asie du Sud Est, afin de mener à bien les projets d’infrastructures nécessaires au déploiement de sa nouvelle « route de la soie ». Le capitalisme d’Etat à la chinoise montrerait-il plus de patience que le capitalisme financier américain versé dans le court-termisme ? Et tout ceci se reflèterait-il dans la conduite de la diplomatie fondée sur l’Histoire avec un grand H ?

Cet article initialement publié sur le site eurasiareview.com n’engage pas la ligne éditoriale du Courrier.

Début octobre, l’Indonésie a finalement lancé le chemin de fer à grande vitesse (HSR) Jakarta-Bandung, le premier TGV d’Asie du Sud-Est. Surnommé « The Whoosh », cette infrastructure fait partie d’un portefeuille croissant de projets internationaux sous la bannière de la « Belt and Road Initiative » chinoise (BRI). Son ouverture coïncide avec le dixième anniversaire de ce méga projet et renforcera le profil de Pékin en tant que catalyseur de la connectivité mondiale. 

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Le capitalisme, clé de voûte de la prospérité moderne

Vous pouvez lire cet article en anglais en cliquant sur ce lien.

Bonne nouvelle pour les partisans du bipartisme : malgré le contexte politique hyperchargé, un nombre sans cesse croissant de personnes de part et d’autre du spectre politique s’accordent sur un point ! Malheureusement, il s’agit d’une notion qui, mal comprise, pourrait saper les politiques et les institutions qui constituent le fondement même du monde moderne.

Ce point d’accord, c’est l’idée que le capitalisme, la mondialisation et le libre-marché ont échoué.

En effet, bon nombre des idées exprimées par Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels dans leur opus majeur, Le Manifeste communiste, gagnent du terrain. L’obsession de la lutte des classes transcende les divisions politiques, dominant à la fois les couloirs du monde universitaire de gauche et les paroles de l’hymne de la « nouvelle droite », Rich Men North of Richmond. De plus en plus de voix s’élèvent pour rejeter l’économie du laisser-faire, considérée comme dépassée. Les complexités du monde moderne, affirment-ils, exigent une action publique vigoureuse pour soutenir les industries nationales, rapatrier les chaînes d’approvisionnement mondialisées à risque et protéger les marchés nationaux des vicissitudes de la concurrence internationale.

Des sondages récents montrent qu’environ 21 % seulement des Américains ont une vision très positive du capitalisme, ce chiffre tombant à 11 % chez les moins de 30 ans. La montée du scepticisme à l’égard du capitalisme ne se limite pas aux États-Unis ; de l’Amérique latine à l’Europe, l’anticapitalisme fait fureur. En France, une majorité d’adultes (62 %) exprime une opinion négative sur le capitalisme.

 

À une époque où la libre entreprise est sans cesse tournée en dérision, un homme se dresse contre l’esprit anticapitaliste en déclarant : « Le marché libre mondial sauvera le monde. » Qui est cet individu qui ose exprimer un point de vue aussi controversé ?

« Personne n’est particulièrement enthousiaste à l’égard de la mondialisation aujourd’hui », a observé le journaliste Po Tidholm à la radio publique suédoise en 2020, « à l’exception peut-être de Johan Norberg ».

Norberg, auteur et historien des idées suédois et l’un de mes collègues au Cato Institute, porte l’accusation avec fierté, la citant au début de son dernier livre, The Capitalist Manifesto. Compte tenu du climat intellectuel actuel, la sortie de ce livre aux États-Unis ne pouvait mieux tomber.

Ce n’est pas le premier à proposer un tel titre ; parmi les auteurs de Manifeste capitaliste, on peut citer Robert Kiyosaki, Andrew Bernstein, Louis Kelso et Mortimer Adler. Comme le fait remarquer Norberg, il n’y a qu’un seul Manifeste communiste, mais il y a de nombreux manifestes capitalistes, car le capitalisme permet justement une grande diversité de pensée.

Parmi les anciens ouvrages de Norberg, citons In Defense of Global Capitalism, qui, comme son titre l’indique, était une défense de la libre entreprise contre les détracteurs de gauche du système. Mais au cours des deux décennies qui ont suivi la publication de ce livre, l’expression de la haine du capitalisme est devenue un passe-temps en vogue chez les populistes de gauche comme de droite. À la lumière de cette tendance, Le Manifeste du capitalisme présente une réaffirmation actualisée et éloquente des principes du libre-marché dont on avait bien besoin.

Le livre aborde les critiques les plus fréquemment formulées à l’encontre des marchés aujourd’hui, et cherche généralement à réhabiliter l’image du capitalisme dans l’esprit du lecteur moderne sceptique.

Comme l’a dit le magnat des affaires Elon Musk dans un récent billet :

« Ce livre explique parfaitement pourquoi le capitalisme n’est pas seulement une réussite, mais aussi une bonne chose sur le plan moral. »

 

Comment Norberg, Musk ou n’importe qui d’autre peuvent-ils rester enthousiastes à l’égard d’un système dont tant de gens, sur l’ensemble du spectre politique, s’accordent aujourd’hui à dire qu’il est un échec cuisant ?

En examinant les deux dernières décennies, le livre reconnaît d’abord qu’elles ont été marquées par des chocs, des guerres, et des échecs. L’étude de ces problèmes, tels que les crises financières, la violence au Moyen-Orient, une guerre à l’échelle industrielle en Europe, une pandémie mondiale, fait que Norberg n’hésite jamais à reconnaître les défauts et problèmes du capitalisme. Mais selon lui, en dépit de tout, les vingt dernières années ont néanmoins été les meilleures de toute l’histoire de l’humanité.

Comment cela est-il possible ?

Il faut prendre du recul et examiner rigoureusement les grandes tendances. Un tiers de toutes les richesses jamais créées l’ont été au cours des deux dernières décennies. Au cours des vingt dernières années, à chaque minute passée à se plaindre de la façon dont le capitalisme mondiale a détruit le monde, plus de 90 personnes sortent de la misère. La mortalité infantile a chuté de manière si spectaculaire que le nombre de décès annuels d’enfants a diminué de plusieurs millions par rapport à il y a dix ans, alors même que la population totale a augmenté.

Les progrès les plus importants ont été réalisés dans les pays les plus intégrés à l’économie mondiale. Comment ? Grâce à la capacité miraculeuse des êtres humains à résoudre les problèmes nous permettant d’améliorer nos conditions, à condition seulement qu’on leur donne la liberté de le faire. C’est pour cette raison que les pays du quartile économique le plus libre bénéficient d’un revenu moyen par habitant plus de deux fois supérieur à celui des pays moins libres.

Les détracteurs du capitalisme sont incapables de reconnaître les origines de la prospérité moderne. Norberg décrit ainsi les penseurs anticapitalistes aisés tels que Thomas Piketty : « Il est fier d’ignorer ce qui se passe en bas, dans les garages, les magasins et les usines, et comment cela peut être lié au fait qu’il vit dans la civilisation la plus prospère de l’histoire. »

Un anticapitaliste pourrait protester que l’abondance moderne repose sur un proverbial château de cartes : la pandémie n’a-t-elle pas révélé l’insupportable fragilité des marchés mondialisés ?

Pourtant, les pénuries liées à la pandémie ont été de courte durée, justement parce que les entrepreneurs ont trouvé des moyens d’adapter le processus de fabrication à l’évolution des conditions dues à la crise. Dans de nombreux cas, les entreprises dotées de chaînes d’approvisionnement plus complexes se sont en fait adaptées plus rapidement que celles dont les chaînes d’approvisionnement étaient moins complexes, car elles disposaient d’un plus grand nombre d’options et ont trouvé d’autres fournisseurs ou fabricants qui n’étaient pas bloqués.

Selon Norberg, les chaînes d’approvisionnement concentrées présentent en fait un plus grand risque de perturbation que les chaînes d’approvisionnement diversifiées, en raison de leur dépendance totale à l’égard d’un plus petit nombre de fournisseurs, ce qui revient à mettre tous ses œufs dans le même panier. Les biens produits localement étaient souvent plus susceptibles de connaître des pénuries que les biens importés ; rappelons que c’est le commerce international qui a permis d’atténuer les pénuries de lait maternisé aux États-Unis, les entrepreneurs ont trouvé des moyens, lorsque les responsables politiques ont levé les restrictions à l’importation en réponse à la crise.

Le livre défend également le capitalisme contre les accusations selon lesquelles il serait fondé sur le vol et l’exploitation, en soulignant qu’il incarne en fait l’exact opposé : l’enrichissement et la liberté de choix. Remplacer les marchés par un système de contrôle public plus centralisé concentre le pouvoir de décision dans les mains d’une petite élite.

Remplacer la sagesse collective produite par des milliards de personnes par les préférences de quelques bureaucrates dont l’argent personnel n’est pas en jeu tend à provoquer un désastre.

Norberg cite de nombreux exemples, dont Quaero, le rêve mort-né d’un moteur de recherche soutenu par l’État en 2005, et dont l’objectif était de concurrencer Google. Malgré tous les efforts des politiciens et bureaucrates européens, et bien que les gouvernements français et allemand aient gaspillé des millions d’euros du contribuable dans ce projet, Quaero s’est effondré en l’espace d’un an. Son implosion démontre ce qui se produit inévitablement lorsque des décideurs (qui ne prennent aucun risque financier personnel) se coupent de la réalité des signaux du marché.

À l’appui de données abondantes et d’exemples mémorables, Norberg démontre l’inculture historique de ce nouvel anticapitalisme. Il montre qu’il ne s’agit pas d’une nouveauté, mais de quelque chose de vieux et d’usé qui refait surface. Les tarifs douaniers, la politique industrielle, le rapatriement et la fixation des prix ont échoué dans le passé, à plusieurs reprises. Les décideurs politiques, de gauche comme de droite, tiendront-ils compte de l’avertissement de Norberg, ou l’humanité réapprendra-t-elle la leçon à ses dépens ?

Le Manifeste Communiste se termine par ces mots :

« Les communistes […] déclarent ouvertement que leurs objectifs ne peuvent être atteints que par le renversement par la force de toutes les conditions sociales existantes. Les prolétaires n’ont rien d’autre à perdre que leurs chaînes. Ils ont un monde à gagner. Travailleurs de tous les pays, unissez-vous ! »

Au lieu d’un appel à la révolution violente, le Manifeste du capitalisme se termine par un plaidoyer en faveur de la préservation pacifique du système de capitalisme mondial mis en péril par des politiques peu judicieuses :

« Nous, les pro-capitalistes de ce monde, n’avons rien d’autre à perdre que nos chaînes, nos barrières tarifaires, nos réglementations en matière de construction et nos impôts confiscatoires. Nous avons un monde à gagner. »

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