The City of London mouthpiece, The Economist, acknowledged on April 10 what EIR has already reported: that “America’s financial system came close to the brink” of collapse this past Tuesday, April 8. The Economist succinctly summed up its April 10 report on the details of the financial higgledy-piggedly which went on: “The failure of both risky [stocks] and supposedly safe assets [Treasuries] at once threatened to destabilize the financial system itself.”
Nor is this over, they warn. “Turbulence may well return…. Should trading seize up once again, the Fed would have to intervene, acting as buyer of last resort and offering emergency loans to systemically important firms in need.”
That, however, might cause further turmoil, and “there is the question of how far central bankers can use monetary policy to ease financial conditions and reduce the risk of systemic damage…. It would be reckless to assume the shocks are over, or that foreign investors’ faith in American assets, now shaken, can be magically restored. How much more can the system take before something really does break?”
Enter Gordon Brown, the Labour Party politician who was Tony Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer for the entirety of his reign, who then replaced Blair as Prime Minister in 2007 when he resigned. Brown pronounced in an April 10 op-ed in The Guardian that what is needed is “an economic coalition of the willing: like-minded global leaders who believe that, in an interdependent world, we have to coordinate economic policies across continents if we are to safeguard jobs and living standards…. We need a bold, international response that measures up to the scale of the emergency.”
What measures should these “like-minded willings” take? Open all floodgates! Among his proposals:
