Three days ago, on Friday October 10, the world was shocked by the impact of the Wall Street financial crisis. There is no way to count the millions of dollars in paper money injected by the Federal Reserve into the world’s finances to keep up banking operations and to prevent depositors from losing their money.
The G-7 finance ministers’ meeting has agreed to implement the following measures:
- Take decisive measures and use every available instrument to back financial institutions of importance to the system and prevent their bankruptcy.
- Take all necessary steps to unfreeze the credit and monetary markets and to ensure that banks and other financial institutions have plenty of access to liquidity and funds.
- Ensure that banks and other major financial intermediaries, depending on their needs, can raise capital from both public and private sources in sufficient amounts to restore confidence and enable them to make loans to families and businesses.
- Ensure that each country’s respective national deposit insurance and guarantee programs are robust and consistent so that minor depositors continue to have confidence in the safety of their deposits.
- To act, when appropriate, to re-launch the secondary mortgage market.
That same day, the secretary of the US Treasury confirmed that the government would purchase bank shares, thus joining Britain’s initiative. Both the United States and Britain have indicated that they will purchase preferential shares which are the first to receive dividends but that will have no voting rights.
President Bush deemed his presence unnecessary at that finance ministers’ meeting. He will meet with them on Saturday. Where was he on Friday, October 10th? In Miami, no less. He was attending a fundraiser for Florida Republican candidates. Presently, with a 24% approval rating, he is the president with the least amount of support in the entire history of the United States. He was meeting with businesspeople and ringleaders of the Cuban scum in Miami. There he was, driven by his maniacal anti-Cuban obsession, at the end of his dismal two terms as leader of the empire. He could not even count on the support of the Cuban-American National Foundation set up by Reagan as part of his anti-Cuba crusade.
For purely demagogical reasons, that organization had publicly asked him to provisionally lift the ban on sending direct assistance to relatives and others affected by the devastating hurricanes which hit our people. Raul Martinez, a former mayor of Hialeah and a rival of Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, had criticized the current policies of the man who was elected president by fraudulent means with less national votes than his adversary, due to Florida’s weight in the electoral vote count, when he failed to win a majority even there.
On Sunday October 12, the European Union, chaired by France, agreed to request that the United States organize a summit to “reestablish the international financial system.” This was stated by President Sarkozy after a meeting in Paris of the Eurozone countries.
Sarkozy said Europe should now join the United States and other powers in attacking the root causes of the financial crisis in which the stock markets are immersed.
“We should persuade our American friends of the need for an international summit to reestablish the financial system,” said Sarkozy, current president of the EU. It will not be a gift to the banks, the French president emphasized.
The president of the United States, George Bush, today begins his final 100 days in power shadowed by his extreme unpopularity and one of the worst economic crises in recent decades.
On the other hand, Brazilian Treasury Minister Guido Mantega criticized the IMF today for describing the advanced nations as models to pursue, and said that the rules of those nations should not prevail in any future reform of the financial system.
“The world is watching in awe as the present crisis exposes weaknesses and serious errors in the policies of countries that were considered models and presented as points of reference for good government,” Mantega said in the International Monetary and Financial Committee, the IMF’s main leadership body.
With the global economy in tatters, the U.S. president, who was placed in that office in such an irregular and irresponsible way, has created a real predicament for all of the NATO allies and Japan, the most developed and wealthiest military, economic and technological partner of the United States in the Pacific.
Miami today is bedlam and Bush has become a ghost.
The stock markets have not fallen further because they were already on the floor. Today, they were breathing happily thanks to the enormous injections of money artificially inflating them at the expense of the future. However, this absurdity cannot last. Bretton Woods is in its death throes. The world will never be the same again.
Fidel Castro Ruz
October 13, 2008
5:20 p.m.