The global money meltdown: Apocalypse Now?

When banksters and their ilk start to "tell the truth," then its time to worry.

Look at the Apocalypse Now Doomsday warnings which are suddenly flooding the media.

Here’s Mohamed A. El-Erian  chief executive of bond fund giant Pimco, with his personal Sky Is Falling shocker that appeared in the Financial Times  (29^th September). It seems that  French banks have scarcely a dime to speak of in their vaults. So much cash has been withdrawn by panicky depositors the safety buffer has shrunk to 1-1.5% instead of the 6 or 7 percent which is generally regarded as prudent. Where did all that money go?

Well, apparently its due to a run on the banks. All of them. Even the one that you visited this morning to work out with the ATM. You may not have realized that your single reckless act in pulling the weekend cash brought the world financial system an inch or so closer to oblivion.

It was this comment that I found both interesting – and very suspicious, for reasons that I will explore in a moment.  Our Egyptian doomsayer states that private credit institutions around the world have sharply pulled back their collective short-term lending to French banks. This of course is the daily fix which keeps all banks, be they French or otherwise, in business.

There’s an old saying that banks lend you money when the sun shines and take it back when the umbrellas come out. The question is, are they getting a taste of their own medicine? (The answer is, No).

So who is the wizard pulling the levers behind the curtain?

The thing about banks is that they never have any money of their own. That’s much too risky.  So they borrow it from shady credit institutions that are little more than ticks feeding on the back of the financial system.  OK you say, banks should be conservative like they used to be, packed with scores of Scrooge-like drones shivering over a candle counting the pennies. Like so much about banking that was a myth too.

Apparently such is the panic among the Gauls that  bank shares have been plunging like lead weights ever since all those directors and counter clerks finally returned from the long summer sabbatical on the Cote d’Azur. Bank equity is trading at around fifty per cent discount to real book value which as your doctor would say, gives cause for concern.  France it seems is suddenly the new front runner to shove the world over the brink. When the French banks fall, all shall fall.

We turn to Hungary and the head of UniCredit global securities, a certain Attila Szalay-Berzev (scarcely a name to trip from the tongue, which is probably why most us have never heard of him before). He took his place in the doom chorus to predict the imminent death of the euro.

This he warned is now beyond saving, because  Europe (starting with the garlicky French) is about to be flattened by a Greek fiscal earthquake in the magnitude of force ten on the Richter scale: the euro is beyond rescue and the only remaining question is how long ‘the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank’ can keep those finicky ouzo-soaked Greeks on the rocky path of duty and honour.

Then we have that strange trader Alessio Rastani who suddenly popped up from nowhere to inform startled viewers of the BBC they were on the verge of Armageddon. Money would, effectively disappear in tangible terms, the banks everywhere will be shuttered, all civil order plunged into turmoil. Then he suddenly announced his mission: how to make money in a global crash of all financial systems. Gosh, that’s reassuring.

Apparently in Mr Rastani’s view there will be those who survive, dotted around the world in small encampments of huts made of banana leaves and  so forth, who will supervise the resurrection of civilization.

Was I entirely alone in finding that this analysis of the Man From Nowhere did not seem to make  much more sense than my daughters fretting over their maths homework? Of course this was an initial, rash reaction, until I realized that Mr Sistani was speaking in code. He was talking in pure Darwinian terms about the survival of the fittest, namely he and his elitist likes.

Personally my 'money' right now is on a synthetic deliberately engineered collapse of the entire world banking system, which may well be so rotten to the core that nothing on earth can save it. Was it ever otherwise, I ask? Think of it as one massive global self-bankruptcy. From the ashes a new phoenix will arise and you bet it will be a monster world bank or something like that. That of course needs a world government to look after the nuts and bolts. Oh yes, and a world currency.

The evidence of a deliberate staged, take down of the world’s present arrangement of financial management  - commodities, currencies, stocks, hedge instruments, banks  – is all around us,  should we care to look for the signs.

Gracious me, even that great stealer of other people's silver teaspoons the International Monetary Fund pleads that it needs a bail-out.

The financial markets across the globe are experiencing almost unique sell-offs in recent memory. The Dow Jones Industrial average dropped 467 points in a day’s trading (September 29^th). The parachutes were already opening the previous day when it fell 284 points. Now read that against the Fed’s warning of ‘substantial risk and strains’ in the global financial system, the similar emission from the Bank of England, and you start to get the big picture.

Who are these ‘investors’ who are rocking the ship, by uttering a single four-letter word, namely SELL? I can assure you that they do not exist. Real flesh and blood investors are as common as oriental gentlemen with long beards and robes appearing with gold,  frankincense and myrrh at birthday parties these days.

Trading is chiefly performed according to robotic primed programmes. The average time is a security is held is about eleven seconds. The bulk of trading occurs close to closing time. Who is pulling the electronic strings, so to speak. Why, the three gentlemen of the New World Order persuasion that I have just named, and their kith and kin from Wall Street to Timbuktu and everywhere in between.

So as you can see, it is easy to ‘fix’ an engineered stock market plunge. I am quite sure that is what we are seeing now.

As for Greece, it is time to stop being taken by the utterly false and almost pathetic myth of Acropolis Now.

Sure, the Greek economy is a bag of dried raisins. It always has been. No-one gave a damn until it suddenly became necessary for this small country and her nine million delightful people to play the leading role in bringing the euro to its knees. This is like saying Vermont packs the punch to topple the dollar.

As a former European MP who watched all the moves leading up to currency union, I formulated an early theory about the euro, which I now believe is being vindicated before my very eyes. Namely, the euro is a mess because it was never intended to be otherwise.

Sooner or later it could be steered into deep mire, than collapsed as part of a major re-alignment of global currencies into one huge global reserve. Mr Strauss-Kahn, he of the Great Chambermaid Affair, late of the IMF, gave the game away with his speeches literally days before he lost his pants - and much else besides. Patently, it was a sting.

Whatever his well known predatory activities, he was not going to go along with a global collapse gang bang.

Look, it is much easier to forge a global currency union if there aren’t that many money boxes to fuse together; dollar, euro, Swiss franc, yen, various other sweepings on the edges and the job’s done. The menacing Chinese can be shoved into a corner where they can sulk until they come to their senses.

But first you need an impetus, which has to be a global fiscal disaster of such epic proportions we will be sold Mrs Thatcher’s famous TINA line. There Is No Alternative.

As my daughters constantly intone when we are driving anywhere: are we nearly there.

It looks like it.