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Our warning
below about the G20 summit plans, as published soon after the World
Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January 2009, has been updated below
with links to recent news on this topic. |
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September 5, 2009 -
G-20 pledge continued economic stimulus - Comment: Do we
really want the US government to be collaborating with foreign
governments to impose salary controls on bankers? That is a very
slippery slope. Why should Americans and Europeans or others face
the same salary cap rules? This expands government power and
control over industry, and such practices lead to greater corruption.
Meanwhile, blind faith commitment to the "stimulus" plan goes on. |
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September 4, 2009 -
European countries call on G-20 to tackle bonuses - Comment:
Pay attention to the preparations for the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, and
the Copenhagen climate summit in December. |
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June 1, 2009 - AP source: Tentative deal struck for funding war -
Comment: Note the $100 billion credit line for the IMF to help
developing countries, as Obama promised at the G20 Summit in April.
That is only treated as a $5 billion commitment on the fiction that it
will somehow be repaid with interest over time. Think of it as a
subprime loan via the IMF instead of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in
which the US taxpayer is assumed to not be on the hook for the $100
billion capital commitments which the IMF can make, somewhat like 20:1
leverage. That worked out really well for us, didn't it? |
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March 28, 20090 - China challenges US global financial leadership -
Comment: Read this carefully. China is boldly asserting the
superiority of their one party, central state planning model.
Ahead of the G20 summit, it is pushing for more global regulatory powers
and a global currency. |
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March 27. 2009 - Obama, Merkel in agreement ahead of G20 - Comment:
No real details, but the Germans think Obama is in agreement with their
position. See more on that position below. |
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March 14, 2009 - Brown, Merkel insist G-20 will deliver results -
Comment: "You're going to see a massive change in the supervisory
system".
"We must act to reshape our financial supervision. Regulation in one
country must cooperate with regulation in another country," Brown
said. Will this be voluntary coordination between countries, or a
new global bureaucracy as European leaders envision? See also
G-20 officials wrestle with policy divisions - and the Chinese
warning about the dollar. |
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March 11, 2009 - Obama, Geithner: recession requires global action -
Comment: Still not saying much yet about the European-driven push
for a new global regulatory system for financial markets. |
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March 11, 2009 - Obama urges other nations to take stimulus action -
Comment: Preparing for the G-20 summit in
April and creating a more global regulatory process over financial
services. Try to imagine financial markets being regulated by a
body like the UN Security Council (see below). Crazy? |
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February 28, 2009 - Reuters - Brown, Merkel urge tighter global banking
supervision - Comment: The return of the new world
economic order - using the financial crisis and public unrest over high
unemployment to push forward a new global regulatory system for
financial markets. |
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Financial Times - The Economists' Forum column by Martin
Wolf - February 25, 2009 -
"What
Obama should tell the leaders of the Group of 20". He
suggests a letter and getting more engaged now to chart a different
course - before EU bureaucrats drive the London summit agenda in the
wrong direction. |
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News update -
February 22, 2009 - EU leaders back sweeping financial regulations
- Comment: The EU is moving forward with Angela Merkel's vision of
global financial market regulation as warned below during the World
Economic Forum event in Davos. Watch out for the European Council
meeting in March and the Group of 20 (G-20) summit in April, which Obama
will attend in London.. |
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Look back at this Financial Times column by
Gideon Rachman - December 8, 2008 -
"And now for world government". We can give up our
sovereign power through treaties - in effect, trumping our
Constitutional protections if the President and Congress agree to
subordinate us to global deals. |
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A
former Secretary of State once observed wryly, "While we are
sleeping, two thirds of the world is up to some mischief." |
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Events this January in Davos have proven that sage advice to be true once
again. |
| Look
up media coverage of the exclusive
World Economic Forum
event in Davos, which brings together government leaders, UN officials,
philanthropists, business leaders, and others to discuss global issues. |
| Watch
for moves this year to create a global initiative to regulate the world
economy, and to direct it toward social purposes. We may expect
this of French labor union
activists and other socialists who think that government exists to spread the wealth
around more fairly and provide full employment, but this is potentially very
dangerous. It's not just the loonies on the streets now.
It's world leaders. Regardless of what you think
of "Wall Street", do you really believe that the world will advance
better economically if financial markets are ruled by a global
bureaucracy? Where is the evidence that this will create better
outcomes through regulators, rather than even more disastrous economic
problems? Unwise political and regulatory actions have played a
major role in creating the most severe economic crisis since the Great
Depression. Why should we now trust bureaucrats to rule over the
entire world? |
| Here
are a couple of brief excerpts from an AP story on January 29 about the
World Economic Forum. British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown said lending to emerging countries would drop from $1
trillion two years ago to $150 billion next year. "This is a breach of
the promise of global prosperity".
Really? OK, he's a liberal Labour party leader,
so perhaps he can be excused for expressing his view that it is the role
of central governments to promise prosperity worldwide, even if he is in
no financial position to deliver on such promises because his own
economy is doing so poorly on his watch. |
| Brown
also made this assertion in preparation for a G20 meeting in April to
discuss the idea of creating some sort of "early warning system" for
financial market problems. "We cannot
continue with a situation when we have global financial markets and no
form of global supervision," Brown said.
Really? So now the G20 needs to create such a
"global supervisor" for the world economy? Are we really OK with
this idea of having a multilateral body (largely European) imposing new
rules over us? We were the ones who figured out first that we had
a real problem - not just one of our own making, either.
It wasn't the government officials and their brilliant
team of bureaucrats in regulatory agencies who figured it out first, and
warned us of the pending dangers, or moved to prevent them. They
were warned several years ago by experts, and did nothing with that
knowledge to stop the problems. On the contrary, they continued to
deny that there was a problem until the disaster was intuitively
obvious. |
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Perhaps that's still better than Angela Merkel's idea of putting the UN
in charge of the economy. "German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, who is proposing a U.N. Economic Council out of the ashes
of this crisis, similar to the U.N. Security Council formed after the
destruction of World War II, said the rights of the poor must be
enshrined in the new economic order."
This sounds like the ghost of former Chancellor Willy
Brandt of the Social Democrats come back to life, asserting that Germany
must lead us out of the unfair debacle of the "North-South" social
disparities which the "Non-Aligned Movement" used to blame on us before
the Soviet Union and various socialist regimes collapsed from within.
After he got his Nobel Peace Price and retired, he became the president
of the Socialist International.
Do we really want the UN to set up a body analogous to
the Security Council to oversee the world economy? Do we want to
give more economic and political power to such an organization? Do
we want to give central governments more regulatory authority and then
delegate it up to multilateral global bureaucracies which are almost
completely beyond the reach and influence of our voters? |
| It's
bad enough that we have to deal with federal
Ponzi schemes thanks to our own officials. We certainly cannot
afford to create new multilateral regulatory organizations with the
power to create even worse global economic disasters with no real
accountability, regardless of any good intentions.
We need to limit the power of central governments
to disturb our ability to sleep peacefully at night, confident that we
are responsible for our own economic futures as free individuals.
We should be skeptical of what the Obama administration
is already trying to do with the new Congress, but we should not lose
sight of the larger and enduring problems which they can create with
their liberal friends in Europe.
We can effectively surrender our economic sovereignty to
unaccountable global bureaucracies through treaty agreements. That
would perpetuate the harm to our remarkable Constitution and the last
two centuries of economic progress through American capitalism rather
than state-directed political economies, whether socialist or other
forms of tyranny.
We are not one member state in the European Union.
We are 50 states, and no state should accept this intrusion on our
individual liberty and our Constitution by our federal government in
cooperation with European or other global leaders. It is one thing
to try to coordinate our own pursuit of our national and global
interests through diplomacy, and quite another thing to create a global
regulatory bureaucracy as a higher authority which our future elected
officials will have very little ability to control or influence.
Think about the UN model, as Merkel has seriously
suggested. This is our worst nightmare - to put a critical
component of our economic vitality in the hands of such a global
bureaucracy with no significant accountability to American voters for
the damage they could to to our economy as they pursue their own
political and social agendas through such unchecked global power. |
