U.S. Economic/Financial News

IMF Joins Rand Paul Types Attacking U.S. Credit

April 18 (EIRNS)—Just like Standard and Poor's rating agency, the International Monetary Fund also chose mid-April to pile onto the demand to shut down U.S. government credit and investment throughout the industrial world, and turn the British screws for an Obama-Republican fascist austerity deal in the United States.

The IMF's semi-annual Global Financial Stability Report, released April 15, has as its main feature, the incredible claim that the credit and spending of sovereign government is the primary problem of the global financial and economic crisis! This is the same IMF which in February publicly acknowledged that it had completely "missed" the bank debt bubble crisis which blew up in mid-2007, and admitted its misjudgment, bad advice, and failure to act on that crisis. These were the kind of admissions which, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out in a statement at the time, should have demanded the sacking of the executive leadership of any bank.

But now the IMF, which had no suspicions about the London-Wall Street debt bubbles, abruptly takes a hard line that the cause of financial crisis is government indebtedness, and that therefore reducing government spending is the target around the world—"particularly in the United States and Japan."

This absurdity is pushed in the report as hard as if it were a Dick Armey "Tea Party" document, or an anti-nation pronouncement by "Austrian" fascist Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Yes, banks have to increase their capital and face the "wall of maturing debt," says the report, but the cause of the problem is the debt of governments. And "tackling the problems that caused the financial crisis will require the world's advanced economies to move away from persistent indebtedness."

This is the kind of oligarchical argument Alexander Hamilton defeated two centuries ago, to give us the American Constitution and Republic. It's another reason President Barack Obama has to be put out of office now, if that republic is to survive.

S&P Referred for Criminal Investigation by U.S. Congress

April 19 (EIRNS)—Standard & Poor's attack on the credit rating of the U.S. government this week, downgrading the U.S. sovereign debt to negative, and warning of a possible lowering of the country's AAA rating, comes just days after the U.S. Senate sent evidence of S&P's crimes against the U.S. economy and its citizens to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), in the press conference on April 13 releasing the Senate Investigations Subcommittee report on the causes of the financial crisis, had this to say about S&P, as well as Moody's:

"The page then turns to credit rating agencies, Moody's and Standard and Poor's, which were giving AAA ratings to high-risk securities, securities that were issued by firms that it was dependent upon—that they were dependent upon for their own business, which also was a clear conflict of interest. And when the securities collapsed in value, leaving pension funds and municipalities and other investors—they were all left high and dry. And so we also say in our report that inaccurate AAA credit ratings were a 'key cause of the financial crisis.'... But for their failures, their conflicts of interest, their caving in to the pressures from Wall Street banks to give AAA ratings to securities which didn't deserve them and they knew it, but for that, you wouldn't have had the collapse of those securities."

Levin also told PBS-TV on April 14 that the Subcommittee would "send the report to the Department of Justice and to the Securities and Exchange Commission for their review, ... whether there should be criminal liability against any of the people who factually we've identified as misleading people or engaging in deception or doing the other kind of improper activities that we lay out in this 600-page report."