PRESS RELEASE
Trans-Atlantic Titanic:
It's Every Man for Himself!
Sept. 20, 2011 (EIRNS)—With the financial system collapsing at an accelerated rate, the central banks are at a loss. Rather than tackling the problems, they are attempting to drown them with a massive flood of dollar notes. Thus, the Federal Reserve, together with the ECB, the Bank of England and the central banks of Japan and Switzerland, announced on Sept. 15 that unlimited liquidity would be granted to all banks until at least March 2012. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented,
"the five most important central banks in the world have decided to implement the exact policy followed by the Reichsbank in the Weimar Republic in the second half of 1923: hyperinflationary money-printing! With the difference, that this time it involves the whole trans-Atlantic region, as opposed to one country."
As if that were not enough, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner invited himself to the EU Financial Ministers' meeting in Poland, on Sept. 16, where he suggested that the euro bailout fund (EFSF) leverage its capital of EU 440 billions ten times to have 4.4 trillion euros available to bail out financially troubled states, or rather their creditor banks. The model for such a scheme is supposed be the TALF (Term Asset-backed Securities Loans Facility), which was set up in 2008 by the Treasury and the Fed and which officially gave out one trillion dollars in loans to reanimate the real estate securities market, and probably much more, according to indications by Neil Barofsky, the general inspector of another bailout program, the TARP.
Judging from reactions by Austrian Finance Minister Maria Fekter and Eurogroup Chairman Jean-Claude Junker, the discussion between Tim Geithner and his European counterparts, who rejected the proposal, must have been quite animated. So much so that someone like Juncker, who is not known for sticking laws and protocols, came out saying that the Eurogroup does not discuss proposals with non-member states. The fact of the matter is that after Geithner's failure, there is no trans-Atlantic bailout agreement, and the only sane policy on the table is LaRouche's Glass-Steagall proposal.
