2024: Decisions to prevent financial chaos and war

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Lead Editorial

10 January 2024
Vol. 26 No. 1-2

On 20 December the Australian Financial Review warned that US regulators fear a repeat of the 2019 and 2020 blow-ups of US Treasury markets, a scenario that also played out in the 2022 UK bond crisis and was exacerbated by market conditions that caused the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in US history in 2023 (p. 7). AFR reports, as AAS has been warning for years, that a small handful of massive, speculator hedge funds have taken over the US Treasury market, “the cornerstone of global capital markets”. They have become, according to one cited hedge fund strategist, “too big to fail”. This comes almost exactly thirty years after the AFR, on 29 January 1994, quoted American economist Lyndon LaRouche’s warning that a “derivatives bubble ... of enormous magnitude” threatened the globe, in a 20-page supplement on financial derivatives.

The actions taken in response to the 2008 global financial crisis have created a far more precarious financial and economic knife’s edge today. The existential threat this represents to the powers behind the financial order, based in the City of London and Wall Street, has driven the world to the brink of a new world war, a brink on which we have been teetering for years.

The alternative to financial meltdown and war has been exemplified by China’s commitment to restore physical economic growth, not only for its own economy, but for the entire world. The expansion of the BRICS forum is propelled by nations that recognise there is no other way to survive than to rebuild the real economy which has been sucked dry by decades of neoliberal economic policy. The choice between taking that alternative pathway, or sticking with the old “rules-based” order, is seen starkly in the decision by the new President of Argentina, fanatical neoliberal Javier Milei, to withdraw his country from BRICS, which it was scheduled to join on 1 January along with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (p. 6). Blaming a long history of “decadence” for a crisis created by the IMF’s financial warfare, in his inaugural speech Milei demanded more of the same medicine the IMF deployed to destroy the country: vicious “fiscal adjustment” and “shock programs”, i.e. austerity. There is “no possible alternative” to this course, Milei claimed, and it must include putting an end to the issuance of money—the ostensible “cause of inflation”. He admitted that under his approach, “in the short term the situation will worsen”, causing untold pain.

In exactly the same category is the push by our own Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, to give up the last remaining powers the government has over the Reserve Bank of Australia—powers which could limit the pain the RBA is imposing on Australians in the name of fighting inflation. As AAS has demonstrated historically in the series The genesis of austerity, now released as a pamphlet (pictured above, details p. 3), “fighting inflation” has been deployed as a ruse to hand control of public policy to private interests, in order to loot the population to benefit the Anglo-American financial and political elite.

But Australians are not about to let Chalmers get away with it, as they have demonstrated through the numerous fights in which the Citizens Party has played a central role in recent years—from defeating the cash ban, to exposing the “bail-in” agenda, to stalling the misinformation/disinformation bill and the ongoing inquiry into bank closures. Our fight for the people and their elected representatives to maintain power over the banking system is the same as that of restoring national sovereignty, which means breaking free from the City of London and Wall Street dictates that spell economic ruin and war. The deployment of national credit to fund economic reconstruction—which will not fuel inflation but will help quell it by raising productive capacities and output—must begin in 2024.

In this issue:

• Fight to stop Treasurer Chalmers from surrendering power to economic stranglers!
• Competition policy fails to support regional bank branches and small business
• A new world rises
• ‘Fragile and uncertain’ US banking system ripe for another crisis
• Canberra opts out (mostly) of Middle East misadventure
• South Africa intervenes against Gaza genocide
• Warm up your keyboard: Make a submission!
• Silencing the lambs. How propaganda works

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