Freeze the 1.5 Quadrillion Derivatives Bubble as a First Step Towards World Economic Recovery
The Underlying Cause of the Financial Meltdown


by Actindependent.org
Global Research, March 29, 2009


Washington DC, March 22 – On the eve of the long-awaited London conference of the G-20 nations, we are rapidly descending into the chaos of a Second World Economic Depression of catastrophic proportions. In the year since the collapse of Bear Stearns, we have moved toward the disintegration of the entire globalized world financial system, based on the residual status of the US dollar as a reserve currency, and expressed through the banking hegemony of London, New York, and the US-UK controlled international lending institutions like the International Monetary fund and the World Bank. This is a breakdown crisis of world civilization, prepared over decades by the folly of deindustrialization and the illusions of a postindustrial society, further complicated by the deregulation and privatization of the leading economies based on the Washington Consensus, itself a distillation of the economic misconceptions of the Austrian and Chicago monetarist schools. If current policies are maintained, we face the acute danger of a terminal dollar disintegration and world hyperinflation.

The G-20 leaders are must deliberate a new set of policies capable of leading humanity out of the current crisis. We must first identify the immediate cause which has detonated the present unprecedented turbulence. That cause is unquestionably the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble. Derivatives have provoked the downfall of Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia, and most other institutions which have succumbed. Derivatives have made J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, Barclays, RBS, and money center banks of the world into Zombie Banks.

Derivatives are financial instruments based on other financial instruments – paper based on paper. Derivatives are one giant step away from the world of production and consumption, plant and equipment, wages and employment in the production of tangible physical wealth or hard commodities. In the present hysteria of the globalized financial oligarchy, the very term of “derivativeâ€