GEAB N°39 is available! Global systemic crisis – States faced with three brutal options in 2010: inflation, high taxation or default

- Public announcement GEAB N°39 (November 16, 2009) -

As anticipated by LEAP/E2020 last February, in the absence of major reappraisal of the international monetary order, the world is now entering the phase of geopolitical dislocation of the global systemic crisis. In 2010, as protectionism and the economic and social depression will gain momentum, a large number of States will be compelled to choose between three brutal options: inflation, high taxation or defaulting on their debt. A growing number of countries (USA, United Kingdom, Euroland (1), Japan, China (2),…) have used all their budgetary and monetary cartridges in the 2008/2009 financial crisis and are now left with no other alternative. Nevertheless, out of ideological reflex or in an attempt to avoid by any means having to make such painful choices, they will try to launch new stimulus plans (under different names) even though it is now clear that the huge public effort made in the past months to boost the economy is having no impact on the private sector. Indeed the consumer-as-we-knew-him in the past decades is dead, with no hope of resurrection (3). Knowing that nearly 30 percent of Western countries’ economies are now made of « economic zombies » (financial institutions, companies and even states, whose signs of life are only due to central banks’ liquidity injections), it is possible to confirm the inevitability of the “impossible recoveryâ€