GLOBAL FINANCIAL MARKETS AND YOU

By Joan Veon
May 13, 2010
NewsWithViews.com

The week of May 2 – 7, 2010 will go down in history as one of uncertainty and change. When I asked then UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1995 what he meant by change, he told me there were several forms of change but what he was talking about was CONSTANT CHANGE. Now that all of the barriers between nation-states have fallen with the exception of the regulatory laws which are about to fall, we will be subjected to constant change as there will be no barriers or borders between countries to prohibit global change and global chaos. Chaos always breeds opportunity to those who create it to take more power, to make money, and to change the world into their image.

In order to have global change you need to have global uncertainty. Last week saw a number of things occurring on an integrated world: the Senate Banking Committee appears to be getting closer to a bi-partisan agreement on regulation; the 1000 point drop in the market; the British elections; and the debt crisis in the European Union led by the debt of Greece.

The Senate Banking Committee has been hammering out a bill which the Democrats would like finish up by the end of this week. The Republicans want to take their time. As I have written before, this bill will open up to the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, via the Treasury Department, all of the financial assets they do not have access to: credit unions, state chartered thrifts, the real estate market, and the insurance industry. Furthermore in a globalized world, you need to have interaction with a global regulatory agency—the Financial Stability Board. The U.S. is already a major player and has been since 1999 when it was the Financial Stability Forum. The May 7 edition of the Financial Times stated,

US senators advocating stricter limits on banks and tougher regulation of markets used yesterday’s volatility to demand more sweeping reforms as the financial Regulatory bill edged towards a vote. Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire predicted that the bill was now certain to pass.

The bottom line is that once America succumbs to a new set of rules, other countries will have to follow—like the European Union for instance. In fact, the weekend edition of the Financial Times hinted that “European leaders committed themselves to a stricter collective effort at fiscal discipline and called for rapid approval of draft laws aimed at tightening financial market regulation.â€