interconnected problems WATCH, let's planetize!! Now.

Dr. Arthur Mutambara, opposition leader from Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change, says the answer to The Davos Question is for global citizens to realize that our problems are interconnected. An injustice somewhere is an injustice everywhere. That means, Mutambara says, that the world should work to insure that Zimbabwe's upcoming presidential elecions (March 29) are free and fair.

the financial HITS just a keepa coming. Let's hear from George Soros again and then some more

SOROS: THE REAL RISK IS ENORMOUS

From the Humanitarian Resource Institute: "CNBC conducted an interview in Davos, Switzerland, with George Soros, Soros Fund Management; Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary & CNBC's Maria Bartiromo:

A key focus point of George Soros was the systemic risk associated with nondisclosed $45 trillion in credit default swaps, and call for intervention by authorities to facilitate an investigation/full disclosure of asset valuations marked to market. Emphasis has been placed on the fact that confidence cannot be reestablished until full disclosure by all investment banks that have participated in these practices.

(boyz and grrrls, can you notice they've all been too busy bailing out their own sweet little asses, conning people into trusting them for just the weeeeeeeeeeeeeee bit longer? They've been too busy stuffing away money to keep up their Quarterly earnings than to keep track of their auditing of profound and BANKRUPTING debt?)

$45 Trillion encompasses a very conservative projection of the size and scope of a bailout needed to stabilize global markets from damage caused by synthetic new instruments, the failure of the ratings agencies and lack of regulatory oversight by reserve banks.

The latest report by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) shows that the total outstanding volume of all over-the-counter credit derivatives increased from $US 3.5 TRILLION in 1990 to $US 63 TRILLION in 2000 and to over $US 283 TRILLION this year. The total amount of exchange-traded and over-the-counter structured financial instruments was 27.3 percent of global GDP in 1990. This year it is 772.8 percent. The BIS has reported that the global market for derivatives has soared to a record $US 370 TRILLION in the first half of 2006, boosted by credit default swaps. - CurrentConcerns.ch: November Issue, 2006.

I believe the current global market for derivatives is now estimated to be over $US 700 Trillion. This would be over 70 times the outstanding U.S. Public Debt ($US 9.2 Trillion) as of 24 Jan 2008 at 04:40:18 AM GMT.

IS THIS WHY THE FED ACTED SO FAST?—FROM THE SYDNEY MORNING POST

The Federal Reserve Bank delivered a large rate cut with unprecented speed. Why?

In part, the size and urgency of the cut are explained by the intensity of the fear that had gripped the markets. In the abrupt bipolar switch between greed and fear, the markets, until Tuesday, had switched to full-time fear.

For example, the yield on US Treasury bonds at the moment is lower than the rate of inflation.

The meaning of this? To hold a government bond at the moment is to be guaranteed of losing money, in real terms. Yet frightened investors are rushing into bonds. Why? Because they are in single-minded pursuit of safety.

A number of famous market names have framed the downturn in apocalyptic terms….

Jim Grant, the publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer and a well-known Wall Street contrarian, told the Herald that an American recession in the current circumstances could bring "an end to the Bretton Woods system, Mark II", the existing world financial order created with the end of the gold standard in 1972.

The biggest of the world's bond market investors, Bill Gross, the founder of Pimco, told the journal Barron's last week that "economic growth will be below zero or mildly above it for a long time, and nothing like what we've grown used to in the past 10 to 15 years".

So the Fed is acting to interrupt the cycle of fear and panic to prevent it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

CHINA AT RISK TOO?

BEIJING (AFP) — China's reported establishment of a task force to monitor banks' subprime exposure shows it can no longer be assured financial markets are insulated from outside shocks, analysts said Wednesday.

The team, set up by the China Banking Regulatory Commission, the top industry watchdog, will examine the subprime holdings of China's major lenders on a monthly basis, the Financial Times said, quoting an unnamed official
.
"Chinese banks have more solid operations at home. Abroad, their risk management is not advanced enough," said Zhang Pan, an analyst with TX Consulting, a securities investment consultancy.

INDUSTRY DOING POST MORTEMS

Fiduciary Investor reports; " The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently hosted a Liquidity Conference to go through this process. Reflective fiduciaries can take advantage of some esteemed thinking in this area. Here's one report that was cited:

Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

"We find that during the explosive growth of the subprime market in 2001-2006 the quality of loans monotonically deteriorated and underwriting criteria loosened. In this respect, the rise and fall of the subprime market resembles a classic ending boom-bust scenario, in which unsustainable growth leads to the collapse of the market. We show that the problems in the subprime market were imminent long before the crisis in 2007, securitizers were to some extent aware of it but a high house price appreciation in 2003{2005 masked the true riskiness of subprime mortgages."

AMERICAN HOME RESOURCE NEWS: Housing and Stock Market fraud

San Diego, California -Politics, legislative and judicial fraud, the privatization of housing ( homeowner associations operated by foreclosure profiteers), the delivery of public services (including justice and law enforcement), the collapse of the world financial systems - all these are related to the rights and property of homeowners in, not only America, but the world. Nothing is an island, everything is of one warp and woof.

Decades ago, AHRC News Services, U S News and World Report, Congressionel Quarterly, and other publications, warned of America's Homeowner Association litigation floods. AHRC News Services reported that governors (Governor George W. Bush, Governor Gray Davis..) and other public officials, judges and foreclosure lawyers were colluding together by electing and appointing forecloseure interests to positions of power in government and courts, writing illegal laws and contracts and using courts and enforcement agencies to rob the homes, property and earnings of homeowners. ??In addition to forcing American home buyers to suffer in a housing fraud, they securitized the fraud-based American mortgages to unsuspecting international investors around the world. They also violated the fundamental rights of citizens in the process.

THE RACIAL DIMENSION: GLENN FORD

The report, titled "Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008," shows definitively that banks and other lending institutions trapped Blacks and Latinos in predatory lending schemes as a matter of policy. "Even a surface check of the demographics shows," the report says, "that, in city after city, a solid majority of subprime loan recipients were people of color." The very scope of the crime proves that the lending crisis is not the product of Black "culture," but the result of calculated policies, near-uniformly carried out by virtually all of the nation's mortgage lending institutions. This is institutional racism writ large, and indisputable.

The money-lenders have already sucked the value out of whole communities, urban and suburban. The wealth loss is staggering: People of color have collectively lost between "$164 billion to $213 billion over the past eight years," with Latinos losing slightly more than African Americans. For the average American, wealth is passed on through the value of homes. That dream, as the report concludes, has been largely foreclosed.

BANKER IN FRANCE CHARGED WITH 7.1 BILLION FRAUD

INVESTMENT NEWS: Morgan Stanley to ax 1,000 jobs

ENTER THE LAWYERS: THE NEXT PHASE

The Columbus Dispatch (OHIO): Mortgage Lender Hid Big Risks, Suit Alleges

The giant mortgage financer known as Freddie Mac swindled an Ohio pension system out of as much as $27 million by concealing its heavy investments in the battered subprime lending industry, Attorney General Marc Dann alleges in a lawsuit. Dann said the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. "secretly and intentionally participated in one of the largest housing investment deceptions in modern U.S. economic times." The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in Youngstown, alleges that Freddie Mac downplayed its investments in subprime lenders before its stock nosedived in November on news that it lost $2 billion in the third quarter, largely because of the collapse in the subprime market.

IHT: Subprime Losses: Now Everyone Has a Lawsuit Some Cases Reaching Across Continents

Everyone wants to know who is to blame for the losses paining Wall Street and homeowners.Mortgage lenders are suing Wall Street banks. The legal battles stretch from Main Street to Wall Street and beyond.

Soros says UK cannot avoid recesssion . and then lies and more lies in the article

Okay the guys making the mess are still the managers.

And who is expecting them to tell the truth?

Lie, lies, and more lies and the liars that tell them

Soros IS the telling the turth, but maybe

a little to late?

George - when is enough enough??


Maybe he had something to GAIN

by keeping silent til now, eh?

Like he didn't know it was comin'.

[Sssh! Don't tell anyone but the guys making the comments are the bad managers!]

FYI - It was Maggie Thatcher, that paragon of freedom and LIBERTY that brought up a generation of financial workers to be the "new Switzerland." She transformed the City of London, alright! Good work, Maggie!!

U.K. vulnerable to reliance on financial services.

George Soros, who famously bet against the Bank of England on Black Wednesday in 1992, Wednesday warned that Britain could follow the United States into recession.

As he did so, the head of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said the Bank of England and European Central Bank (ECB) should cut interest rates to prevent their economies suffering the same sort of slowdown that on Tuesday prompted the Federal Reserve to make the biggest cut in U.S. interest rates for a quarter of a century.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos as stock markets resumed their downward march, Soros said it would be "very difficult" to avoid recession in both the U.S. and the U.K. The Fed had cut rates in a bid to prevent the U.S. tumbling into a major depression.

Britain, the Hungarian-born financier argued, was particularly vulnerable because of the large share of the economy accounted for by the City, which is already suffering from the turmoil in financial markets and where jobs are already being lost.

"London as a financial center looms larger than New York as a financial center in the U.S. In that sense, a bigger adjustment is facing the U.K.

"House prices have appreciated as much in the U.K. as America. There are similarities. The U.K. will be affected."

The billionaire philanthropist also called for a huge increase of regulation and oversight over financial markets, whose excessive freedoms had caused "not a normal crisis but the end of an era".

Angel Gurria, head of the OECD, said the Fed had been right to cut interest rates but disagreed with Soros that a recession was inevitable. "Growth will be around zero but I don't think it is worse than that," he said. "We are much less vulnerable because economies are stronger than in the past."

He still thought the Bank of England and ECB should worry less about inflation and more about growth and therefore cut interest rates. Inflation was largely caused by rising oil and food prices, he said, while so-called "core" inflation was steady.

"They cannot ignore the signals coming out of the world's largest economy which warranted a 75 basis point cut from the Fed," he said. "They are not going to be isolated from what happens in the U.S."

Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, said on Tuesday night that the U.K. faced the worst outlook for more than 10 years but said he remained worried about inflation. Markets read King's speech as meaning the Bank would be reluctant to reduce rates sharply from their current 5.5% level.

Gurria warned that markets are going to be a "rollercoaster". As he spoke European shares fell to their lowest levels in a year and a half. The FTSE 100 index ended down 130 points at 5,609, at which point the Dow Jones industrial average was off 162 points at 11,805.

Oil prices continued to slide as dealers worried that a weakening U.S. economy, which consumes a quarter of global crude production, would mean lower demand. U.S. light crude futures dropped below $88 a barrel, down more than 12% from the all-time high of $100 hit this month.

The state of the world economy dominated discussions at the Davos meeting yesterday, with economists and business leaders divided about the outlook.

Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist, said that the Fed was trying to solve a crisis of its own making.

"What we have now are the foreseeable consequences of bad economic management,"

he said.

U.S. Treasury official David McCormick insisted that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy were strong. "While we continue to believe the U.S. economy will grow, it will grow at a slower pace and there is no doubt downside risks have increased."

New diplomacy; the DAVOS question

ASKWORLD

Re: Davos Question - Mobilise the Public

As you read what's below - remember that Schwab is about to hauled in to solve America's fiscal crisis!! My o my! The hits from the neocons running the world, never stop coming!!

At Davos, Mothra versus Godzilla

Terence Corcoran, Financial Post Published: Thursday, January 24, 200

It's the battle of the catastrophic monsters. Will it be the looming life-threatening climate crisis or the looming economy-threating growth crisis? Which poses the greater threat to life on Earth has suddenly become an open question.

Until perhaps this week, the global-warming scaremongers seemed to hold the upper hand. What could possibly trump the escalating claims of imminent doom from the likes of Al Gore and United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon. "We are at a crossroads," Mr. Ban said last year. "One path leads to a comprehensive climate-change agreement; the other to oblivion."

At the Davos World Economic Forum, climate change has suddenly been overtaken by the world economic crisis. At a session of business and economic people, global currency speculator George Soros declared: "Central banks have lost control." The Egyptian Finance Minister, Youssuf Boutros Ghali, said his panel wanted to discuss world poverty and inequality in the future. "But there is no point looking beyond this year if the patient is already dead."

It must be tough being a leader, but surely the power players who populate the Davos event, an annual monument to self-aggrandizing business leaders, can do better than this report yesterday from Reuters: "Business leaders appeal for crisis leadership." Isn't that great: Just as the going gets rough, with markets falling and economic prospects looking grim, business leaders head for the exits and call on others to clean up the mess.

What it amounts to is another reason to ignore the world forum, now underway in the Swiss resort town of Davos. It also shows up the empty futility of the forum's mission, as stated yesterday by Klaus Schwab, the event's founder and executive chairman. He urged business leaders to "show that true leaders solve crises and create opportunities in a changing world."

Not this year, apparently. Mr. Schwab tried his best to maintain the high ground, to rise above the aura of panic sweeping the world and threatening his well-planned sessions around the watery shibboleths of global corporate do-goodism and citizenship. "This year we are experiencing doom and gloom as the world enters uncharted territory. Irrational pessimism is as damaging for us all as irrational exuberance."

That's probably a good way of looking at the current state of affairs and the wildness sweeping the markets. But then Mr. Schwab wandered off from the doom and gloom track and into the strange land of Davosism. "But if we are prepared to collaborate -- on a global level and incorporating all stakeholders of society, and if we truly look for innovative solutions -- answers taking into account the new power equations which are shaping global society --only then do we have the capability to bring the risks under control and to restore sound global growth conditions."

No wonder the world's business leaders are confused. At Davos, moreover, the process is singularly incapable of dealing with anything that relates to the real economy.

It's a Coke versus Pepsi world, literally. The heads of both global soft-drink companies took somewhat opposing views of the economic world. Pepsi chief Indra Nooyi -- who is co-chair woman of Davos -- said her company and products are well placed in economic good times and bad. When times are good, people drink Pepsi to have a good time. When times are bad, they drink Pepsi to have a good time. She refused to complain about central-bank policy or the the state of the global economy. Coca-Cola CEO Neville Isdell said there is a greater than 50% chance of a recession in the United States this year.

The Davos event may be a bit of a bellwether, however, on how the the world will come to deal with what is shaping up as a great battle of the looming catastrophes. Which is the greatest crisis facing man: climate change or economic turmoil? A test run of that great Godzilla-Mothra conflict appears set for Friday, when a session will be devoted to coping with high oil prices.

Officials from the United States, Japan, Britain and Europe are apparently going to discuss what they can do about high oil prices. At US$100 a barrel, oil prices are draining cash from the world's major economies and smaller nations, causing economic hardship. Once they've finished with Mothra, will the same officials then rush across the hall for another meeting to hail plans for new carbon taxes and emissions-trading schemes to ward off Godzilla?

Hard to see how all these and other conflicting issues will get resolved by the business leaders meeting at Davos. One thing is certain. They won't get much help from Mr. Schwab, who said yesterday that: "With the right values in our hearts, and by replacing divisions and stereotypes through collaboration and innovation, we shall create here in Davos the sources allowing all of us to energize our organizations to do what needs to be done."

Based on that note, it is fair to conclude that neither Godzilla nor Mothra have anything to fear from Davos.