One always learns something by rereading the same books. After Johan Norberg’s Defence of Global Capitalism (2001) I wanted to check what actually happened in later 1980s and early 1990s. Norberg was too young to remember those events, but I remember how the Finnish finance minister Iiro Viinanen was saying that there is no other way and the party is over. Both quotes were stolen from the bigger globalists. I have read them elsewhere.
Capital movements had been released some years earlier, strangely there was no news of it, but Viinanen was all the time in the main news saying that Finland is taking so and so many millions each hour and we are spending more than we earn. Then he revalued the Finnish mark, though it was clear to everybody that the mark is too strong. Next he spent all foreign currency of the county protecting the mark. Naturally it failed and the mark was finally set floating. Soon came the crash.
In the preface to the Finnish edition of Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents (2002, Finnish 2004) Erkki Tuomioja mentions that IMF required countries to protect their overvalued currency, and adds that Finland (i.e. Viinanen) did it without IMF’s order. So, who gave the order? Either Viinanen gave this idea to IMF, and they passed this great wisdom to other countries, but this is not likely, or the same people, who gave IMF this order gave it also to Viinanen. Libertarian Johan Norberg says in his book that of course one should not stick to fixed exchange rate, but Sweden and Finland did so. It was a stupid thing to do and everybody – even I – saw that it was a stupid thing to do. But Viinanen did so and nobody tried to stop him. Newspapers supported him in this idiocy. So much for the free press. I was not in Finland when the recession came in 1993-1994, but I heard later that it was a total crash.
Later there was a boom in Finland: Nokia did fine in global markets, for some time, but then Nokia sold the mobile phone business and now Finnish economy does not look so fine. Economic growth after the 2008 crash has not been impressive. Probably Finland had no choice in early 1990s. It usually is so. But the crash of 1993-94 was not necessary. In fact, Keynesian policy could have been continued for another 50 years. Profitability in Western countries had sunken only from about 10% to about 9% according to Beghnad Desin’s book. As West Germany managed to keep low inflation, it was possible to do so without the type of globalization that was done. Lowering import customs by GATT was already enough for most of the benefits. The choices were not only Albania or globalization, as Viinanen claimed to us.
I tried to find some explanation to the release of capital movements from Meghnad Desai’s book Marx’s revenge (2002), but he did not explain why other countries than the USA and the UK released movements of capital. Those two did it because they elected Reagan and Thatcher. As all European countries were following the Keynesian economic policy at that time, it was clear that you must not release capital movements. It is a basic requirement for the Keynesian methods to work. Desai tells how Mitterand’s France tried to follow Keynesian solutions and stimulate the economy with public money, but it failed because capital escaped the country. Thus, capital movements had been released in France before that. I wonder why.
Leftist emeritus professor of the London School of Economics, Desin, does tell how the profitability had sunken after 30 years of Keynesian economic policy and that Western countries had to find some solution to it. But that is exactly what should have happened in capitalism. Competition lowers profits. Perfect competition lowers profits to zero. And profitability had not sunken even close to zero, only about 1/10. Many tools were available for solving the problem caused by this, like devaluation, direct support of export industry, or the participation of the state to negotiations between employers and trade unions, and they were commonly used. There was no acute need to change the policy, and then all European countries released capital movements and all these methods become impossible. Fighting inflation was given as the main reason for the changes and the reason for high inflation was given as the loss of profitability because of high wages. Of course, this is a false reason. High inflation was caused by the USA decision of 1971 not to have the dollar exchangeable any more with gold. The gold standard was an essential part of the Bretton Woods system. Leaving the gold standard resulted in fast devaluation of dollar (i.e., the USA printed lots of dollars) and the pound, tied to the dollar, also lost value. Consequently, the UK had very high inflation, as did countries having trade with the UK, like Finland. The loss of profitability was real, but not so large, and it will also happen in global markets after some time as competition decreases profits.
At the same time Western countries stopped printing money and started taking foreign loans. It was these loans that Viinanen so much warned of, but it was he who took them. The issue with these loans is that they had a negative real interest when taken, but then the interest was raised to a very high value. Desin says 15%, I remember that Stiglitz gives the figure as 17%. This is why e.g. Poland ended up bankrupt: Poland had taken foreign loans, then their interest went sky high by a one-sided decision. One comment of Desin about these loans clarified a question that often bothered me. In the last years of Communism Poland was short of food, after the changes there was lots of food. Agriculture was not nationalized in Poland and there were no major improvements in agriculture after the system fell. So, who ate the food? Desin explains it: in order to pay for the loans, these countries had to sell agricultural products in the world market as their industrial products were not competitive. So, it was not Russians who ate the food. It was sold somewhere in the world market.
The answer to my question was not in Desin, but Stiglitz has the answer. Nobel prize winner Stiglitz explains how he was the principal economist of the World Bank and tried to help poor countries, but IMF was ordering poor countries to open their markets, release capital movements etc., but it was ruining the economy of most of the countries. There was no evidence that freeing capital movements improved growth, but IMF people had been taken over by some king of a globalist coup in 1980s. I think he is quite honest in his story and he really wanted to help poor countries, and that he is also a very competent economist and is correct in saying that the tools IMF offered to these countries were incorrect. But I am quite certain that the IMF people knew it as well as Stiglitz. They were told to do so by some higher bosses somewhere. As Stiglitz says, high IMF people have a very close connection to certain banks.
Stiglitz himself believes in globalization, if done correctly, and says in the beginning that his book does not contain evidence of any Wall Street plot that tries to govern the world and that he does not believe in such a plot, but it exactly looks like a plot of this type. It is not a plot of all Jews. Stiglitz himself is a Jew. It is also not a plot of economists, as Stiglitz is an economist. But it can very well be a plot of a small group of people associated with certain large banks, which of course is what the plot usually is said to be, I mean the NWO conspiracy.
In his book Stiglitz does not only explain how IMF badly treated Third World countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He also discusses what happened when Communism fell. The economic recovery operation in the Soviet Union was naturally a plain and simple robbery. Poland, which did not follow the shock therapy, did much better. The benefactors of the robbery of the Soviet Union were the oligarchs. That gives an easy way of identifying whose plot it was. The benefactors must belong to the plot in some sense. Thus, if for instance we find that most of the oligarchs were Muslims, then obviously the plot must have been planned by some group of Muslims in the banks that have strong influence over IMF. A fast check-up shows that the oligarchs were not Muslims and that few Muslims have high positions in leading banks. Stiglitz mentions some names, like Stanley Fisher, who moved to the Citygroup from being the vicehead of IMF, but in the preface of his book in the Finnish edition Tuomioja comments that mentioning Fisher caused some bad feelings in the IMF.
Probably we cannot easily identify these plotters. Still, there was a conspiracy in the 19th century and now there is a very strange globalization effort in the world, ipso: there is a group of plotters now somewhere. One simply has to study more carefully how and why Western countries released capital movements in 1980s and 1990s. No economic theory had demonstrated that such a method is positive, yet it was pushed through in all countries. You need some power to do so.
We can now reconstruct a short history of the conspiracy. International bankers had unquestionable power during the first time of global markets (1820-1914). This is the time of exploitation of colonies, such as the slave trade and opium trade to China (the opium trade was run by Lord Palmerston, a Freemason, and David Sassoon, a Jewish banker). The conspiracy started the First World War. After this war Western countries tried to return to free markets, which resulted into the depression of the 1930s. A new war was started. After the Second World War Western countries tied international money by forbidding movements of capital. The conspiracy was beaten for a while in economy, though it still continued in academies and the press. After capital movements were freed in a very crooked way we are back in the initial situation. Consequently, we see similar stock market crashes, which belong to this system and can be made at will by international money. This is really not that difficult to decipher. The tool presently is IMF. It was not so originally, but IMF was taken over in 1980s. Think tanks, like Bilderberg, CFR, and so on, have some role, but a minor one. The world is ruled by money and IMF controls milliards.
In fact, we get a fairly symmetric structure to three phases of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.
First phase: bankers club/Europe, Jacobins/Illuminati/Memphis&Mizraim, Carbonaries, Frankists.
Second phase: bankers club/USA, Theosophists/Nazis, Communists, Zionists.
Third phase: bankers club/USA, I-lobby/CIA, various movements/terrorists, zionists.
The symmetry is that the first is the same group, the second are infiltrators who make a takeover (pressure from inside), the third is revolutionaries (pressure from outside), and the last is messianic, though not necessarily recognized as such. But naturally I do not propose that this has anything to do with reality. It is simply nicely symmetric.
Later in his book Stiglitz mentions that there is a conspiracy theory that the Wall Street did those IMF operations for its own gain, and adds that he does not believe in the theory, he uses the word conspiracy. As Stiglitz sees it necessary to deny believing in any conspiracy theory, I also have to deny having ever believed in any kind of conspiracy theories. Such crazy ideas like that there is organized crime (where? who has seen it?), terrorist organizations (utter rubbish), secret operations by intelligence organizations (absurd), or plots to overthrow a government (still more crazy) are just fiction, they do not happen in the real world. In the really real world all people tells openly everything they plan to do and everybody works only for the common good with purely most laudable intentions, especially this is true with Wall Street bankers of any ethnicity.