by Harley Schlanger, LaRouche PAC:

Now is the time for the leading spacefaring, technologically powerful nations—particularly the United States, China, Russia and India—to create a new international system of credit for scientific and industrial development. The Bretton Woods system launched by Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration in 1944 was such a system, and gave many nations rapid growth and rising living standards until the City of London banks succeeded in destroying it in the early 1970s. The “floating exchange rate” system they put in power on Wall Street is finally, after decades of financial crashes, destroying itself.

Fifty years of currency floats, casino speculation, deindustrialization and globalization have crippled the “developed” nations of the United States and Europe and their allies. They don’t have the hospitals to meet a serious global epidemic of a novel coronavirus. They don’t offer help to stop unusually large swarms of locusts devouring food in Africa, West Asia and South America, let alone think of exporting modern capital goods to those countries in the way that FDR thought of exporting the revolutionary Tennessee Valley Authority to the world.

Now “fears arising from the coronavirus epidemic” are allegedly triggering 1,000-point plunges on Wall Street, a headlong global rush into U.S. Treasury securities driving their interest rates down toward zero, and yet at the same time an aggravated shortage of liquidity (to speculate with!) on U.S. interbank lending markets. And, yesterday, for the third time recently, a significant Indian lending institution has failed and had to be nationalized, the $50 billion Yes Bank Limited in Mumbai.

It is not “virus fears” shaking the City of London’s rotten “floating-rate” monetary system after 50 years. It is tens of trillions of unpayable, speculative, securitized debt in an “everything bubble” of corporate speculation and households’ underpaid overextension. There are hundreds of trillions of derivative bets trembling on top of it.

And underneath that, worn-out real economies in a worldwide manufacturing recession, now rapidly being worsened by the impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic and its quarantines. There are now beginning large losses by airlines (200,000 flights have been cancelled so far worldwide); in hospitality and retail businesses of every kind; in auto production and sales (China auto sales were down 80% year on year in February); in dropping aircraft orders. Oil producers are trying to cut world oil production by 1.5 million barrels/day. A leading Italian economist estimates his country is losing 2.1% of its GDP. The IMF is lowering its world economic estimates virtually every other month.

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