ZeroHedge: ""Why do we consider banks to be like holy churches?" is the rhetorical question that Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimson asks (and answers) in this truly epic three minutes of truthiness from the farce that is the World Economic Forum in Davos."
President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson: "We didn't follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western world in the last thirty years. We introduced currency controls, we let the banks fail, we provided support for the poor, we didn't introduce austerity measures on the scale you are seeing in Europe. And the end result four years later is that Iceland is enjoying progress and recovery, very differrent from the European countries that suffered from the financial crisis.
The theory that you have to bail out banks is a theory about bankers enjoying for their own profit the success and then letting ordinary people bear the failure through taxes and austerity; and people in enlightened democracies are not going to accept that in the long run."
De Europese Unie heeft door zijn eenheidsmunt interne muntaanpassingen onmogelijk gemaakt. We zijn tot mekaar veroordeeld in Europa door de gemeenschappelijke euro. En dat was een foute keuze, zeker in een regime waarin de banken en financiële instellingen, de banksters, bonusjagers en hedge funds de dienst uitmaken en lak hebben aan nationale welvaart en zelfbeschikking. Het resultaat na verloop van tijd zal zijn dat een deel van de Europese Unie zich afscheidt van de 'lastige' landen, waarna muntaanpassingen weer wel mogelijk worden.
Guardian: "Five years on from the Wall Street crash, the world economy is still palsied. The GDP report released in the UK this Friday will underline the mess made by the austerity-pushers, just as much as the economic wreckage on show in Greece, Spain and Portugal. And the latest indicators of slowing expansion in China should put paid to any vain hopes that other cylinders in the world economy would kick in. The only way out of the doldrums will be for the west to accept that this is a crisis of demand, rather than supply – one that can only be countered by big spending on jobs and raising wages. Again, there is little chance of such solutions emerging from the Davos set, or of serious proposals for real industrial policies.
The programme of corporate-led globalisation pushed by multinationals is surely also exhausted. The term "Davos man" was coined by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. According to him, the members of this global elite have "little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations". Yet in the crash, it was governments that had to step in and bail out their national banking systems – and then try to reflate their domestic economies."