June 14—Competing strategic deliberations could not be much more clearly delineated this week. The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Swiss National Bank conduct their policy deliberations, including decisions over rate hikes, as over a decade of central banks ingesting garbage financial paper looks to come back up on them. The roiling of the markets indicates some of the indigestion. Does the Fed have a magical rate hike amount — 0.5%, 0.75%, 1.0% — that will keep the doors open this week?
Meanwhile, beginning Wednesday, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum opens four days of deliberations, with President Vladimir Putin’s plenary address on Friday already announced to be a major assault on the bankruptcy of Western policies on energy, food, sanctions, inflation, et al. As his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, put it, the world is facing “an ideal systemic storm.” Years of mistakes in the West “have been aggravated by the economic war being waged on Russia. And Russia’s too large a country for the [economic] not to boomerang to them.”
The next day, June 18, the Schiller Institute convenes a two-day conference, “There Can Be No Peace Without the Bankruptcy Reorganization of the Dying Trans-Atlantic Financial System,” featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Yes, the folks who for decades have clearly articulated the ‘Patentrezept,’ that it exists and how it works — not an inappropriate time to learn how to cut out the cancer and restore the body.
Meanwhile, the various ministers of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have been meeting, in preparation for next week’s BRICS summit, “Foster High-quality BRICS Partnership, Usher in a New Era for Global Development.” The central banks have a lot more to worry about than how much bad paper they can flush, without causing even more panic.
The genius ‘sanctions’ regime (6.0?), besides further undercutting Western economies and guaranteeing more and more inflation, has proven a major impetus for Russia, China, India, and others to seek pathways forward, to seek ways to overcome historic frictions. What’s an international financial speculator to do?
Otherwise, don’t let it escape notice—in separate meetings, both Australia and the United States sat down for prolonged meetings with China. Normally, that should not even raise an eyebrow, but in these crazy times, that is bigger than “man bites dog.” It’s an incredibly small step — yet one not taken for quite a while. Perhaps, threats of financial meltdown and thermonuclear war may leave the psychopaths unmoved, but they have their own way of getting under the skin of peoples and even governments.
