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UNDERNEWS
Undernews is the online report of the Progressive Review, edited by Sam Smith, who has covered Washington under nine presidents and edited alternative journals since 1964. The Review is an online journal and archive of alternative news. It has been on the web since 1995. See main page for full contents

• CRASH TALK SATURDAY
  A reminder: No one has yet told us how much of the fiscal crisis is due to subprime loans and how much to various forms of casino capitalism such as investing with non existent money and how much to the collapse of laundered money for the drug trade and other illegal operations. It would be nice to know.
  
  Michael Hudson, Democracy Now - Well, what upsets the Europeans and the foreigners is that the US plan has done nothing at all about the debt crisis itself. It's bailed out the creditors, but not a penny of the actual debts, the subprime mortgage debts, are addressed. Without any of the media knowing, the Federal Reserve over the last few months has given $850 billion of cash for trash already. This is what the $700 billion discussion in Congress was supposed to be about, but the Fed, without anyone knowing, has already been exchanging these securities. And the securities essentially have been swapped by the US bankers to their pals and not done anything at all to write down the actual subprime debts. . . And if you add up all of the subprime bad loans and defaults, that's altogether $1 trillion. So far, the government has given away $6 trillion already to Wall Street. That's much more than any of the subprime debt. And the volume of derivative trade has been estimated at $450 trillion, an unbelievable amount. So nobody has any idea about how much money is at stake.
  
  And what really triggered a lot of this was the way in which Lehman went bankrupt. The day - and this has not been discussed either in America, but it's all over the European press. The day before Lehman went bankrupt, it basically looted all of its foreign offices. For instance, in England, it emptied out the English account of a few billion dollars, leaving the English employees only with the . . . the little cards they had to use in the vending machines. No salaries were paid. The London office was closed down immediately. And the next day, Lehman used the money that it took from London to pay its closest associates to redeem the derivative trades that it had done. So the English bankers [have] come to the conclusion that the American bankers - well, we won't say "crooks," but let's say they're cronies who deal among themselves and are willing to screw the foreigner.
  
  And this has created such a mistrust abroad that Europeans and Asians and OPEC country investors are simply pulling their money out of the US, because they don't have a clue as to the solvency of the banks. We're seeing the end result of the Alan Greenspan deregulatory revolution, where he said markets are all self-regulating. Right now, you're seeing the markets self-regulate themselves. And the result is a wipeout of the American pyramiding. . .
  
  Forty percent of American income is spent now on rent, and about 15 to 20 percent on interest payments. And without addressing the debt problem, no matter how much money the banks have, they are not going to lend money to somebody who can't afford to take on any more debt. And most people in America right now cannot afford to meet the bank's standards for taking on any more debt. So none of this money that's being given away has any effect at all on real people and purchasing power and cars and goods and services. It's all to settle debt pyramiding among the banks and Wall Street institutions themselves. . .
  
  William Engdahl, Global Research - What's clear from the behavior of European financial markets over the past two weeks is that the dramatic stories of financial meltdown and panic are deliberately being used by certain influential factions in and outside the EU to shape the future face of global banking in the wake of the US sub-prime and asset-backed security debacle. The most interesting development in recent days has been the unified and strong position of the German Chancellor, Finance Minister, Bundesbank and coalition government, all opposing an American-style EU superfu