Apocalypse Now: Has Next Giant Financial Crash Already Begun?

Paul Mason, writing in The Guardian, describes how we are already at the beginning of a financial Apocalyse. “A predicted global meltdown passed without event. But there are enough warning signs to suggest we are sleepwalking into another disaster”.

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He suggests all the signs are present to indicate that the financial apocalyse has begun:

“Let’s assemble the evidence. First, the unsustainable debt. Since 2007, the pile of debt in the world has grown by $57tn (£37tn). That’s a compound annual growth rate of 5.3%, significantly beating GDP. Debts have doubled in the so-called emerging markets, while rising by just over a third in the developed world”.

“John Maynard Keynes once wrote that money is a “link to the future” – meaning that what we do with money is a signal of what we think is going to happen in the future. What we’ve done with credit since the global crisis of 2008 is expand it faster than the economy – which can only be done rationally if we think the future is going to be much richer than the present”.

“This summer, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pointed out that certain major economies were seeing a sharp rise in debt-to-GDP ratios, which were well outside historic norms. In China, the rest of Asia and Brazil, private-sector borrowing has risen so quickly that BIS’s dashboard of risk is flashing red. In two thirds of all cases, red warnings such as this are followed by a major banking crisis within three years.”

“The underlying cause of this debt glut is the $12tn of free or cheap money created by central banks since 2009, combined with near-zero interest rates. When the real price of money is close to zero, people borrow and worry about the consequences later.”

“So, the biggest risk to the world, despite its growing seriousness, is not the deflation of a bubble. It is the risk of that becoming intertwined with geopolitics. Any politician who minimises or ignores this risk is doing what the purblind economists did in the run up to 2008″.

Read the full article “Apocalypse now: has the next giant financial crash already begun?”

Paul Mason is a respected journalist and broadcaster. He is a former economics editor of BBC’s Newsnight and currently he is economics editor of Channel 4 News.

He can be followed on @paulmasonnews.

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