The Collapse of the Euro and the New World Order
The phrase “New World Order” has been around for over a century.
The Progressives in the USA and the Old Boy Network of Great Britain — the Round Table Network — were pushing for globalization before World War I. So were the liberal Social Gospel Protestant theologians, who saw this as an extension of the kingdom of God. The Versailles peace conference was their golden opportunity. The League of Nations was the incarnation of their vision. This would be a New World Order.
This week, I came across a book by Samuel Batten, The New World Order. It was published in 1919. It was a defense of the post-War globalism. It was written from the perspective of the Protestant Social Gospel. It began:with the forced integration of Europe into a single political and economic construct. Unsurprisingly, the old solutions have not worked and indeed their application is making Europe’s various problems worse. The interesting thing is that members of the elite are starting to openly admit this:
Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, wrote in his recent book The End of Alchemy that European leaders pushed for the adoption of the euro as a single currency knowing that it would cause an economic disaster in Southern Europe. The idea was that the impact of weakened economies would force national politicians to accept “reforms” imposed by Brussels. Put simply, Lord King argues that these elites consciously organized a huge decline in living standards in the expectation that it would undermine the legitimacy of local politicians. The problem is that most regular people (rightly) believe that their state is the best guarantor of their society being able to “live together”, which is the basic contract binding a nation.
This is a stunning revelation. Those of us who opposed the creation of the euro in the late 1990’s knew that there would be a sharp division between thrifty northern Europe and spendthrift southern Europe, or Club Med, as it came to be called. We believed that the euro would fail. Southern nations’ deficits would break up the euro zone. But I do not recall anyone who said that the euro was part of a deliberate conspiracy of northern bankers against the South — a strategy to bring them under northern control. If it was, then it has backfired stupendously. The South ran up massive debts to northern banks, which are now trapped. That was why they got the governments in the north to bail out Greece. The South is in control.
The IMF was on board from the beginning.
Last week the International Monetary Fund’s independent watchdog offered a scathing assessment of the agency’s handling of the eurozone crisis with the allegation that staffers willfully ignored fatal flaws in the euro project due to an emotional attachment. It became a totem of IMF thinking that in a common payment area, there could not be a solvency crisis. Moreover, the “solutions” imposed on Greece hurt the most vulnerable part of society, causing a collapse in living standards. In an indictment of the IMF’s competence, its assessments (forecasts) about the impact its policies would have on the Greek economy were shown to border on the ridiculous. To boot, the processes followed by IMF staff were shown to be unprofessional with decisions being taken without proper discussion and documentation.
The big banks lured the South — private and public — into massive indebtedness. Then the IMF offered bailouts to governments on this basis: “austerity,” meaning slightly less monstrous government deficits. But this was nothing new. This has been the IMF’s strategy from the beginning. The best book on this is John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
This, too, has now blown up. Brexit was the first sign.
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