Author: Alicia

On July 24th, French Economics Minister Michel Sapin and Governor of the Banque de France François Villeroy de Galhau gave a press conference in the context of the preparations for the G20, in which they gave full approval of China’s New Silk Road.

“Fifteen years ago, France was the first European country to open a strategic dialogue with China. In that dialogue, we explored several questions and created a solid basis for trust. Many exchanges, especially on political, economic and cultural questions, were carried out. In the economic domain we have constructive cooperation in sectors such as nuclear energy and other energy sources, as well as aviation. ‘With its New Silk Road, China is opening today a new historic opportunity,’ stated Central Bank Governnor François Villeroy de Galhau. He mentioned new opportunities of cooperation between China and the Western countries in terms of railway and highway infrastructure. He noted France’s enthusiasm for this initiative, and the positive effect it will have on the process of globalization in China. France must seize the new opportunities of cooperation opened by that process, he said and underlined in particular the development possibilities between France and the Szechuan province, and the fact that Chengdu is one of the crucial cities for the new Silk Road. Chengdu is already connected by a direct flight to France and by railroad to Europe. Fields of cooperation already exist in the areas of health, services to seniors, pharmaceutical research, agricultural goods, and safety in food products.”

Strong nuclear cooperation has long existed between France and China: the French built the Chinese nuclear program and proceeded to engage in technology transfer in exchange for joint development of the Chinese international market and for joint interventions into third markets, as attested by the joint EDF/China deal to build two EPR’s in Great Britain. Other such areas of collaboration exists in anti-pollution programs in water, air and soil, etc.

This cooperation, however, is one of big deals between France and China in high technology of the very large CAC 40 companies, which often have no impact on the French economy because the companies have been outsourced and no longer pay taxes in France. This is not exactly our idea of the New Silk Road policy, which is that Europe needs to go back to the Franklin Roosevelt, and today rather LaRouche policies, which generated the European miracle of the postwar reconstruction, the very same policies that allowed China to develop massively in the last three decades. 

Brazilian Judge Marcelo da Costa Bretas Thursday issued a preposterous 43-year prison sentence against Vice Admiral Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, the 76-year-old military scientist who initiated and oversaw the development of Brazil’s cutting-edge scientific and technological nuclear programs since the late 1970’s.

Adm. Pinheiro was serving as Executive Director of the state nuclear company, Eletronuclear, when first arrested in July 2015, on charges stemming from the 16th phase of the British-Obama “Lava Jato” bankers’ attack on the Brazilian nation, called “Operation Radioactivity,” because it was directed at the nuclear industry. While others of the accused capitulated to the judicial witchhunt, the admiral denied the charges and refused to accept a plea bargain.         

In two years, “Lava Jato” has driven Brazil’s legitimate president out of office, paralyzed and nearly bankrupted the national oil company (Petrobras) and every significant private construction and engineering company in the country, and jailed many of its top leaders, civilian and military alike, on the pretext of “fighting corruption.” But the sentence against Admiral Othon is decades longer than any yet meted out against the victims of Lava Jato. And his daughter, who worked with him in the nuclear industry, was given a 14 year, 10 month jail sentence on the same alleged “corruption charges.”

By all accounts, Adm. Pinheiro was one of Brazil’s most creative and audacious leaders of the past four decades. In 1974, at age 35 and a captain in the Navy, he asked his superiors to send him to MIT to study nuclear engineering, a field in which he had no prior background. Brazil began constructing its first nuclear plant in 1972, but it was subjected to Anglo-American attacks and obstruction of its nuclear industry from the outset. When Pinheiro returned from his studies in 1979, he became known as “the crazy one,” for his championing the need for Brazil to master the full nuclear-fuel cycle, and develop its own uranium enrichment technology and industry to secure its nuclear industry. He convinced his superiors of the project, and set out to create Brazil’s centrifuge uranium enrichment program from scratch. Developing an autochthonous naval nuclear propulsion capability—i.e., a nuclear submarine—was likewise his idea. He convinced the Brazilian government to give the go-ahead, and he led its execution. The Navy’s nuclear program he created has been the backbone of Brazil’s civilian nuclear industry up to the present.

The die-in-jail sentence issued against the Admiral was for charges ranging from money-laundering, obstruction of justice, and participation in a “criminal association” for allegedly taking some $1.2 million in bribes for the construction of the Brazil’s third nuclear plant. The “Lava Jato” apparatus charged that Admiral Pinheiro’s crime was particularly heinous because he had maintained contact with the leadership of Eletronuclear.

There will be a backlash. Prominent nationalist journalist Mauro Santayana wrote today, in an article published in Jornal do Brasil, that in any sane country, Admiral Othon Pinheiro, “one of the best Brazilian scientists,”—awarded the Grand Cross of National Scientific Merit in 1994, among other prestigious awards—would be held in honor. Referencing earlier incidents when the CIA was found to have planted a spy next to the Admiral’s apartment, Santayana wrote that the same “foreign power” which did that, is behind the judges of Lava Jato. But he warned that the judgment of History will have its day, and stated: “Like a majority of patriots, nationalists, legal scholars, [and] constitutionalists, the Brazilian military has tolerated in dignified silence … the threats which, like vultures, hover over the numerous defense projects begun in the last decade, and against the companies responsible for them… in the name of a hypocritical pseudo-battle against corruption.”

The following speech was delivered by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, on July 29 at the “Think 20” Forum in Beijing. The Forum was organized by three Chinese think-tanks: the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IWEP) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the Shanghai Institute for International Studies (SIIS), and the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China (RDCY), with the participation of 500 think-tank experts, politicians, and representatives of international organizations from 25 countries, with a view to formulating suggestions to the heads of state and government of the G20 member countries. Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche spoke on the first panel of the two-day conference dedicated to “Global Governance: System Improving and Capacity Building.”

Since the G20 represents the most powerful combination of industrial and emerging countries on the planet, there is presently no other agency which can address the existential challenges facing civilization and implement solutions to them in time. The populations of most countries have the very real experience of being engulfed in terrifying crises — a terrorist threat out of control internationally; the migration of millions of people attempting to escape war, hunger and death; the resulting refugee crisis that is shaking the foundations of the EU; the rise of anti- establishment parties in many countries; the Brexit as a warning shot of the potential disintegration of the EU; the increasing gap between the wealthy and ever more layers of society who are losing their well-earned status as middle class or are living in poverty; the experience of the impact of “unorthodox monetary measures” on life savings and expectations for the future; the limits of social acceptability of bailout and bail-in measures; and the growing fear that the world has entered a new cold war and a nuclear rearmament spiral. In short, a growing loss of confidence in the establishment of at least the transatlantic sector.        

The refusal of the upcoming G20 summit to acknowledge that situation; an effort to hide the failures of the dominant policies, in particular since 2008, behind public relations rhetoric; and failure to take the chance of the upcoming summit to present real solutions to these crises, will not have effects in the realm of virtuality, but in terms of real history and the lives and happiness of billions of people.        

There are immediate solutions at hand, but they require the willingness of leading institutions to revise the axioms of current policies and return to policies that have not only proven to be effective in previous situations, but also represent a new paradigm, that can lay the basis for the next one hundred years of the human species and beyond.        

In order to give hope for a better future for all of mankind, a hope which has been lost in many parts of the world, the G20 summit must come forward with a vision that offers a remedy, a pathway to overcome those crises mentioned, the establishment of a higher level of reason to realize the common aims of humanity.  

1. The only “practical” expression of that vision—and that is not a contradiction in terms—is the perspective of the New Silk Road put on the table and implemented for three years now by the Chinese government. As of now, over 70 countries are participating in various aspects, and infrastructure and development projects of it. What China calls “win-win” collaboration in such joint projects is not only the only efficient way to overcome geopolitical confrontation, the root cause of two World Wars in the 20th century and of the underlying danger of a third, global war today, which, given the existence of thermonuclear weapons, would be a war of annihilation. The “win-win” perspective is also coherent with the principles of the Peace of Westphalia, according to which any successful order of peace must be based on the “interest of the other.”        

The New Silk Road concept must therefore be extended to all regions of the world as a concrete offer to overcome underdevelopment, as a “World Silk Road.” If the G20 member states were to issue such a promise, with the solemn commitment to overcome hunger and poverty, and provide clean water for everyone within a few years, something which is technologically eminently feasible,— it would cause a revolution of hope and optimism in the world.        

2. In order to eliminate both the reasons for mass migration from South-west Asia and Africa and the environment for recruitment of terrorists, there must be a comprehensive industrial development perspective for both, which not only rebuilds the war-torn regions, but also puts on the table an integrated plan of infrastructure, industry, agriculture and education, to transform those parts of the world into areas of high productivity of labor power and capacities.        

In general, the projects of the World Silk Road must be defined so as to have the optimal impact on the cognitive powers of the populations of the respective countries, to facilitate the best possible increase in productivity of the world economy. The focus therefore must not only be on innovation, but on qualitative breakthroughs in the understanding of qualitatively new physical principles of our universe.        

Examples of this are crash programs for the development of thermonuclear fusion power, which will provide energy and raw material security for mankind, as well as the development of new water resources through the peaceful use of nuclear energy for the desalination of large quantities of ocean water, the ionization of moisture in the atmosphere, and other technologically innovative forms.        

International cooperation in space research, travel and colonization defines the pathway for the next necessary breakthroughs in science and technology. It also represents the future-oriented platform for a peace order for the 21st century. And most importantly, it marks the transformation of the human species toward greater consciousness of its own identity as the only creative species known in the universe so far.        

3. An uncontrolled collapse of the financial system of the trans-Atlantic sector would threaten to throw many parts of the world into chaos with unpredictable consequences. The so-called “tool-box” of financial instruments, which was decided upon after the 2008 crises rather than implementing true reforms, has been used up. The consequent “unorthodox monetary instruments,” such as quantitative easing, negative interest rates and helicopter money have in large part produced the opposite of the intended effect.        

The fact that the reintroduction of the FDR Glass-Steagall banking separation law has been adopted in the election platform of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, and the fact that there is a growing discussion in several European countries on reducing the future risk of the financial system by introducing Glass-Steagall criteria in Europe as well, create a very favorable precondition for agreeing upon a global Glass-Steagall Act at the upcoming G20 summit.        

If the G20 Summit were to put the World Silk Road on the agenda, the Chinese Dream would become the World Dream.

A classified map was presented to the White House this week, then leaked to NBC who posted it on their website, showing the “progress” of Obama’s war on ISIS over the past two years. ISIS and its affiliates, the map shows, are now active in 18 countries, whereas in 2015 it was 13, and in 2014 it was only 7. Did this convince the warrior-president that his policy was a failure, and to accept President Putin’s repeated proposals to bring the world’s nations together to fight the common terrorist enemy?

Of course not. Rather, Obama launched a second war on Libya, bombing the city of Sirte (Qadaffi’s home town) on Monday and Tuesday, supposedly to prevent ISIS from consolidating a base in the country. Obama went on TV Tuesday to say that the war was “critical” to help Libya’s Government of National Accord fight ISIS, and that the war would continue as long as necessary.        

There are several lies involved, as usual. The Government of National Accord is not a government of national accord, but a pseudo government hand-picked at the UN and shipped into Tripoli with the assignment to “invite” the US to start bombing, using US special forces on the ground as spotters. Obama did not ask for or receive authority from the UN, nor from the US Congress, to launch another war, proving once again his credentials as a war criminal. And, of course, ISIS would not be there in the first place if Obama had not bombed the country back to the stone age and killed its anti-terrorist leader in 2011, which, along with G.W. Bush’s similar treatment of Iraq in 2003, constitute the greatest war crimes of our age, responsible for the terrorist chaos internationally and the horrendous refugee crisis across Southwest Asia and Europe.        

Leading bankers, including investment bankers, are now warning that nothing short of ending the “Universal Banking Model” immediately (i.e. restoring or initiating Glass Steagall bank separation across the trans-Atlantic region) will stop the onrushing collapse of the western banking system. A former leading Goldman Sachs Director and European Commission official Paul Goldschmidt, wrote that anything short of “doing away with Universal Banking” would cause not only financial breakdown, but also the “destabilizing of the foundations of European democracy” — i.e., fascism.        
Helga LaRouche, who has just returned from China, noted today that the Chinese are extremely aware of the danger of the collapse of the western financial system, and the implications for the West and for the world. It is this financial breakdown which is driving Obama’s mad push for military confrontation with Russia and China, placing the world on the brink of thermonuclear war.        

LaRouchePAC organizers in Washington, D.C. 2014

The solution is clear, and imminently achievable. The urgency of implementing Glass Steagall immediately in the US and Europe can not be over emphasized. The LaRouche movement, which is largely responsible for getting the Glass Steagall bills introduced and sponsored in the US Congress, and placed on the platforms of both parties at the recent Conventions, has mobilized itself to inspire the American population at this moment of historic transformation to reach to the stars, to restore the once-common American belief in science, progress and nation-building, to take down the Wall Street-lords and war-lords, along with their tool Obama, before it is too late.        

China, Russia, and nearly the entire world are ready to act together with a reconstituted United States to achieve such a new state of affairs, on behalf of all mankind.

I’m interested, tell me more

In a long interview with CNBC-TV, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said that his government will oppose a bail-in with all its force. In his broken English, Renzi said, “Italy is totally fighting for avoid bail-in because also soft bail-in could be a disaster for the credibility and for the confidence.” Renzi also said that the only solution for Italian banks is “growth,” and that how to achieve growth is “my dream and my nightmare.”

Well, now that he has violated EU rules on bail-in, Renzi should take the next step and violate EU budget rules in order to implement a growth program. In a discussion Tuesday morning, Lyndon LaRouche stressed that although this is not a national but a global crisis, Italy must implement a law for a national credit program for recovery, and European nations should cooperate for national self-defense. This will then “cause the whole [EU/euro] program to be re-examined,” LaRouche said.

Anything else is not going to work. Take the “solution” adopted for Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), which nobody is trusting. Monday and Tuesday, Italian banks, as well as other European banks, were hit by head-for-the-exits selling. Unicredit stock trading was suspended both days after having fallen almost 10% on Monday and 5% on Tuesday. The 70% discounted price for MPS’s non-performing loans has been seen as a benchmark for future deals, thus forcing other banks with NPLs to recapitalize.

The Financial Times published a chart with the loss in value of five major European banks since the stress tests results were published on Friday: Unicredit -15.9%; Commerzbank -11.2%; Deutsche Bank -6.6%; Credit Suisse -6.1%; Barclays -5.4%.

In the context of no economic growth and a zero/negative interest rate policy, there is no chance that any bank can recover. And now the ECB is also driving corporate finances into bankruptcy. Bloomberg has reported that the ECB purchases of corporate bonds are driving down yields, which last week were at an astonishing 0.7%.

Second quarter figures for Eurozone GDP show a 0.3% (non-) growth, while a review of public investment rates to GDP show a decline of greater than 1% in the 2009-2016 period. This means a loss of EU115-120 billion in investments.

The circulation this week of a videotape by “ISIS” promising attacks on Russia, and personally threatening, “We are coming to get you, Putin,” involves a greater danger than most “experts” realize, EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche said Tuesday.

“This is a shock,” LaRouche said. “Do they realize what and whom they are threatening? This is being deployed! This is not ‘ISIS,’ it is a Chechen-centered complex of terrorism groups and operations. And it was created and is used by the British, by Obama, against Russia, using Saudi Arabia as an instrumentality. Putin has been fighting this, successfully, for nearly two decades. Effectively this is Obama.”

LaRouche did not rule out that “this might lead Russia to respond, at some point, even strategically. It could contribute to world war!”

LaRouche’s extraordinarily prescient 1998 film presentation, “Storm Over Asia,” was produced to expose exactly this Chechen-centered terrorism as being aimed by London at the potential “Russia-China-India strategic triangle,” and carrying the threat of a thermonuclear world war. That was the point at which Putin took office and began the long fight which defeated the terrorists in Russia, and is aimed at defeating them internationally now.

Of the “ISIS” threat video against Putin and Russia now, LaRouche observed, “This is a shockingly irrational decision by some party, just when rational negotiations by Russia and America are needed to produce greater security in that area.” 

The Obama war party is dropping all pretenses and preparing for war on China, as the above title of the July 28 RAND Corporation report makes clear. The contents are chilling, proposing that the US is losing its edge if it waits even a few more years, and insanely arguing that war is winnable because the use of nuclear weapons is “highly unlikely,” and that Russia “would have no significant bearing on the fighting.”

The RAND press release announcing the report reads in part:

“As Chinese military capabilities improve, the United States no longer can be certain that a Sino-U.S. war would lead it to achieve a quick and decisive victory….

“At present, Chinese military losses would significantly exceed U.S. losses during a war. However, the unrelenting improvement of Chinese anti-access capabilities could increase U.S. losses and, as U.S. strike capabilities are depleted, reduce Chinese losses….

“… a premeditated attack from either side is unlikely… [but] China could try to intimidate its neighbors below the threshold of U.S. intervention and misjudge where that threshold is, or underestimate U.S. willingness to back Japan militarily in a crisis over disputed territory in the East China Sea….

” Technological advances in the ability to target opposing forces are creating a condition of… conventional counterforce, where each side has the means to strike and degrade the other’s strike forces. Because this increases the incentive of each side to attack an enemy before one’s forces are attacked, it will make crises and military confrontations — such as the ongoing disputes in the South China Sea — increasingly and dangerously unstable, according to the study….

“Internally, China’s authoritarian regime and nationalistic public mood would, in the short term, enable it to wage war despite heavy losses, whereas U.S. politics are less predictable. Over time, however, China could be subject to heightened dissidence and separatist activities, especially as the economy — the ultimate source of regime legitimacy — is battered.

“Internationally, Russia and NATO might line up behind China and the United States, respectively, but have no significant bearing on the fighting…. Japan’s entry into a Sino-U.S. war could tilt the military situation, though this could increase Chinese resolve and result in attacks on Japan.”

See the full report here. Co-authors of the 116 page study are Senior Fellow David C. Gompert, Astrid Cevallos, and Cristina L. Garafola. “Research for the study was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of the Army and conducted within the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine and Resources Program, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Army.”

By issuing guarantees on Step 2 of the rescue plan for Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the Italian government is de facto bailing out the banks that will be part of Step 1, which is the EU5 billion capital increase. In fact, those banks shall buy up to EU5 billion of new MPS shares, only on the condition that the bank gets rid of EU27 billions in nonperforming loans (NPLs), thus promising market “profitability.” This will occur through a fund called Atlante, which will buy those NPLs at 30% of their value, and issue securities guaranteed by the Italian government at a 6% interest.

The members of the consortium which participate in Step 1 are: J.P. Morgan, Mediobanca, Goldman Sachs, Santander, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Although it is not yet known who shall buy those securities, it might well be that some, if not all of these banks will be part of the game. So far, it has been announced that Italian private pension funds will buy half a billion securities. However, the Association of Tax Consultants (ADC) has pulled out of the operation. The ADC sent a letter to the Prime Minister stating, “We will not allow one single cent to be taken out of our pension fund for purposes other than for paying our pensions. …. We are not cows to be milked.”

Since the procedure to obtain government guarantees for Atlante’s senior securities takes some time, the Italian government is considering to issue a bridge loan.

Reached for a comment, Lyndon LaRouche said: “Cancel those government guarantees.”  Furthermore, he said,  “The game is collapsing, because they played the game too long. They had no right to do that, but they all tried to get bets, and they found out that they could not get it. Somebody else complained that their schemes had caused the system to fall. That’s what happened.”

The stress tests “are not dealing with the reality of the problem. They deny reality. Take the Italian thing, which is horrible. They are saying: We the rich, are becoming more rich. And the other part of the ordinary rich won’t be rich any more.”

When the vampires start to donate blood, you know the whole system is dead. In a last minute maneuver announced this evening, an emergency rescue for Monte dei Paschi di Siena Bank (MPS) has been arranged, involving a consortium of banks and pension funds buying some $10 bil euro of non- performing debt off the bank’s books, at 30 cents on the dollar; and a capital infusion into MPS of some $5 billion. “Atlante” [sic] is the name for the new, rescuing entity, whose participants include Deutsche Bank—itself in need of rescue, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and others. The Italian Treasury Department issued a statement that it was ‘satisfied’ with the plan. The inference is that this maneuver from private sources avoids the imposition of the EU bail-in procedure.

This MPS so-called rescue was announced minutes before the results were issued from the ludicrous “stress tests” of 51 Euro banks, conducted by the European Banking Authority. In fact, no contrived stress exercises and scenarios of risk are needed to prove that the system itself is kaput in the Trans-Atlantic banking sector, with banks holding multi-hundreds of billions of non-performing debts, and trillions of worthless derivatives and other toxic claims. The stress test results came out only after 10 pm in Europe, after markets closed, so that financial players could have the weekend to figure out their next move!

All this highlights, that the only sane solution is that proposed earlier this month by Lyndon LaRouche, as the “Herrhausen” intervention, to deal with the crisis of Deutsche Bank, by providing an injection of liquidity, accompanied by transforming the bank’s mandate and activity, to supplying credit for productive use. This is spelled out in Helga Zepp LaRouche’s July 12 call, “Deutsche Bank Must Be Saved, for the Sake of World Peace!”

LaRouche stressed this earlier today, saying that this is the job we have to accomplish. Not “testing”—which is guaranteeing, not preventing the crash.

In the ongoing Deutsche Bank saga, its stock value had fallen 8 percent as of Friday morning, just since Wednesday. The price was hovering around 12 euros per share. Then by the evening, it blipped up a bit, after the MPS scheme was made known. This week Merrill-Lynch downgraded Deutsche Bank to “underforming” status.

one may assume that the assassination of Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen on Nov. 30, 1989, did not occur at the snap of a finger, but was planned and prepared over several weeks. The speech which Herrhausen was scheduled to give in New York on Dec. 4, “New Horizons in Europe,” with its straight challenge to destructive trans-Atlantic banking methods, was likely not known at the time the team of assassins went to work; however, two statements were known which Herrhausen gave in June and September, which contained the core components of what he would have said in New York, had he not been assassinated.

In an essay titled, “The Time Has Come — Debt Crisis at a Turning Point,” published by Germany’s leading business daily, Handelsblatt, on June 30, 1989, Herrhausen denounced the debt policies particularly of U.S. banks, as not working but only making the debtor nations’ situation worse as well as that of the creditor banks themselves. Instead, general debt write-offs of up to 70% including cuts in the interest paid of up to 50% for a period of 5 years, and the maturity of loans being extended to 25 or 30 years were the only things that would work, Herrhausen wrote. This approach, he insisted, would “enable the said (debtor) nations to reassign considerable resources that so far had been used to serve the debt, to instead be used such purposes that would serve the recovery of their domestic economies.” Herrhausen added that what debtor nations really needed was not fresh money, that is new debt, but “it would be better to say they need resources.” The net effect of this  “resources reallocation could during the first five years be bigger than the fresh money injections requested by them so far.” Herrhausen did not reference it directly, but what he proposed was the approach generally taken in the London Debt Agreement of 1953 that created an enormous relief for postwar Western Germany to get back on its feet and not collapse under the weight of the piled-up old debt. That Agreement had been negotiated by Deutsche Bank’s Hermann Josef Abs—the outstanding constructive banker who also played a role in promoting the Herrhausen’s career when he was still a young banker at the bank.

At a press conference Sept. 25, 1989, on the occasion of the World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C., Herrhausen presented the same arguments, pointing out that he very much hoped that other banks would follow the example of Deutsche Bank as a “debt reduction bank.” The unresolved payments problems of the debtor nations, along with problems resulting from debt imbalances in the United States itself and in Europe, Herrhausen warned, posed a systemic risk. Taken together with certain problems not solved in the Soviet Bloc even under the reforms of “Glasnost,” broad unrest, nationality frictions and “escalated conflicts erupting from that” could lead to very gloomy constellations, Herrhausen warned. He then proposed, for unstable Poland in particular, the creation of a special new bank in Warsaw, an “Agency for Reconstruction” which would make sure that new loans to the Polish economy would be used as the Marshall Plan money was used for well-defined  reconstruction in Germany and Europe after World War II.

With that, Herrhausen had addressed in his own words what Lyndon H. LaRouche had laid out in his own historic speech at the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin, on Oct. 12, 1988. That speech was being studied by many policymakers and bankers in the months following, and one may assume that Herrhausen had the text on his desk at some point as well.