Forecasting the Next Crisis

Accuracy in Academia ^ | June 16, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Forecasting the Next Crisis

Bethany Stotts, June 16, 2010

Johan Norberg, author of Financial Fiasco, argues that countries worldwide have set themselves up for another, more severe, worldwide financial crisis by holding interest rates artificially low and accruing government debt.

“All the measures that we have taken to save the economy: the low interest rates, the massive debt, the safety net for the financial industry—these are the very things that led us into a crisis in the first place,” he said when narrating the film Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis. “We’ve been saved from the consequences of one burst bubble by inflating a hundred new ones all over the world,” says Norberg, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“But it’s not just the U.S. that’s increasingly looking like a house of cards,” he says in the film. “During the crisis many governments went deeply into debt.”

“Estimates say that the average debt in the richest nations will exceed one hundred percent by the year 2011,” he says.

The International Monetary Fund’s number two official, John Lipsky, noted at a China Development Forum Beijing this March that the IMF projects that the “gross general government debt in the G-7 advanced economies, except Germany and Canada, will rise from an average of about 75 percent of GDP at the end of 2007 to about 110 percent of GDP at end of 2014…” reported the Associated Press on March 21....

[Salgak]

And here’s betting that the Crisis will be noticed and promoted by the White House and the Dems starting about October 25th. . . .

[sten]

there is a reason it use to be reprehensible to take political advantage of a crisis / disaster.

if you mentally get to a point where it’s ok to make political hay from a crisis, because the ends justify the means, how much of a leap is it to creating the crisis yourself?

after all... it’s for the children.