On 19 November the book was still not delivered, so I logged in to complain. This wasn’t the first time that something goes wrong when I order something from Bol.com...
I first got asked for the Order nr. The previous times that I complained, this wasn’t asked. Then I got the bizarre question for my emailadress, the third time this was explained “for verification” (I was logged in with my emailadress!).
Then they even got rude, insisting that the book had been delivered according to the “Track & Trace code” and demanding that I contact my neighbours. After the third time of this demand, I asked for the “Track & Trace code” and then immediately was asked if I would like to order the book again. After my third request for the “Track & Trace code”, it was finally given. When I looked it up on Postnl.nl it wasn’t found.
I asked to cancel the payment order, to which I got answered that this isn’t possible. On my insisting that the book wasn’t delivered, I was asked if I want it “afboeken”, to which I answered “yes” (I’m not sure what this means).
In this post I’ll finish my summary of Engdahl’s excellent book on some of the wondeful work by the IMF in the 1990s....
Destroying Asia’s tigers
The G-7 meeting in September 1985 at the Plaza Hotel was designed to bring the overvalued dollar down to manageable levels. The Bank of Japan, at the request of Washington, cut interest rates down to 2.5% in 1987, where it remained until May 1989. At first, instead of more Japanese purchases of US goods, investors won big on the rising Nikkei stock market, creating a colossal bubble, also of real estate prices. Stock prices rose at least 40% annually, while real-estate prices in and around Tokyo ballooned with an increase of around 90%.
After the yen rose from 250 to only 149 yen to a dollar, Japanese capital flowed into US real estate, US government bonds and US stocks, thereby aiding the presidential election of George H.W. Bush.
In 1988, the world’s greatest stock and real-estate bubble had been created with the Nikkei index rising 300% in only 3 years since the Plaza accord. The nominal value of all stocks listed on the Nikkei stock exchange accounted for more than 42% of the world stock value!
The major Wall Street investment banks, led by Morgan Stanley and Salomon Bros., used exotic new derivatives and financial instruments to turn the decline of the Tokyo market into a near panic sell-off, as the Wall Street bankers made a killing by put options in Nikkei stocks. By March 1990, the Nikkei had lost 23%, more than $1 trillion from its peak, within months, Japanese stocks had declined nearly $5 trillion.
East Asia had been built up during the 1970s and especially the 1980s by Japanese state development aid, large private investments and MITI support. In east Asia during the 1980s, a high worker productivity and economic growth rates of 7–8% per year were normal, leading to an overall rise in the standard of living in Asia.
In January 1990, Japan’s Prime Minister Kaifu travelled to West Europe, Poland and Hungary, to discuss the economic development of the former communist countries of East Europe. In early 1990, President Bush Sr sent defense secretary Dick Cheney to Tokyo to “discuss” drastic US troop reductions in a thinly disguised form of blackmail.
Now the countries in East Asia were told to open their markets to foreign capital flows and short-term foreign lending. Between 1994 and May 1997, bubbles in luxury real estate, stock values and other assets were made by a sudden flood of foreign dollars.
Rothschild agent George Soros, head of Quantum Fund, acting in secrecy, was armed with an undisclosed credit line from a group of international banks including Citigroup. They gambled that Thailand would be forced to devalue the baht and break from its peg to the dollar. In May 1997, Soros, Julian Robertson (head of the Tiger Fund and reportedly also of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund, whose management included former Federal Reserve deputy David Mullins), unleashed a huge speculative attack on the Thai currency and stocks. By June, Thailand was forced to float the baht and was ask the IMF for “help”. Swiftly the same hedge funds and banks crashed the Philippines, Indonesia and finally South Korea, making billions in the process.
The populations sank into chaos and poverty. While the east Asian countries had a combined account deficit of $33 billion in 1996 speculative money flowed in. In 1998–1999, it rose to $87 billion. By 2002, it peaked at $200 billion. Most of that money returned to the US in the form of Asian central bank purchases of US Treasury debt, effectively financing Washington policies.
Destroying Yugoslavia
Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Washington and the IMF were working “shock therapy” in Yugoslavia. In 1989, the IMF demanded that prime minister Ante Markovic would structurally reform the economy.
In 1990, the Yugoslavian GDP sank with 7.5%, and another 15% in 1991. The IMF ordered wages to be frozen at 1989 levels, while inflation rose dramatically, leading to a fall in real earnings of 41% by the first half of 1990. By 1991, prices had risen with more than 140%.
To make matters worse, the IMF ordered full convertibility of the dinar and “freeing” interest rates.
The living standard of Serbs, Kosovans, Bosnians, Croats and others declined dramatically. The IMF explicitly prevented the Yugoslav government from obtaining credit from its own central bank, crippling the ability of the central government to finance social and other programs.
This led to the formal declaration of independence by Croatia and Slovenia in June 1991. In 1992, Washington imposed a total embargo on Yugoslavia, freezing all trade and plunging the economy into chaos, with hyperinflation and 70% unemployment as the result.
In a June 1990 EU summit, Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers proposed a European energy community, to bind the countries of the “European Economic Community with the USSR and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe”. In 1995, the EU had initiated the Interstate Oil and Gas Transport to Europe (INOGATE) program, “to promote the security of energy supplies”.
In February 1999, just before the Clinton administration began bombing Serbia, EU commissioner Hans van der Brock stated as the goal of INOGATE: “to help free the huge gas and oil reserves of the Caspian Basin by overcoming … bottlenecks which have impeded access to local and European markets”.
A pipeline route, Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Pipeline Corp. (AMBO), backed by the US government and First Boston Bank, had been on hold for several years. Before it could move ahead, Washington decided it had to get rid of the Milosevic regime obstacle. Thousands of tons of bombs later, and after an estimated $40 billion of destruction to the economy and infrastructure, the Pentagon began construction of one of the largest US military bases in the world - Camp Bond Steel near Gnjilane in southeast Kosovo, for 3,000 soldiers. By 2001, Washington was in control of the Balkans.
In June 1999, when the bombing of Serbia was finished, the US government announced it was funding a feasibility study for the AMBO pipeline. The AMBO feasibility study was done by Halliburton Corporation’s Brown & Root, when Dick Cheney was chairman. The US ambassador to the UK from 2001 to 2004, William Farish, a trusted friend of the Bush family and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, admitted that the oil riches of the Caspian area was a major reason for American interest in the Balkans.
For more information on the destruction of Yugoslavia: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1359
Destroying Eastern Europe – IMF
Mikhail Gorbachev privately met with the Honecker communist leadership in East Germany, and more or less ordered them to give way to the popular movement for “freedom” sweeping East Germany. Within weeks, the old order in the DDR was swept aside in a popular revolution.
On 29 November 1989, days after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Deutsche Bank head Alfred Herrhausen was blown up in his armoured car. Herrhausen was a key adviser to the Kohl government, who had told of his plans to turn East Germany into Europe’s most modern economic region in 10 years.
In July 1990, at a meeting of the G-7 industrial nations in Houston, Texas, US Secretary of State James Baker said:
Harvard economists, like Jeffrey Sachs, were flown to Moscow to assist in the destruction of the old central state apparatus. In 1992, the IMF demanded a free float of the Russian ruble. Within a year, consumer prices had increased with 9,900%, while real wages fell with 84%. Industrial production fell to half its earlier level as inflation passed levels of 200%. Average life expectancy for men dropped to 57 years by 1994, the level of Bangladesh or Egypt.We have agreed to ask the IMF … to undertake a detailed study of the Soviet economy … to make recommendations for its reform.
IMF shock therapy was intended to create weak economies all around Russia, so that they had to depend on Western capital.
In 1996, the IMF provided Russia a $6 billion loan only if Anatoly Chubais was made minister for privatisation.
In 1997, George Washington University Professor Peter Reddaway wrote that Chubais had been accused in Russia of “censoring the media, undermining democracy, engaging in dubious personal dealings, taking orders from Washington and building a criminalized form of capitalism”. This was reason enough for deputy Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers to back him.
Ukranian agriculture was deregulated on IMF and World Bank demands.
In the late 1990s, the world oil prices had increased to more than $30 per barrel.
As a result of the IMF demands, the people were forced to buy local goods at dollar prices.The price of bread shot up by 300%, electricity with 600%, and public transportation with 900%. With sky-high electricity costs and no bank credit, state industries were forced into bankruptcy. Foreign speculators could pick up the economy at dirt-cheap prices.
Best of all, the oil and gas riches of the former Soviet Union could be scooped up by the US and British oil multinationals. In 1998, the IMF estimated that 17 Russian oil and gas companies, with a market value of at least $17 billion, had been sold by Chubais for $1.4 billion. Companies like Lukoil, Yukos, Sibneft and Sidanko were created.
The state gas monopoly Gazprom, the world’s largest gas producer, was worth about $119 billion; 60% of Gazprom was sold to private Russian groups for some $20 million.
Firestarter wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 6:29 pmWilliam Engdahl – A Century of War; Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (first published in 1992, but updated since): http://www.takeoverworld.info/pdf/Engda ... r_book.pdf