G20TheResult

Yesterday’s G20 summit resulted in an additional $1 trillion (£679bn) being made available to boost the world economy.

President Barack Obama claimed that the summit will signal a "turning point" in the pursuit of economic recovery and made progress in reforming a "failed regulatory system".

"By any measure the London summit was historic. It was historic because of the size and the scope of the challenges that we face and because of the timeliness and the magnitude of our response," he said.

There were some other headline initial results when World stock markets skyrocketed and a man caught up in the protests surrounding the event died.

The long anticipated violence broke out but was closely controlled by an overwhelming and well-drilled police operation that swamped the area. There are the usual repercussions that always seem to happen after huge police operations like this in Britain, with accusations flying about. But the general consensus from the watching world media was that the policing was fair, well conceived and executed.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a very relieved and happy man when he said the new extra funding would shorten the recession and save jobs. It follows what he described as the "new consensus" reached by heads of state on taking united action to deal with economic crisis.

"This is the day that the world came together, to fight back against the global recession. Not with words but a plan for global recovery and for reform and with a clear timetable," Mr Brown stated at the conference centre in London's Docklands close to the new financial centre at Canary Wharf.

Speaking at a press conference to mark the end of the summit, Mr Brown said G20 leaders had concluded "that global problems require global solutions" and that they will "do what is necessary" but that there are "no quick fixes".

President Obama is known to have played a key role in brokering the agreement, resolving differences between France and China on tax havens.

Another G20 summit will be held later this year to check on progress.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that the conclusions of this G20 summit were "more than we could have hoped for".

The $1 trillion injection includes $250 billion (£170.2bn) in International Monetary Fund special drawing rights - available to all IMF members. This is a $150 billion increase on what had previously been suggested in order to help get trade moving again.

The "unprecedented fiscal expansion" already under way will mean a $5 trillion (£3.4tn) injection by the middle of 2010, he said, helping to save or create millions of jobs.

Six pledges were made by leaders - to restore confidence, growth, and jobs; repair the financial system to restore lending; strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust; fund and reform international financial institutions; promote global trade and investment and reject protectionism and finally to build a sustainable recovery.

A new "financial stability board" will "ensure co-operation across frontiers and to stop risk to the economy" and provide an early-warning mechanism, he said. And for the first time, there will be a "common global approach to how we deal with impaired, or toxic, assets".

Central banks had agreed to "maintain expansionary policies as long as they are needed using the full range of options available to them".

Mr Brown affirmed there were no splits at the talks, saying: "The issues that people thought divided us did not divide us at all. There was substantial agreement on the need for us to do whatever is necessary to return to growth."

Countries had also restated their commitment to the millennium development goals and to helping tackle poverty, he said, adding the summit had agreed measures totaling $50 billion (£34bn) to assist the poorest countries.

Brown added: "This time of financial crisis is no time to walk away from our commitment to the world's poorest. We will not pass by on the other side."

Mr Brown said, “After the Wall Street Crash in 1929 it took 15 years for the world to come together and address the problems.” That delay was unforgivable and disastrous.

The Prime Minister continued: "Our priority right through this summit has been the jobs, the homes, the businesses of hard-working families in this country and, indeed, every country.”

He added that world leaders have agreed to meet again later this year.

The UK and US emphasized the need for public spending to ease the crisis while France and Germany were obviously keener for tougher financial regulation.

Mr Sarkozy had threatened to walk out of the meeting if it did not yield concrete results but this had been largely discounted as gesture politics aimed squarely at his own electorate. Like everyone else he wanted to put his own country’s spin on this event.

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel also praised the outcome.

She said the new measures would give the world a "clearer financial market architecture" and the agreement was "a very, very good, almost historic compromise" and it is clear that it did not oblige any country to launch any further economic stimulus packages.

The truth is that no one knows how well this package of measures might work, but we do know that the time to judge it will come in the months and years to come, not here or now.

We can all agree that this package is promising and perhaps, just perhaps we have seen the end of the beginning of our current crisis.

PremiereAvril

The G20 summit takes place tomorrow in London. Already the great and the good are arriving here with their retinues. Some times it is hard to remember that the Roman Empire is history, especially when one sees the size and majesty surrounding these political leaders.

President Obama has 500 people traveling with him, of whom 200 are security personnel. However I don’t know how necessary his French dessert taster, Monsieur Premiere Avril, is in the democracies of today.

Does he really need Guiy de Maupassant Rabinowitz as his fan bearer, or is he compelled to listen to his personal Chicago back up singers even if they double up as his ostrich feather fan bearers?

The 3 people surrounding Prime Minister Brown is modest in comparison, but as is well known he does have a great deal to be modest about. His retinue contains an information guy who tells him why the public in the UK want to string him up and another two guys who tell him to ignore the first chap.

President Sarkozy of France has announced that he will refuse to sign any agreement with which he doesn’t agree. I feel this is a trend that could take hold since I can announce that as from today I shall also refuse to sign any agreements that I don’t agree with.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany smiled in the direction of the small but perfectly formed French President, and said something along the lines of, I’ll have whatever he’s having and send it to my room. I am confident that rumors stating that she was seen buying underwear from Victoria’s Secret in London are false. It can also be discounted that she entered the Chinese embassy by a side entrance and left some hours later looking disheveled but happy.

The Chinese Prime Minister later stated that his country remains ready, willing and able to inject the necessary liquidity wherever necessary. Roughly translated his statement read, “We’ve been getting it for a very long time, it’s payback time.”

The Japanese smiled and said nothing at all, except they were seen to snigger when asked their view on bailing out the Western economies.

President Obama and Prime Minister Brown went to Saville Row for fittings of their Superman suits but this writer is not entirely sure they are going to fit.

TakingABreak

I am taking a break from writing these articles for a few days, it’s a kind of a blog writers “gone fishing”. Except I can think of nothing I would like to do less. Actually I can. What would be worse is to attend the G20 conference in London next week to listen to the man who was created in a lab when Tony Blair took all the worst aspects of Socialism and conjoined these with the most scabrous parts of Capitalism to create a Frankenstein monster called Gordon Brown.

What did the UK do so wrong to deserve this man?

Brown’s week was enlivened when he delivered his speech to one of the most boring and creepy centers of world government, the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

In response to the Brown presence a British backbench Conservative Member of the European Parliament for South East England, Daniel Hannan delivered an eviscerating condemnation directly to Brown who can be seen trying to smile his way through the attack. In doing this the young Tory has touched a nerve around the world, with approximately a million hits on You Tube in just a couple of days.

Brown looked on helplessly while gritting his teeth, smiling mirthlessly, he shook his head as the Tory caricatured him as a 'Brezhnev era apparatchik' who is ' pathologically incapable' of accepting any of the responsibility for his role in the financial crisis.

The video of MEP Daniel Hannan delivering this no holds barred but measured verbal assassination of the Prime Minister and his gross mis-handling of the economic crisis instantly flowered into a surprise hit on the Internet.

The 37-year-old MEP, who was the youngest British member elected to the European Parliament in 1999, yesterday received plaudits for his tongue-lashing.

Major Broadcasters - including the BBC – totally and abysmally failed to report Mr Hannan's onslaught despite giving full coverage to Mr Brown's most pro-European speech to date and having been forewarned that Hannan was going to respond.

But the world of the old-fashioned broadcaster having the ultimate control over what we are allowed to see is now gone with the advent of almost universal access to the Internet, twitter and mobile communications.

So the speech by the young Conservative firebrand was quickly posted on You Tube and news outlets from Australia to America seized on his comments.

The clip lingers on Prime Minister Brown looking on with a frozen smile, while Hannan warned how Britain was entering the recession in a 'dilapidated condition' with an 'almost unbelievable' deficit.”

It’s time more responsible people took up this battle and said what needs saying. The Emperor, Gordon Brown, has no clothes, he is being transported around the earth in borrowed transportation, shouting to anyone who will listen, “look at my wonderful clothing!” but he is as naked and feeble as the day he was born and it is our duty to tell him until he is forced to listen.

In the meantime I shall be doing something completely different as the G20 convenes in London to the inevitable riots of protesters finding any excuse to misbehave like anarchists in the name of democracy. Whilst inside the hallowed halls of diplomacy a bunch of small well padded boys and girls pretend to be serious politicians and economists who know the economic answers and do their best to avoid another Great Depression.

Let’s just hope we get lucky because nothing, so far, makes me believe our leaders have a clue what to do.

TheJuryIsOut

President Obama retains a great deal of his victorious feel good factor. Almost everyone, even his political foes need and want him to succeed if for nothing more than enlightened self-interest. He, unlike Gordon Brown retains a feel good aura; a ready smile and the appropriate words that make us believe he might have the right answers.

But does anyone really have the required knowledge to navigate these uncharted and dangerous economic storms?

Gordon Brown became Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer as part of then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s first government, a dozen years ago. His first action was to divorce the Bank of England from his own direct control. The reason he gave for doing this was so that the Bank of England would set interest rates in order to control inflation independent of any political considerations.

Now Gordon Brown is Prime Minister I would bet big money that he wishes the Bank of England were still in his own direct control. Last night the Governor of the Bank shook the government to the tips of its toes when he said that finance deficits were already too high and therefore there is no room for the Prime Minister to engineer either big tax cuts or any further spending increases to spark life into the economy.

The timing of the Bank Governors intervention couldn’t have been more embarrassing or unfortunately timed for Brown. It comes a few weeks before the next big budget, on April 22 and more or less simultaneous to the Prime Minister making an impassioned pro financial stimulus package to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He has been touring the world promoting his ideas of a global stimulus package prior to the next G20 summit of the world’s economic superpowers, which he is hosting in London next week.

Mervyn King, the Governor of England’s central Bank, doesn’t believe the country can afford any further stimuli. Gordon Brown believes we have to find a way to afford to stimulate the economy.

An auction in government debt in the UK failed to achieve the target sum for the first time in 7 years. A major warning sign we would do well to heed.

Brown believes that we must be prepared to do what is necessary to resume the growth in the economy achieved by the fiscal stimulus strategy promoted by President Obama and Brown, This includes quantitative easing and extraordinarily low interest rates and effectively means spending our way out of the recession.

The current European President, the Czech leader, believes that the road to hell is paved with the President Obama fiscal stimulus plan.

This is possibly the most important economic argument ever to be fought in the world since the Great Depression and the implications for our future well-being are enormous.

Although it is pleasing and somewhat cathartic to castigate and condemn the wrongdoers and criminals in the financial sector who cost us all so much with their stupidity and greed it is not the most important of the tasks that must be conquered.

Neither should we focus too much attention on more regulations when all we ever needed to do was enforce the regulations that already existed. In fact there is a very good argument to reduce regulations, and make the markets simpler.

Of equal or possibly even more far reaching consequence, we have to consider the future of markets that have operated more like bookmakers. We should eliminate shadow markets and return to a world where financial instruments must be real and paid for.

Right now the battle for the hearts and minds of the G20 leaders is under way and during the next week they will decide whether we spend our way forward, hopefully out of the recession or, as I think is equally likely, we move into a Japanese style decade of stagflation. The jury is out.

Recovery

The announcement of the plans released by the US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner seems to have excited the market in Wall Street. The main indexes rose by 6% whilst the banks roared ahead by 15%.

The fundamental underpinning of the plan is that America is committing $1 trillion to buy huge amounts of toxic debt. The idea behind this is that this will unplug the capital markets and credit will again be available in a more normal manner. Like it used to be. But the sad fact is that it isn’t going to ever be quite like it was before.

As the American housing market seems to be picking up a bit, and a chink of sunlight is soothing the incipient panic in the US banking sector the German GDP is expected to fall between 6 to 7% during this year. China is taking progressively more defensive measures and the eastern European countries, formerly part of the Soviet bloc are on the edge of the financial precipice.

No one knows how our collective vulnerability will show itself next. Will the bigger economies have to bail out more of the second and third world countries, and do they have the firepower to do so?

The new emperors of the universe come from Asia and Arabia but it is a very flawed power.

The Chinese continue to live with a paradox. A relatively capitalist economy that is centrally managed by an underlying Soviet type politburo be it political or military. Their controlling fingers are in every pie. But now the global economy is in chaos at precisely the moment China is about to assert itself as a superpower. Is it tenable for China to keep the lid on personal and political freedom whilst energizing and possibly liberalizing their economy and that of the world around them?

There must be a huge temptation for the fairly geriatric Chinese leadership to totally withdraw from the international disaster. However there must be an even more compelling temptation to use the country’s huge reserves for maximum strategic leverage. Will China tear itself apart because of the contradictions of its system or survive and go on to become the pre-eminent global superpower?

The oil rich Arab countries wealth is almost entirely due to their oil revenues and reserves. This is not a sound basis for long-term stability. At present these countries desperately need to create structure and broaden their resources.

As I have written before, you write America off at your peril. But the first shoots of recovery are still a very long way in the distance.

But it has become obvious that the old order is dead and will never come back.

LossOfTrust

Our society operates on the base of faith and trust. Lose this and we experience misery and possible anarchy.

The basis of what makes things tick is economic. If the oil of money is not in the engine it will seize up and that is precisely what’s happening. Once the money vanishes we are left with a future of damage control.

Everything else starts to fall apart without money. Taxation must rise, but the government take decreases as businesses and individuals make less profit, if they profit at all. There will be less cash available for public works and consumers have less money to spend. Even if they have money they lack the confidence to spend when there is growing doubt that they will keep their jobs. The people are suffering from an enormous confidence deficit and an almost total lack of faith in our system.

There was never a time in modern history when our banks held enough cash to meet a potential run on the bank. These institutions, even at their most prudent and solid, never held a dollar or a pound for each pound or dollar deposited with them. It was more like 10% to 15%. It all worked pretty well when no one questioned the solidity and credit worthiness of our banking giants.

Similarly governments work because of the acquiescence of a compliant and law abiding population. The deal being that we shall abide by your laws as long as we feel they’re reasonable and not too far from our notion of fairness. When laws are seen to be unfair there are many examples of the furious reaction of the people. Revolutions and civil wars have started huge bloodbaths because of perceived injustice.

Fundamental questions like this must be asked when the rulebook is being torn up and thrown away. A contemporary large-scale survey amongst young people in Germany found that this group, although largely apathetic about political parties in general, reserved their largest support for the far right. In Austria more than 30% of the general electorate now vote for the Fascist parties. The same trends are becoming evident for a growing swathe of Europe.

Over the last few days I have been conducting a straw pole. I asked an entirely unscientific group of people, here and in the USA a question. They have no link other than me as their common denominator.

The question is this: -

“If you were now to see a person come on your television and say that he is a banker, taking deposits, to be guaranteed by the government 100%, and this guarantee is backed up by a government spokesman. The banker offers a return of 7.5% per year, starting immediately. Will you invest your money with him?”

Well, what do you think?

The banker received a 100% rejection.

Not one person I questioned was prepared to invest their money with my fictitious banker.

This proves that our faith in banks and bankers has totally vanished, and it will be a very long time before it can be recaptured. There is no more important task for our leaders than to reverse this.

WhichWayForward

There are not many aspects of the present government in the UK or the last one in the US that I agree with. In fact the list is so small and inconsequential it’s hardly worth mentioning. On the other hand I don’t disagree with everything they did nor do I think they were or are entirely evil.

The single biggest mistakes they both made was to try and make facts conform to their political theories and if not, to force a fit. As an example I am convinced that one day in Britain we will discover that virtually unrestricted immigration was a social political experiment.

Don’t get me wrong, I am virulently opposed to both the hard left and hard right, and in fact every ”ism” appalls and scares me. But I just don’t believe it could have been possible for literally millions of foreign nationals to enter this country illegally without at least the tacit connivance of those responsible for our borders.

Either these officials are criminally inept or they wanted this to happen. The results are the same and in the present economic circumstances could prove catastrophic. I say this in the knowledge that less than one hundred years ago my grandparents and their siblings arrived in this country and America, penniless refugees.

The numbers of immigrants then allowed in was in direct proportion to the needs of their new host countries. Put another way, the bargain suited both sides of the equation. It made some sense.

Now there are a huge number of new immigrants in our countries and our economies are in free fall. If the economic migrants were to simply go home there wouldn’t be a problem here, but there would be a huge problem in their countries. The new reality is that there are new camps being built in France for all the new migrants fighting to get into the UK, and the net numbers in the UK are growing so fast that the UK is forecast to overtake Germany’s population having once been far smaller.

What will happen when the indigenous population can’t get or keep jobs but the new migrants stay and prosper? This will potentially lead to problems that could lead to substantial civil strife.

America has different but related problems. Of them all I believe that the most immediate and affordable will be remaking the economic model of the USA to re-emphasize its ability to manufacture its way out of most problems when taken together with its huge capacity to export raw materials. This must be achieved and the education system re-engineered to produce what America needs so that it can compete.

The UK has to re-imagine itself and recreate its ability to deliver great products that are brilliantly designed and engineered. That was what worked in the Anglo American economic model and we simply walked away because we became besotted in making money out of thin air and betting on futures. The so called “knowledge economy” only works if you have something worth saying.

The key problems are, as ever, related to our wallets and sense of well-being. As this becomes progressively more problematic there would be a cycle of action and reaction in proportion to the desperation of the population. We could see either Fascism or Communism become a power again and with it a major, equal and opposite, probably violent reaction.

We must address educational necessities, fixing the economy and immigration as matters of equal priority. No one of these fixes is going to be sufficient, we need them all.