10-29-2019, 03:49 PM
William Engdahl - A Century of War Part II
In this post I’ll finish my summary of Engdahl’s book on some of the wonderful work by Anglo-American warmongers and the IMF from 1970s to the 1990s....
Ayatollah Khomeini – Thatcher economics, the IMF in the 1980s
In 1975, the CFR, under the direction of New York attorney Cyrus Vance, drafted a series of policy blueprints for the 1980s. The CFR called “A degree of “controlled disintegration” in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980’s”.
In 1978, the Shah’s government of Iran and British Petroleum were “negotiating” on the renewal of the 25-year oil extraction agreement. In October 1978, the talks had collapsed over the British “offer” that demanded exclusive rights to Iran’s future oil output.
In November 1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, a member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under the National Security Council’s Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Robert Bowie from the CIA was one of the lead “case officers” in the new CIA-led coup against the Shah that they had placed into power in 1953. US security advisers to the Shah’s Savak secret police implemented a policy of ever more brutal repression, to maximize antipathy against the Shah. At the same time, the Carter administration began protesting abuses of “human rights” under the Shah.
The BBC’s Persian-language broadcasts, drummed up hysteria against the regime in exaggerated reporting of incidents of protest against the Shah and gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda platform inside Iran.
The Shah fled in January 1979, and by February Khomeini had been flown into Tehran to proclaim the establishment of his theocratic state.
For more on the support for Ayatollah Khomeini from the UK and US: https://forums.richieallen.co.uk/showthr...p?tid=1340
Iran’s oil exports to the world were suddenly cut off, some 3 million barrels per day. Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in January 1979 also cut some 2 million barrels per day.
Unusually low reserves of oil held by the “Seven Sisters” oil multinationals contributed to the oil price shock, with prices for crude oil soaring from a level of some $14 per barrel in 1978 towards $40 per barrel for some grades of crude on the spot market. The ensuing energy crisis in the US was a major factor in bringing about Carter’s defeat in the presidential election a year later.
Despite the fact that an oil price of $40 per barrel represented a dramatic increase in dollar terms, the media hysteria over the “incompetent” Carter administration, led to a further weakening of the dollar.
Since early 1978, the dollar had already dropped more than 15% against the German mark and other major currencies. In September 1978, the dollar fell in a near panic collapse when it was reported that Saudi’s central bank SAMA had begun liquidating billions of dollars of US treasury bonds.
The oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979, which had raised the price of the world’s basic energy by 1,300% in 6 years, had understandably caused inflation.
British PM Margaret Thatcher, insisted that the 18% inflation in Britain had been caused by government deficit spending, carefully ignoring the 140% increase in the price of oil since the fall of Iran’s Shah. In June 1979, a month Thatcher had become PM, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, began raising base rates for the banking system a staggering five percentage points, from 12% to 17%in only 12 weeks. The Bank of England simultaneously began to cut the money supply, to ensure that interest rates remained high.
Director of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker followed Britain’s example to “fix” this inflation by cutting credit to banks, consumers and the economy. US interest rates on the Eurodollar market soared from 10% to 16% and 20% in a matter of weeks. Government spending was savagely cut in order to reduce “monetary inflation”.
In March 1980, President Carter had signed into law the “Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act” that empowered Volcker’s Federal Reserve to impose reserve requirements on banks, ensuring that his credit choke succeeded.
Businesses went bankrupt, families were unable to buy new homes, long-term investment in power plants, subways, railroads and other infrastructure came to a grinding a halt. Unemployment in Britain doubled, from 1.5 million to 3 million in Thatcher’s first 18 months as Prime Minister.
Inflation was indeed being “squeezed” as the world economy was plunged into the deepest depression since the 1930s – this was labelled the “Thatcher revolution”. And the dollar began an extraordinary 5-year ascent.
The international financial interests of the City of London and the powerful oil companies, chiefly Shell and British Petroleum, were the intended beneficiaries. British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell exploited the astronomical price of $36 or more per barrel for their North Sea oil.
Also exchange controls on the big City banks were removed, so that instead of capital being invested in rebuilding Britain’s rotten industry base, funds flowed out to real estate in Hong Kong or lucrative loans to Latin America
The radical monetarism of Thatcher and Volcker spread like a cancer. With interest rates of 17-20% any “normal” investment was simply not profitable.
Six months after Thatcher took office, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the US, with Vice President George H.W. Bush in control.
Reagan had been tutored while governor of California by the guru of monetarism, Milton Friedman. Reagan kept Milton Friedman as an unofficial adviser on economic policy. His administration was filled with disciples of Friedman’s radical monetarism, following the same radical measures earlier imposed by Friedman to destroy the economy of Chile under Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
As the average cost of their petroleum imports, rose some 140% in US dollars, developing countries this time around were faced with the situation that the dollar itself was also rising rapidly, because of both the high US interest rates and the higher oil price.
All Eurodollar loans to these countries were fixed at a specified premium over and above the given London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR). This LIBOR rate was a “floating” rate, which rose from an average of 7% in early 1978 to almost 20% in early 1980.
The creditor banks, following a closed-door meeting in England’s Ditchley Park that fall, created a creditors’ cartel of leading banks, headed by the New York and London banks, later called the Institute for International Finance or the Ditchley Group. The private banks “socialised” their lending risks to the taxpaying public, but kept the profits for themselves.
This was an almost exact copy of what the New York bankers did after 1919 against Germany and the rest of Europe under the Dawes Plan.
Out of $270 billion loaned by Latin America between 1976 and 1981, only 8.4% actually arrived in the countries. In 1979, a net sum of $40 billion flowed from the “rich” North to the “poor” South. In 1983, this flow had reversed with $6 billion from the “developing” countries to the industrialised countries, since then the amount has risen steadily, to approximately $30 billion a year.
In August 1982, large Third World debtor nations refused to pay, but the IMF simply pressured them to sign “debt work-outs” with the leading private banks, often led by Citicorp or Chase Manhattan of New York. The IMF “medicine” was invariably the same: the victim debtor country was told to slash domestic imports to the bone, cut the national budget, quit state subsidies for food and other necessities, and devalue the national currency in order to make its exports “attractive”.
Between 1980 and 1986, a group of 109 debtor countries, paid to creditors in interest on foreign debts alone $326 billion; repayment of principal on the same debts totalled another $332 billion. They were paying $658 billion on what originally had been a debt of $430 billion and on top of that these 109 countries still owed the creditors $882 billion in 1986!
Total foreign debt of the developing countries, rose from just over $839 billion in 1982 to almost $1,300 billion by 1987. Virtually all this increase was due to the added burden of “refinancing” the unpayable old debt.
During the 1980s, the “developing“ nations transferred a total of $400 billion into the US alone. Capital flight from Third World countries into the “safe haven” of the US and other industrialised countries amounted to at least another $123 billion in the decade up to 1985. Large banks, like Citicorp, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guaranty and Bank of America, were bringing in flight capital assets of some $100–120 billion. The annual return for the New York and London banks on their Latin American flight capital business, was 70% on average. The very same “developing” countries were forced into brutal domestic austerity to “stabilise” the currency.
These profits allowed the Reagan administration to finance the largest “peacetime” deficits in world history, while falsely claiming “the world’s longest peacetime recovery”. As exports to Latin America came to a grinding halt, there was a devastating loss of US jobs and exports.
President Ronald Reagan in August 1981 signed the largest tax reduction bill in post-war history. In the summer 1982, Paul Volcker decreased interest rate levels. This was followed by a speculative bonanza in real estate, stocks, oil wells in Texas or Colorado. As the Federal Reserve’s interest rates went lower, the fever grew hotter. “Cheap” debt was the new fashion. Within 5 years, the US transformed from the world’s largest creditor to becoming a debtor nation, for the first time since 1914.
While this turned young stock brokers into multimillionaires, the real living standard for “normal” Americans steadily decreased, while that of a minority rose as never before. Families went into record levels of debt for buying houses, cars, video recorders. Government went into debt to finance the huge loss of tax revenue and the expanded Reagan defence build-up.
By 1983, annual government deficits began to climb to an unheard-of level of $200 billion. The national debt expanded, along with the deficits, and paying Wall Street bond dealers and their clients record sums in interest income. Interest payments on the total debt by the U.S. government almost tripled in 6 years, from $52 billion in 1980, to more than $142 billion by 1986 (equal to one-fifth of all government revenue).
Money kept flowing in from Germany, from Britain, from Holland, from Japan, to take advantage of the high dollar and the speculative gains in real estate and stocks on the US markets.
Billions of dollars flowed out of the London-based Eurodollar banks to the accounts of developing country borrowers without a “lender of last resort” but the banks didn’t take any risk as the IMF enforced payment of the usurious debts through the most draconian austerity in history. The IMF was firmly controlled by the Anglo-American voting power.
Nationally controlled oil resources could have been the means for modernising Mexico.
In February 1982, the IMF dictated a series of Mexican peso devaluations to “spur exports”. By the first 30% devaluation, the private Mexican industry, which had borrowed dollars to finance investment, led by the once-powerful Alfa Group of Monterrey, was made bankrupt overnight.
In early 1982, the peso stood at 12 pesos for a dollar. By 1986, 862 Mexican pesos were needed to buy 1 dollar, and by 1989 the sum had climbed to 2,300 pesos. But Mexico’s total foreign debt, grew from some $82 billion to just under $100 billion by the end of 1985.
British and US multinationals set up child-labour sweatshops along the Mexican border with the US. These “maquiladores” employed Mexican children aged 14 or 15 for wages of 50 cents an hour, to produce goods for General Motors or Ford Motor Company or various US electrical companies. Of course the IMF agreed with this child labour!
The same process was repeated in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, most of black Africa, including Zambia, Zaire and Egypt, and large parts of Asia.
Until the 1980s, black Africa remained 90% dependent on raw materials export for financing its development. In the early 1980s, the world dollar price of these raw materials came tumbling down. By 1987, raw materials prices had fallen to the lowest levels since the Second World War, about the level of 1932 (when there was also a deep world economic depression).
In 1982, these African countries owed creditor banks in the US, Europe and Japan some $73 billion. By the end of the 1980s, through debt “rescheduling” and various IMF interventions, this had more than doubled, to $160 billion. This was about the sum these countries would have earned at a stable export price level.
The incredible high inflation rates during the early part of the 1980s, typically 12–17%, dictated the conditions of investment returns. A fast and huge gain was needed.
In 1985, the US economic situation threatened the future presidential ambitions of Vice President George H.W. Bush. This was reason for a “rescue” mission.
This time Saudi Arabia was used to run a “reverse oil shock” and flood the world oil market with “cheap” oil. The price of OPEC oil dropped from an average of nearly $26 to below $10 per barrel in only a couple of months in the spring of 1986. Wall Street economists proclaimed the final “victory”, while George Bush Sr. made a quiet trip to Riyadh in March 1986 to tell King Fahd that the oil price had gone down enough. Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani was fired for a scapegoat and oil prices stabilized at the “low” level of around $14–16 per barrel.
Speculation in real estate in the US continued at a record pace, while the stock market began a renewed climb to record highs. This 1986 oil-price collapse unleashed what was comparable to the 1927–29 phase in the US speculative bubble. Interest rates dropped even more dramatically, as money flowed in to make a “killing” on the New York stock markets.
A new financial perversion became fashionable on Wall Street, the ”leveraged buyout”. Boone Pickens with borrowed money - “junk bonds” - bought controlling stock in companies, like Union Oil of California, or Gulf Oil, that were many times more worth than he had. If he succeeded in taking over a huge company with “borrowed money”, his debt could be repaid, while making a handsome profit. If the company became bankrupt, his bonds were just “junk” paper.
During the last half of the 1980s, such actions consumed Wall Street and pushed the Dow upwards, driving corporations into the highest levels of debt since the 1930s depression. But this debt was not undertaken to invest in modern technology or new plant and equipment.
After President Reagan signed the new Garn–St. Germain Act into law, he enthusiastically told an audience of invited S&L bankers, “I think we’ve hit the jackpot”. The new law opened the doors of the S&Ls to financial abuses and speculative risks as never before. It also made S&L banks an ideal vehicle for “organised crime” to launder billions of dollars from the booming narcotics business.
Few noticed that it was the former firm of Reagan’s Treasury secretary Donald Regan, Merrill Lynch, whose Lugano office was implicated in laundering billions of dollars of heroin profits in the so-called “pizza connection”.
Life insurance companies, began to speculate in real estate during the 1980s. By 1989, insurance companies were holding an estimated $260 billion of real estate on their books, in 1980 this had been $100 billion. Then in late 1980, real estate collapsed, forcing failures of insurance companies for the first time in post-war history.
On 19 October 1987, the bubble burst. On that day the Dow Jones Index collapsed more than in any single day in history, by 508 points. Nakasone pressed the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance to assist. Japanese interest rates fell lower, and lower, making US stocks, bonds and real estate appear “cheap” by comparison. Billions of dollars flowed out of Tokyo into the United States. During 1988, the dollar remained strong and Bush was able to secure his election as president. The plan of the new Bush administration was to direct pressures onto US allies for “burden sharing” of the huge US debt.
The Thornburgh Doctrine had stipulated that the FBI and Justice Department had authority to act on foreign territory. President Bush quickly showed himself to be a “tough guy”, by invading the tiny Panama, in his first year as President, December 1989.
From 1979, when Paul Volcker had begun his monetary shock, to 1988 the government recorded Americans below the poverty level went from 24 million to 32 million Americans (an increase of more than 30%). Costs of American health care, rose to the highest levels ever, and as a share of GNP, to double that of the UK.
In the 1980s, the vital public infrastructure of the US collapsed: highways cracked; bridges became structurally unsound and even collapsed; in areas like Pittsburgh, water systems became contaminated; hospitals in major cities fell into disrepair; housing stock for the less wealthy decayed dramatically.
Total private and public debt of the US in the 1980s went from $3,873 billion to $10 trillion by the end of the decade.
Thatcher’s eleven-year as PM of Britain was equally disastrous. Real estate speculation and the financial services of the City of London increased enormously, while Thatcher’s economic policy had severely restricted industrial investment, and modernisation of the nation’s deteriorating public infrastructure.
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: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...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:
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.
Understandably there are important events missing from the book (with “only” 270 pages). I’ve also deleted information, and even with these omissions my summary is “too” long...
William 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/Engdah...r_book.pdf
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Following is a more recent interview with William Engdahl (44:33): https://soundcloud.com/21wire/featured-f...al-warfare
In this post I’ll finish my summary of Engdahl’s book on some of the wonderful work by Anglo-American warmongers and the IMF from 1970s to the 1990s....
Ayatollah Khomeini – Thatcher economics, the IMF in the 1980s
In 1975, the CFR, under the direction of New York attorney Cyrus Vance, drafted a series of policy blueprints for the 1980s. The CFR called “A degree of “controlled disintegration” in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980’s”.
In 1978, the Shah’s government of Iran and British Petroleum were “negotiating” on the renewal of the 25-year oil extraction agreement. In October 1978, the talks had collapsed over the British “offer” that demanded exclusive rights to Iran’s future oil output.
In November 1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, a member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under the National Security Council’s Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Robert Bowie from the CIA was one of the lead “case officers” in the new CIA-led coup against the Shah that they had placed into power in 1953. US security advisers to the Shah’s Savak secret police implemented a policy of ever more brutal repression, to maximize antipathy against the Shah. At the same time, the Carter administration began protesting abuses of “human rights” under the Shah.
The BBC’s Persian-language broadcasts, drummed up hysteria against the regime in exaggerated reporting of incidents of protest against the Shah and gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda platform inside Iran.
The Shah fled in January 1979, and by February Khomeini had been flown into Tehran to proclaim the establishment of his theocratic state.
For more on the support for Ayatollah Khomeini from the UK and US: https://forums.richieallen.co.uk/showthr...p?tid=1340
Iran’s oil exports to the world were suddenly cut off, some 3 million barrels per day. Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in January 1979 also cut some 2 million barrels per day.
Unusually low reserves of oil held by the “Seven Sisters” oil multinationals contributed to the oil price shock, with prices for crude oil soaring from a level of some $14 per barrel in 1978 towards $40 per barrel for some grades of crude on the spot market. The ensuing energy crisis in the US was a major factor in bringing about Carter’s defeat in the presidential election a year later.
Despite the fact that an oil price of $40 per barrel represented a dramatic increase in dollar terms, the media hysteria over the “incompetent” Carter administration, led to a further weakening of the dollar.
Since early 1978, the dollar had already dropped more than 15% against the German mark and other major currencies. In September 1978, the dollar fell in a near panic collapse when it was reported that Saudi’s central bank SAMA had begun liquidating billions of dollars of US treasury bonds.
The oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979, which had raised the price of the world’s basic energy by 1,300% in 6 years, had understandably caused inflation.
British PM Margaret Thatcher, insisted that the 18% inflation in Britain had been caused by government deficit spending, carefully ignoring the 140% increase in the price of oil since the fall of Iran’s Shah. In June 1979, a month Thatcher had become PM, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, began raising base rates for the banking system a staggering five percentage points, from 12% to 17%in only 12 weeks. The Bank of England simultaneously began to cut the money supply, to ensure that interest rates remained high.
Director of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker followed Britain’s example to “fix” this inflation by cutting credit to banks, consumers and the economy. US interest rates on the Eurodollar market soared from 10% to 16% and 20% in a matter of weeks. Government spending was savagely cut in order to reduce “monetary inflation”.
In March 1980, President Carter had signed into law the “Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act” that empowered Volcker’s Federal Reserve to impose reserve requirements on banks, ensuring that his credit choke succeeded.
Businesses went bankrupt, families were unable to buy new homes, long-term investment in power plants, subways, railroads and other infrastructure came to a grinding a halt. Unemployment in Britain doubled, from 1.5 million to 3 million in Thatcher’s first 18 months as Prime Minister.
Inflation was indeed being “squeezed” as the world economy was plunged into the deepest depression since the 1930s – this was labelled the “Thatcher revolution”. And the dollar began an extraordinary 5-year ascent.
The international financial interests of the City of London and the powerful oil companies, chiefly Shell and British Petroleum, were the intended beneficiaries. British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell exploited the astronomical price of $36 or more per barrel for their North Sea oil.
Also exchange controls on the big City banks were removed, so that instead of capital being invested in rebuilding Britain’s rotten industry base, funds flowed out to real estate in Hong Kong or lucrative loans to Latin America
The radical monetarism of Thatcher and Volcker spread like a cancer. With interest rates of 17-20% any “normal” investment was simply not profitable.
Six months after Thatcher took office, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the US, with Vice President George H.W. Bush in control.
Reagan had been tutored while governor of California by the guru of monetarism, Milton Friedman. Reagan kept Milton Friedman as an unofficial adviser on economic policy. His administration was filled with disciples of Friedman’s radical monetarism, following the same radical measures earlier imposed by Friedman to destroy the economy of Chile under Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
As the average cost of their petroleum imports, rose some 140% in US dollars, developing countries this time around were faced with the situation that the dollar itself was also rising rapidly, because of both the high US interest rates and the higher oil price.
All Eurodollar loans to these countries were fixed at a specified premium over and above the given London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR). This LIBOR rate was a “floating” rate, which rose from an average of 7% in early 1978 to almost 20% in early 1980.
The creditor banks, following a closed-door meeting in England’s Ditchley Park that fall, created a creditors’ cartel of leading banks, headed by the New York and London banks, later called the Institute for International Finance or the Ditchley Group. The private banks “socialised” their lending risks to the taxpaying public, but kept the profits for themselves.
This was an almost exact copy of what the New York bankers did after 1919 against Germany and the rest of Europe under the Dawes Plan.
Out of $270 billion loaned by Latin America between 1976 and 1981, only 8.4% actually arrived in the countries. In 1979, a net sum of $40 billion flowed from the “rich” North to the “poor” South. In 1983, this flow had reversed with $6 billion from the “developing” countries to the industrialised countries, since then the amount has risen steadily, to approximately $30 billion a year.
In August 1982, large Third World debtor nations refused to pay, but the IMF simply pressured them to sign “debt work-outs” with the leading private banks, often led by Citicorp or Chase Manhattan of New York. The IMF “medicine” was invariably the same: the victim debtor country was told to slash domestic imports to the bone, cut the national budget, quit state subsidies for food and other necessities, and devalue the national currency in order to make its exports “attractive”.
Between 1980 and 1986, a group of 109 debtor countries, paid to creditors in interest on foreign debts alone $326 billion; repayment of principal on the same debts totalled another $332 billion. They were paying $658 billion on what originally had been a debt of $430 billion and on top of that these 109 countries still owed the creditors $882 billion in 1986!
Total foreign debt of the developing countries, rose from just over $839 billion in 1982 to almost $1,300 billion by 1987. Virtually all this increase was due to the added burden of “refinancing” the unpayable old debt.
During the 1980s, the “developing“ nations transferred a total of $400 billion into the US alone. Capital flight from Third World countries into the “safe haven” of the US and other industrialised countries amounted to at least another $123 billion in the decade up to 1985. Large banks, like Citicorp, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guaranty and Bank of America, were bringing in flight capital assets of some $100–120 billion. The annual return for the New York and London banks on their Latin American flight capital business, was 70% on average. The very same “developing” countries were forced into brutal domestic austerity to “stabilise” the currency.
These profits allowed the Reagan administration to finance the largest “peacetime” deficits in world history, while falsely claiming “the world’s longest peacetime recovery”. As exports to Latin America came to a grinding halt, there was a devastating loss of US jobs and exports.
President Ronald Reagan in August 1981 signed the largest tax reduction bill in post-war history. In the summer 1982, Paul Volcker decreased interest rate levels. This was followed by a speculative bonanza in real estate, stocks, oil wells in Texas or Colorado. As the Federal Reserve’s interest rates went lower, the fever grew hotter. “Cheap” debt was the new fashion. Within 5 years, the US transformed from the world’s largest creditor to becoming a debtor nation, for the first time since 1914.
While this turned young stock brokers into multimillionaires, the real living standard for “normal” Americans steadily decreased, while that of a minority rose as never before. Families went into record levels of debt for buying houses, cars, video recorders. Government went into debt to finance the huge loss of tax revenue and the expanded Reagan defence build-up.
By 1983, annual government deficits began to climb to an unheard-of level of $200 billion. The national debt expanded, along with the deficits, and paying Wall Street bond dealers and their clients record sums in interest income. Interest payments on the total debt by the U.S. government almost tripled in 6 years, from $52 billion in 1980, to more than $142 billion by 1986 (equal to one-fifth of all government revenue).
Money kept flowing in from Germany, from Britain, from Holland, from Japan, to take advantage of the high dollar and the speculative gains in real estate and stocks on the US markets.
Billions of dollars flowed out of the London-based Eurodollar banks to the accounts of developing country borrowers without a “lender of last resort” but the banks didn’t take any risk as the IMF enforced payment of the usurious debts through the most draconian austerity in history. The IMF was firmly controlled by the Anglo-American voting power.
Nationally controlled oil resources could have been the means for modernising Mexico.
In February 1982, the IMF dictated a series of Mexican peso devaluations to “spur exports”. By the first 30% devaluation, the private Mexican industry, which had borrowed dollars to finance investment, led by the once-powerful Alfa Group of Monterrey, was made bankrupt overnight.
In early 1982, the peso stood at 12 pesos for a dollar. By 1986, 862 Mexican pesos were needed to buy 1 dollar, and by 1989 the sum had climbed to 2,300 pesos. But Mexico’s total foreign debt, grew from some $82 billion to just under $100 billion by the end of 1985.
British and US multinationals set up child-labour sweatshops along the Mexican border with the US. These “maquiladores” employed Mexican children aged 14 or 15 for wages of 50 cents an hour, to produce goods for General Motors or Ford Motor Company or various US electrical companies. Of course the IMF agreed with this child labour!
The same process was repeated in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, most of black Africa, including Zambia, Zaire and Egypt, and large parts of Asia.
Until the 1980s, black Africa remained 90% dependent on raw materials export for financing its development. In the early 1980s, the world dollar price of these raw materials came tumbling down. By 1987, raw materials prices had fallen to the lowest levels since the Second World War, about the level of 1932 (when there was also a deep world economic depression).
In 1982, these African countries owed creditor banks in the US, Europe and Japan some $73 billion. By the end of the 1980s, through debt “rescheduling” and various IMF interventions, this had more than doubled, to $160 billion. This was about the sum these countries would have earned at a stable export price level.
The incredible high inflation rates during the early part of the 1980s, typically 12–17%, dictated the conditions of investment returns. A fast and huge gain was needed.
In 1985, the US economic situation threatened the future presidential ambitions of Vice President George H.W. Bush. This was reason for a “rescue” mission.
This time Saudi Arabia was used to run a “reverse oil shock” and flood the world oil market with “cheap” oil. The price of OPEC oil dropped from an average of nearly $26 to below $10 per barrel in only a couple of months in the spring of 1986. Wall Street economists proclaimed the final “victory”, while George Bush Sr. made a quiet trip to Riyadh in March 1986 to tell King Fahd that the oil price had gone down enough. Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani was fired for a scapegoat and oil prices stabilized at the “low” level of around $14–16 per barrel.
Speculation in real estate in the US continued at a record pace, while the stock market began a renewed climb to record highs. This 1986 oil-price collapse unleashed what was comparable to the 1927–29 phase in the US speculative bubble. Interest rates dropped even more dramatically, as money flowed in to make a “killing” on the New York stock markets.
A new financial perversion became fashionable on Wall Street, the ”leveraged buyout”. Boone Pickens with borrowed money - “junk bonds” - bought controlling stock in companies, like Union Oil of California, or Gulf Oil, that were many times more worth than he had. If he succeeded in taking over a huge company with “borrowed money”, his debt could be repaid, while making a handsome profit. If the company became bankrupt, his bonds were just “junk” paper.
During the last half of the 1980s, such actions consumed Wall Street and pushed the Dow upwards, driving corporations into the highest levels of debt since the 1930s depression. But this debt was not undertaken to invest in modern technology or new plant and equipment.
After President Reagan signed the new Garn–St. Germain Act into law, he enthusiastically told an audience of invited S&L bankers, “I think we’ve hit the jackpot”. The new law opened the doors of the S&Ls to financial abuses and speculative risks as never before. It also made S&L banks an ideal vehicle for “organised crime” to launder billions of dollars from the booming narcotics business.
Few noticed that it was the former firm of Reagan’s Treasury secretary Donald Regan, Merrill Lynch, whose Lugano office was implicated in laundering billions of dollars of heroin profits in the so-called “pizza connection”.
Life insurance companies, began to speculate in real estate during the 1980s. By 1989, insurance companies were holding an estimated $260 billion of real estate on their books, in 1980 this had been $100 billion. Then in late 1980, real estate collapsed, forcing failures of insurance companies for the first time in post-war history.
On 19 October 1987, the bubble burst. On that day the Dow Jones Index collapsed more than in any single day in history, by 508 points. Nakasone pressed the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance to assist. Japanese interest rates fell lower, and lower, making US stocks, bonds and real estate appear “cheap” by comparison. Billions of dollars flowed out of Tokyo into the United States. During 1988, the dollar remained strong and Bush was able to secure his election as president. The plan of the new Bush administration was to direct pressures onto US allies for “burden sharing” of the huge US debt.
The Thornburgh Doctrine had stipulated that the FBI and Justice Department had authority to act on foreign territory. President Bush quickly showed himself to be a “tough guy”, by invading the tiny Panama, in his first year as President, December 1989.
From 1979, when Paul Volcker had begun his monetary shock, to 1988 the government recorded Americans below the poverty level went from 24 million to 32 million Americans (an increase of more than 30%). Costs of American health care, rose to the highest levels ever, and as a share of GNP, to double that of the UK.
In the 1980s, the vital public infrastructure of the US collapsed: highways cracked; bridges became structurally unsound and even collapsed; in areas like Pittsburgh, water systems became contaminated; hospitals in major cities fell into disrepair; housing stock for the less wealthy decayed dramatically.
Total private and public debt of the US in the 1980s went from $3,873 billion to $10 trillion by the end of the decade.
Thatcher’s eleven-year as PM of Britain was equally disastrous. Real estate speculation and the financial services of the City of London increased enormously, while Thatcher’s economic policy had severely restricted industrial investment, and modernisation of the nation’s deteriorating public infrastructure.
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: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...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:
Quote:We have agreed to ask the IMF … to undertake a detailed study of the Soviet economy … to make recommendations for its reform.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.
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.
Understandably there are important events missing from the book (with “only” 270 pages). I’ve also deleted information, and even with these omissions my summary is “too” long...
William 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/Engdah...r_book.pdf
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Following is a more recent interview with William Engdahl (44:33): https://soundcloud.com/21wire/featured-f...al-warfare
The Order of the Garter rules the world: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/viewtop...5549#p5549