WILLIAM WHITE, the head of the OECD’s review body, warned before the Davos Summit on Monday that: ‘All the market indicators right now look very similar to what we saw before the Lehman crisis.’
White’s message is that central bankers are holding a particularly ferocious tiger by the tail, with global debt ratios surging by a further 51 percentage points of GDP since the Lehman crisis and reaching a record 327%. ‘Central Banks have been pouring more fuel on the fire’ he told the Daily Telegraph.
He said: ‘Should regulators really be congratulating themselves that the system is now safer? Nobody knows what is going to happen when they unwind QE. The markets had better be very careful because there are a lot of fracture points out there.’
Meanwhile, Maurice Obstfield of the IMF has warned that a global recession ‘may be closer than we think and the ammunition with which to combat it is much more limited than a decade ago, notably because public debts are so much higher.’ The system is heading for another great crash!
Workers are still paying for the last rescue operation in 2007-2010 with lost wages, jobs and homes. The next crash will bring a social revolution when the masses refuse to sacrifice themselves again for the sake of the banks and take action to expropriate the bankers and the bosses!
This economic catastrophe is taking place in a situation where workers all over Europe are already fighting for their rights, from Brexit Britain to Greece, Germany and France. It is also a situation where the revolutionary movement of the masses of the Middle East has created major divisions amongst the imperialist powers themselves.
The US and its NATO allies are now in a desperate economic and military crisis. Turkey, a NATO member with the strongest army in the alliance, next to the US, is now fighting US-backed Kurdish forces in northern Syria, which it labels terrorists, and has already formed the basis of a limited alliance with both Iran and Russia.
This breaching of the NATO alliance has seriously undermined the NATO general staffs who are now desperate and angry. This breach, and the developing economic catastrophe, has now driven them to call for an early war with Russia.
The British general staff is now advocating publicly guns not butter, and that the NHS, health and education budgets have got to be sacrificed to prepare for a war with Russia that could happen much sooner than later. The Chief of the UK General Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, said on Monday in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute that hostilities could begin with Russia a lot sooner than the UK expects.
He said that Russia presents ‘the most complex and capable security challenge we have faced since the cold war’. He said that, from watching Russia’s moves in the last few years, there are ‘no longer distinct states of peace and war but a series of stages in between.’ He is saying there is a permanent war taking place.
He warned that ‘Russia could initiate hostilities sooner than we expect and a lot earlier than we would in similar circumstances.’ Perhaps referring to the Turkish-US war in northern Syria, he warned of an attempt to ‘erode and undermine the credibility of NATO and threaten the very structure that provides our own defence and security,’ – this is the divide and rule that the international order is designed to prevent.
‘It will start with something we don’t expect – we should not take what we’ve seen so far as a template for the future.’ The British general staff, presiding over a crisis-ridden capitalist system, is advocating war with Russia as the only way out of the capitalist crisis, and war with the working class to procure the armaments for the surprise attack that he is advocating in a state of between peace and war.
Faced with a growing economic, political and military catastrophe the working class of the UK and the world must organise to disarm the imperialist war- mongers with socialist revolutions that expropriate the bosses and bankers and bring in worldwide socialism. There is no other way forward!