PrintMarch 9, 2009
Now Where Did We Put that $50 Trillion?
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has announced that around $50 trillion dollars in global financial assets disappeared last year. Fifty trillion dollars -- that’s just about the gross domestic product of the entire planet for one full year.
Shamim Adam of Bloomberg reports:
The global economy is likely to shrink for the first time since World War II, and trade will decline by the most in 80 years, the World Bank said yesterday. Its assessment is more pessimistic than an IMF report in January predicting 0.5 percent global growth this year.
Developing nations will bear the brunt of the contraction and they will face a shortfall of between $270 billion and $700 billion to pay for imports and service debts, the Washington- based World Bank said.
Protectionist measures by countries to prevent a deeper fallout from the global downturn won’t work, said Claudio Loser, a former International Monetary Fund director and the author of the report that was commissioned by the ADB.
“There is no room for denial or populist policies,” Loser said. “Otherwise the crisis will become even deeper and harder to reverse.”
Developing nations will bear the brunt of the contraction and they will face a shortfall of between $270 billion and $700 billion to pay for imports and service debts, the Washington- based World Bank said.
Protectionist measures by countries to prevent a deeper fallout from the global downturn won’t work, said Claudio Loser, a former International Monetary Fund director and the author of the report that was commissioned by the ADB.
“There is no room for denial or populist policies,” Loser said. “Otherwise the crisis will become even deeper and harder to reverse.”
At just the moment in time when we desperately need cheap and plentiful energy to run our industries, Obama proposes switching large sections of America’s energy system to far more expensive “clean” sources of power like windmills and solar panels. At the same time, he has just received billions and billions of dollars for make work programs like paving roads, building bike paths, and adding more insulation to public buildings.
Let’s examine that last quote again:
“There is no room for denial or populist policies,” Loser said. “Otherwise the crisis will become even deeper and harder to reverse.”
Au contraire! There is plenty of room in America under Barack Obama and our Democrat Congress for “denial and populist policies.” Look for our economic crisis to “become even deeper and harder to reverse.”
