Does This Sound Eerily Familiar?
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world’s financial markets while they “rewrite the rules of international finance.”
“The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,” Berlusconi said today after a Cabinet meeting in Naples, Italy. A solution to the financial crisis “can’t just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.”
The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism.
Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation’s wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government.
The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system.
Germany called on Friday for a set of global rules to help tackle the global financial crisis, saying it was time to put an end to ad hoc solutions.
"We need global rules for the markets," German Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck said.
Is this all seeming a little end-times-esque? If we wind up with a truly global economy, or one far more global than we even have now, is it so hard to believe a step or two down the road is a card, and then an implant, that you must have to buy anything?
Are we watching the foundation laid for the events in the book of Revelation? Or am I just paranoid?
Filed under: Economics • Religion
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