Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Who’s behind the Global Economy?

Did you notice that lately the major economic reforms they all look the same?

Strange and worrying...

Strange because we always knew that in the global economy each nation was free to compete with the others and grab their segment of cash flow from foreign investments, tourism etc.

That’s why according to a simple marketing logic, to the very purpose of making each single economy more attractive to foreign investments, each country should elaborate its own legislation on a product-differentiation basis in order to maximize the uniqueness of their offer and make it more appealing to foreign investors.

This is not how it works though.

Actually this is something to worry about because if the Secretary of Treasure of any given country finds himself in the situation in which he is unable to take an autonomous decision but he has instead to undergo the directives of some international institution there’s something wrong here.

What’s at stake here is the very meaning of political representation which is put into discussion together with the very basics of Democracy itself.

You have a government overthrow when a government chosen by the citizens of a given country is  replaced by another government that has not been chosen by those same citizens. 

So the question here is: are we in front of a huge government overthrow of global size?

Let’s put it another way: are there supranational entities, not elected by the people that took over the elected officials and that are deciding for us? 

Dangerous.... the most dangerous aspect of this whole story is that we, the people, we live in total darkness. Indeed we are convinced that if we decided to live in a certain country like Germany, Spain or the United Kingdom, then we are going to be subjected to the economic and fiscal provisions of that country in which we chose to live.

It apparently seems so.

But it’s not.

So we ask ourselves. Why the single countries are losing their own independence by undergoing the imposed economic choices of someone else?

If a country government decides to make its own economic policy why in the world it has to undergo the judgment of foreign rating agencies and why the same country eventually got down on its knees has to go back on its own steps?

Who’s behind this “interference”?

What’s going on indeed?

Is something changing and we’re not aware of it?

But the crucial question is: who’s that strong to bend the will of a series of country governments.

This is the situation. Unfortunately we are not wrong if we ask ourselves whether is it possible that these forces of darkness have also planned the economic crunch that has been haunting the global economy in the past five years?

If you want to know my opinion, which is not the one of a politician but of a simple entrepreneur, the whole thing was absolutely planned.

First of all in order to rule the global economy you just need to control the economic flows. The rest is absolutely irrelevant.

It starts indeed from who sells the money. The Banks. You know the protocols Basel 2 and Basel 3. They only reward those banks that have a solid capital reserve. These banks can only supply money to those companies that also have a nice capital reserve and a nice cash flow.

Families are spurred to plunge into debts through the various means of consumer credit like debt cards, or other tools that cost the consumer  a fee which goes up to 18% per year.

The providers of these financial tools are often the major financial institutions.

So the families have to plunge into debt because is this sort of situation that feeds and keeps up the whole system.

On the other side, businesses must undergo a rating system. The better their budget the better their rating. Under these provisions however we risk to lose the Banker’s role (which is absolutely priceless for the community).

Then we have those countries that struggle everyday more in deciding their economic policies in full authonomy.

This kind of system rewards the rich countries, the rich businesses and the rich people. The stats show that the number of the super rich is growing year by year and that big companies are growing everyday bigger and bigger while the medium and small sized businesses are dying.

The data show that also the rich countries are getting richer always more.

I am deeply convinced that in order to overcome the global crunch we must change this system and redistribute the wealth. Not through an increased tax-pressure but by promoting the private initiative and by providing credit to those businesses that showed to be active in their own market.

The experience tells us that the microcredit of the Indian Grameen Bank (or Bank of the poor) was a crucial contribution to the development of the Indian economy, making it the major player that is today. The Grameen bank increased the level of wealth in the population’s lower segments while increasing the profits of the bank too and of its own founder Professor Muhammad Yunus, a man who I deeply admire and who’s been awarded the Nobel Prize because of the historical meaning of his initiative.

The same thing happened in those Asian and African countries where microcredit is becoming every day more popular. Microcredit indeed is showing to be the very engine of the emerging markets economic development, especially in those countries we used to call third world.

My idea of economic model is the following: we need local banks with diffused ownership, based on the Italian model of “cooperativa” where community members are also shareholders. These banks must support the local businesses, the retail shops, working figures like plumbers for example who have to buy their own tools in order to do their job.

The “Cooperative Banks” are the ones who can teach the new generations what saving and investing really mean. These are concepts that the big international bankers have swept away from my generation.

I know this can be viewed as utopic but believe me this is how it is.

The little Alpine Communities living in the small villages of the Italian alps, they have been kept living in their small ancient world with their small sized banks which helped them going through each global crisis of the past sixty years.

These banks have diffused ownership and all the community members are shareholders. On the other side, the bank supplies credit exclusively to the community members, because this is their statute’s main rule.

So why the European big shots who have many more means at their disposal they are unable to get the global economy out of this “crisis”?

Maybe the question is: they can’t or they don’t want to?

Luigi Foscale