Text Fwd: G-20 closes, pushes imbalance guidelines to 2011/ G20 종결: 불균형 지침을 2011년으로 밀어부침

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[In Update] People’s Response Action against G-20
[엎데이트중] G20대응민중행동
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President Lee Myung-bak gives remarks during the first session of the G-20 Summit, entitled “World Economy and Framework,” at the G-20 venue in Seoul’s COEX, Nov. 12. (Photo by Kim Bong-kyu)

Hankyoreh
G-20 closes, pushes imbalance guidelines to 2011
: Analysts said the summit signaled a decline in U.S. power and rise of emerging nations
By Ahn Seon-hee, Staff Writer
Nov. 13, 2010

The G-20 Summit in Seoul ended without any significant progress made in resolving the “currency war.” The leaders at the summit failed to agree on any concrete measures for resolving current account imbalances and concluded the summit with a simple agreement to discuss matters again in the first half of 2011. The United States, which faces a vast current account deficit, attempted to pressure China into reducing its current account surplus with the United States by increasing the value of the yuan, but China countered that the United States should work on addressing its own issues.

On the proposed current account guidelines, the only agreement reached by the leaders was to have the International Monetary Fund (IMF) develop a specific plan and to discuss the course of action in the first half of 2011. They reached no clear agreement over any specific deadline for future agreement. The wording used with regard to exchange rates was nearly identical to that seen in the communique from the Gyeongju finance ministers’ meeting. There, ministers reached an agreement to form somewhat loosely structured “current account guidelines,” but the summit meating failed to generate any specific details, and they delayed discussions until 2011.

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Also, while the then-G-5 nations of the United States, West Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France all agreed on the U.S. solution with the Plaza Accord, many countries in addition to China are now making their voices heard this time, including Germany, Brazil, and Japan.

The communique also included a “Seoul Action Plan” with policy measures to be taken by individual countries for the continued growth of the global economy, as well as a “Seoul Development Consensus” with a multi-year plan for supporting the growth of developing and low-income countries.

It adopted regulations on the rapid inflow and outflow of capital as a formal agenda item, declaring, “We called on the...IMF and BIS [Bank for International Settlements] to do further work on macro-prudential policy frameworks, including tools to mitigate the impact of excessive capital flows.”

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]

Site Fwd: [Reality Zone]“Crisis is an Opportunity”: Engineering a Global Depression to Create a Global Government 위기는 기회, 세계 불황을 세계 정부로 만드는 행동

From Reality Zone blog
Global Research
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
“Crisis is an Opportunity”: Engineering a Global Depression to Create a Global Government
by Andrew Gavin Marshall

The following is a sample from an forthcoming book by Andrew Gavin Marshall on 'Global Government', Global Research Publishers, Montreal. For more by this author on the issue of the economic crisis and global governance, see the recently-released book by Global Research "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century," Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, (Editors), in which the author contributed three chapters on the history of central banking, the rise of a global currency and global central bank, and the political economy of global government.

Problem, Reaction, Solution: “Crisis is an Opportunity”

In May of 2010, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, stated that, “crisis is an opportunity,” and called for “a new global currency issued by a global central bank, with robust governance and institutional features,” and that the “global central bank could also serve as a lender of last resort.” However, he stated, “I fear we are still very far from that level of global collaboration.”[1] Well, perhaps not so far as it might seem.

The notion of global governance has taken an evolutionary path to the present day, with the principle global political and economic actors and institutions incrementally constructing the apparatus of a global government. In the modern world, global governance is an inter-lapping, intersecting, and intertwined web of international organizations, think tanks, multinational corporations, nations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, military alliances, intelligence agencies, banks and interest groups. Globalization – a term which was popularized in the late 1980s to refer to the global spread of multinational corporations – has laid the principle ideological and institutional foundations for this process. Global social, economic and political integration do not occur at an equal pace; rather, economic integration and governance on a global level has and will continue to be ahead of the other sectors of human social interaction, in both the pace and degree of integration. In short, global economic governance will set the pace for social and political global governance to follow.

In 1885, Friedrich List, a German mercantilist economic theorist wrote that when it came to the integration of a “universal union or confederation of nations,” that “all examples which history can show are those in which the political union has led the way, and the commercial union has followed. Not a single instance can be adduced in which the latter has taken the lead, and the former has grown up from it.”[2] The twentieth century thus changed the historical trend, with undertaking economic integration – union – which is then followed by political integration. The best example of this is the European Union, which started out as a series of trade agreements (1951), eventually leading to an economic community (1957), followed by an economic union (1993), followed by a currency union (2002), and with the recent Lisbon Treaty, is now in the process of implementing the apparatus of a political union (2009). While this same regional governance model is occurring on a global scale in Africa, South America, East Asia, the Gulf Arab states, and with North American and Euro-American integration, it is simultaneously taking place on a global level. With the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, global trade systems were institutionally integrated, while the major global economic institutions of the IMF and World Bank, as well as others including the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), accelerated their management of the global economy.

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