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Cold turkey for financial addiction
By James Cumes
link They will discover that they and the speculators, high rollers and just plain gamblers in global finance have been indulging an addiction for which there can be no painless detoxification. The addiction has persisted for too long and has become too deep and widespread.
To begin with, the addiction is too huge. The "value" of the creative financial paper circulating the globe is calculated, as close as one of our "experts" can reasonably count it, to be US$480
trillion. The Bank for International Settlements puts its count at $600 trillion. In fact, we do not know what the precise sum may be, but we do know that it is so mind-boggling that it seems to lie outside all reality.
What is certain is that somewhere in that massive sum are debts that have to be repaid and creditors who have to be satisfied; and we know that it is a domino game. If the creditors of the first debtor aren't satisfied, then they will become, in their turn, defaulting debtors for their own creditors; and so on down the line and around a global mulberry bush.
Global gross national product s calculated to be about $50 trillion a year. So the figure of $480 trillion is close to 10 times the entire global annual GNP, and $600 trillion is about 12 times. Alternatively, we can say that the "notional value" of the various pieces of financial paper circling the globe at the moment is probably somewhere between 40 and 60 years of the United States' GNP. It is several times the estimated market value of aggregate global wealth.
