It is financial war Yves. You act as though the Paulson plan is a solution when it’s actually a means to create a US banking oligarchy. These emergency conditions are totally manufactured. A simple proof: Look at how quiet the weekend is compared to the weekly rollercoaster from hell. Having lived through a few myself, I can tell you that a real storm doesn’t take weekend breathers.

States ultimately dominate the banks and seek to dominate each other. This is a crisis of sovereignty not merely profit.

Post asset devaluation the US intends to use its trillions in “bailout” money to buy up cheap assets then flood the world with liquidity to devalue its debt. The “bailouts” will weaken the dollar and wreck international trade by design. They’ve led the world into chaos and plan more chaos to gain ground. Isn’t it obvious that stability is not the US government’s interest?

It is naive to think that the US wants to save the world economic system when it is clearly interested in saving only its own banking elite.

Yesterday’s opening of the De Gaulle memorial at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises featured “sozial markt wirtschaft” language from both Sarkozy and Merkel. There is a need to shape markets to serve people and not be destructive is a formulation among the reports. Markel is quoted widely with an adaption of an old French saying “chacun ses onions” to “chacun sa merde” which I guess means “everyone clean up their own mess.”

It might be that “clean-up” and “way forward” can be treated under different headings of discussion.

Brown was invited to a pre-meeting with Sarkozy, Trichet and the EC commissioner to lay out his plan. I don’t think Brown will be attending the Eurozone-15 meeting because UK isn’t in it.

There will be reports on this over the late morning and early afternoon I think. French and German governments look like they will be implementing tomorrow.

I think this is something which has been prepared over a longer time, and it will be worth paying attention to the words used to present what is proposed as well as what ever the proposals are as a practical matter.

A unified Europe.

When you quote someone just cut and paste. Then you won’t leave any words out.

I said

“… all-out war going on between the United States and the EU to define the future face of __European__ banking.”

Of course this is not the endgame. This is a move on Europe. China comes later.

If we allow fear to dissuade us. If we worry about the millions who will suffer – and millions _will_ suffer terribly – then next time you will have to worry about tens or hundreds of suffering millions.

In other words each country is still responsible for its own banks, the only change is that the individual nations will coordinate more closely their policies and solutions.

Let’s wait and see, maybe I am missing something, but in my mind the EU would insist on radical changes to the political architecture of Europe before taking on a job similar to the US Treasury. And Germany and France would insist on safeguards against a majority of the nations of the periphery voting to fire up the printing presses. As it stands there is an insufficient amount of political legitimacy on the EU level and so it is not yet ready to take the politically difficult decisions of choosing winners and losers among European banks; let alone ot order on the EU-level the transfer of funds from say Germany to Italy. Any such move today would put the entire EU project in danger. While most rational people would agree that ideally the EU would possess the institutions capable of making these decisions; it will take a lot of work after the current crisis is resolved to bring those fundamental changes to reality.

This crisis is harsh; the hopes and dreams of many are trapped below decks and aren’t going to make it. But what I _like_ about it is how quickly self-serving socio-political illusions are colliding nose first with the cold hard surface of The Way Things Really Are.

Their source may be wrong, or a fluid situation may decay, but I’d take the FT any day, hands down, over any US MSM outlet.

Surely the endgame structures need to include the Chinese in a major and central way.

They are the ones, after all, with the cold hard cash.

And they are brilliant negotiators, negotiating along the lines of “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable”.

And we are a LONG way from the endgame. This is just the end of the first phase, when the credit catastrophe BEGINS to affect the real economy.

There is MUCH more to come.

Everything is ad hoc until the Chinese are on board. They have veto power.

Is this why Paul Volcker is in Asia now?

Matt