IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde in Davos

Christine LaGarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) talks about what must take place in order to begin sorting out the economic upheavel in the Eurozone. Clearly the message is disturbing despite her calm and measured delivery of the tasks and challenges ahead. Even the IMF--the organization itself--admits to the need to raise funds in order to help stabilize the Eurozone and to keep its own liquidity protected. One gets the distinct impression that there is so much to do, with so little time to do it in, that it is only a matter of time before the precarious house of cards collapses. Even if they could stabilize the European economy, how long until the next bond payments come due and the central banking system and EU commissioners will have to go back to the drawing table to buy more time. Even more disturbing, the efforts to stabilize the economies of those countries close to default are now reluctantly, in some instances angrily, handing over their fiscal sovereignty to the ECB and the IMF. In essence, we are seeing a coup spearheaded by the financial sector reshaping the Eurozone.

Wake Up Call

It took the crash of 2008 to wake me up and to motivate me to dig deep into the financial world to try and understand how interconnected we are to all the decisions and movements that are made within it. We are certainly far more aware of how insidiously money influences politics and how on a global scale the use of military and police action necessitates keeping certain power structures in place and creating stronger and more brutal barriers to ensure their existence. Libya is a powerful example of this. The reasons for the country's takeover, fueled by the west's indirect support of insurgents and removing Gaddafhi from power, had nothing to do with freedom and democracy as it was sold to the American public, but had everything to do with the control of oil, ensuring the stability of the balance of power and keeping the dollar as the only option for trade. We simply wouldn't be spending millions of U.S. tax payer dollars taking out a dictator if the major export of the country were flowers. I believe all of these elements are deeply interconnected and need to be studied both on their own merits and in the theatre where they converge. Issues like these including but not limited to central banking, international trade, cheap labor, military dominance, etc., I have long explored on FB (and I will continue to explore there) but I intend to take on more comprehensively here. If you are intrigued, I invite you to take on the challenge, open your heart and mind and join the conversation and the exploration.

My Mission Statement

Hello and welcome to my new blog. I am a graduate student studying the global economy, international business and how the influence of multinational corporations shape the fiscal and political policies of governments world wide. I believe the real news is to be found splayed in the business/financial sections of newspapers and on the news and financial websites. The financial world has a very specific and deliberate language that is constantly and purposefuly changing to create an opacity that is little understood among the masses in order to de-incentivize scrutiny. I believe however, that with a closer analysis, defining terms and using analogies that resemble how we experience economics we can get at a clearer more accurate account of the events occurring in our world today.

Economics is the life blood of what keeps daily life in motion and provides a seeming normalcy and continuity--a substructure that when all is well is barely noticed or felt. But once there are disruptions in the economic and monetary pipelines on a micro or macro level, such as bank credit freezes and the burst of the housing bubble through subprime lending in 2008, these events can cause catastrophic reverberations leading to devastating collapses in very short periods of time often effecting millions of people at once. We owe it to ourselves and our progeny to understand how the system works and how it changes.

I have created this blog in order to research trends, explore decisions made in fiscal policies both foreign and domestic, to observe and analyze geo-political events as it relates to global economics and more humbly, I am doing this to learn and put the pieces together for myself. I am studying to reach a certain level of expertise and proficiency in this field, but acknowledge that I will forever be a student as I take this journey. These are desperate times growing ever more chaotic....let's learn together and with any luck help change the world towards a greater economic equilibrium.