Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The Debt Crisis in the European Union: CDS and rating agencies: Part 5 of 7

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Debt Crisis in the European Union: CDS and rating agencies: Part 5 of 7

Click here to access article by Eric Toussaint from the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt.

Learn more about another creative scam of neo-liberal capitalists: credit default swaps (CDSs), and how they can and do wreck havoc on the economy of any country.

...right up until the AIG disaster and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the IMF, the US Federal Reserve and the ECB repeatedly claimed that CDSs were a new product that offered excellent guarantees against risks (see the box on CDSs). Since then, their discourse has changed, but nothing, absolutely nothing, has been done to regulate the CDS market. Meanwhile, in view of the size of the phenomenon, CDSs constitute a huge time-bomb hanging over the international finance system. The fact is that CDS should be outlawed.