Everyone must have noticed, because it is not something that can easily escape attention: It is the latest report by international charity organization Oxfam that says top 80 billionaires of the world own $ 1.9 trillion and this roughly equals what the rest of the world owns and in the next four years, they will be richer than the rest of the world: Billionaires 54 per cent, the rest 46 per cent by 2020.
But they might not have to wait for it that long, the rise in the wealth of the billionaires could come as early as this year or next, because our new economic system, the “bankism”, (the name coined by financial analyst Gerald Celente) which replaced capitalism, has many tools working for them, credit swaps, derivatives, yield spreads, you name it…
And the process may have already begun: Swiss National Bank, Switzerland’s central bank, after promising only one month ago that it would keep holding as long as necessary, just last week dropped the peg it had established to European single currency three years ago. After the move, the Euro took a nosedive, Swiss franc skyrocketed, several global currency exchange dealers declared bankruptcy, some could be saved through injection of huge amounts of cash.
The Swiss had established the peg to prevent their own currency from appreciating against the Euro, and in order to prop up the single European currency, they had been buying billions of it and have created a huge Euro reserve. But one day after this article appears on print, European Central Bank is expected to announce a massive money printing scheme, which will mean an enormous depreciation of the reserves of the Swiss bank alongside the reserves of other central banks.
Market analysts said it could be the beginning of the new phase of the war among the central banks, this war being closer to a race to the bottom in terms of the values of their currencies, the cheaper your currency is, the easier for you to export your deflation.
And what does this mean for us in Alberta, where we are facing the very real possibility of a serious recession, unemployment and depleted savings for a lot of people?
Maybe not much in the short term, but a lot of bad news in the not too distant future.
Because Canadian dollar is basically a commodity currency, the value of our national currency unit is very vulnerable to the fluctuation of prices in the international commodity exchanges. With the price of oil, the most widely traded commodity and our main export item, already down by 50 per cent since last summer, and copper price in steep decline throughout the world, first and foremost, the purchasing power of the money in our pockets and bank accounts is slowly being drained.
Then, given the tricks of “bankism”, we might be looking at a new crisis in the next three to six months, given that big investments banks have now started to fight to devour the market share of each other.
The space of this column is not enough to list all the possible or potential disasters that could fall on us, the ordinary people who try to make a living with our labor and not by the proceeds of our investments.
But there is enough space to draw attention to this: As the Oxfam report shows, the process of accumulation of wealth in the hands of few has been accelerating since the beginning of the new millennium, and this is the time when terrorism (Islamic or otherwise), violence, and consequently, fear and anxiety started to become distinctly more noticeable elements of our lives.
Could it more than a coincidence?