STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
IMF: 'World Economy Could End as We Know It …'
By Joe Jarvis - February 25, 2013

Christine Lagarde: "2013 Will Be Make or Break" Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, cautioned at the World Economic Forum in Davos that Europe must continue to guard against a relapse in 2013. Speaking at an event honoring women leaders hosted by Credit Suisse in partnership with Newsweek and The Daily Beast, Lagarde was joined by Egyptian human rights activist Dalia Ziada, who discussed the challenges women face in the Middle East. "2013 will be a make or break year," Lagarde said. "2012 was tough. A lot happened in Europe, a lot happened in the U.S. and there is clearly a lot happening in Asia." – The Financialist

Dominant Social Theme: If we don't make it in 2013, the world as we know it will disappear.

Free-Market Analysis: While this speech was made a while ago at Davos, we think it is worth noting as Ms. Christine Lagarde is enunciating a significant dominant social theme – that the West is surely destined to perish if savvy officials don't make the proper decisions.

The West is in terrible trouble anyway, economically, most from the decisions of this self-appointed elite that has used central banking as a weapon of creative destruction. Having obtained the awesome power of money printing, elites printed too much of it, probably on purpose, and thus crashed economies first in the US and then in Europe.

Now, Ms. Lagarde indicates (and surely she will repeat this meme) that the same mechanism and leadership that brought us to our current situation are to be entrusted with critical decisions in 2013. Here's more from the article:

Policymakers have to stay focused on the medium-term plan to reduce debt. The same goes for Japan," Lagarde said. In Europe, although 2012 saw many policy actions such as the institution of the European Stability Mechanism, more work remains. "We need to make sure we guard against relapse – which will happen if we don't keep at it. More importantly, it's not time to relax." "

Ingredients for a Stable Economy Trust and con?dence are crucial to avoiding a relapse and seeing the course for global economic stability, Lagarde explained. "Trust is a crucial factor for the economy. It has been eroded, and in order to rebuild it you need to face reality constantly. You need to tell people the truth – that's what they want."

If Ms. Lagarde wanted to tell the truth, she would explain to people how the fiat-money business cycle works. Monopoly central banks overprint money and cause first a boom and then a bust. By increasing or decreasing money printing, a handful of people can shake the economic world.

There is no direct evidence, of course, of their strategic decisions but we have noted in the past that the economic environments the most adversely affected in the past years have been Western ones. The so-called BRICs, including Brazil, India and China have boomed.

If one subscribes to the idea that the powers-that-be have in mind both a world currency and world government, then such economic adjustments make sense. Down goes the West, up go other large economies. Gradually, perhaps on purpose, the dollar's dominance is eroded. Additional currencies become strengthened.

This all seems coincidental of course, merely the outgrowth of economic affairs. But for believers in directed history, none of it may be a coincidence. The idea may be to make a global economy easier to integrate.

If this is the case, Ms. Lagarde is not telling the truth on several levels. First, the West's "crisis" may be in a sense manufactured, the result of a global central banking economy that need to be adjusted and reduced. Second, the decisions made in the current environment are not necessarily significant.

Obviously, she is framing the argument as if there are only two choices. Either abandon economic "discipline" and suffer the consequences or continue with quasi-austerity measures – high taxes, monopoly privatization and lower federal benefits – and reap the rewards.

There are plenty of other ways to fix Western economies, including repudiating bank debt as those in Iceland did, introducing gold-backed currencies and generally diminishing the power of monopoly central banking. If Ms. Lagarde wanted to be honest, she'd discuss these options as well.

After Thoughts

Instead, she is framing the discussion in a certain way. This was a more fruitful strategy in the 20th century than the 21st.

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