Banking collapse has already happened; Crisis is worst ever; Financial system has effectively disintegrated; Mass social insurrection likely

Analysts: New Era Of Chaos Has Taken Hold
Banking collapse has already happened; Crisis is worst ever; Financial system has effectively disintegrated; Mass social insurrection likely
Steve WatsonInfowars.netMonday, Feb 23rd, 2009
A wave of economists, investors and other financial experts issued a series of dire warnings concerning the global financial crisis over the weekend, stating that a new era of chaos has taken hold all over the globe.
Some asserted that a total banking collapse has already occurred, while others said that the downturn is now the worst on record, far outstripping the great depression.
Hedge fund manager and billionaire philanthropist George Soros said the financial system has effectively disintegrated, with the turbulence more severe than during the Great Depression and with the decline comparable to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker said he could not remember any time, even in the Great Depression, when things went down so fast and quite so uniformly around the world.
Financial market analyst Martin D. Weiss has stated that the banking collapse has already occurred and a major Wall Street meltdown is now imminent.
Leading forecasters, The National Association for Business Economics, have warned that the recession is projected to worsen and unemployment could hit 9% this year, 10% percent next year and continue to rise into 2011. In 2008, the jobless rate averaged 5.8 percent, the highest since 2003.
Financial professors Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University have said that the crisis is “as bad as they come”, warning that if the averages of previous crises hold, Americans can expect unemployment to reach 11 or 12 percent, housing prices nationally to drop 36 percent, stocks to lose more than half their value, and real output per capita to plunge 9.3 percent.
New York University economist Nouriel Roubini has predicted a lost decade of Japanese-style stagnation (a deadly combination of stagnation, recession and deflation) but on a worldwide basis.
“The global economy is now literally in free fall as the contraction of consumption, capital spending, residential investment, production, employment, exports and imports is accelerating rather than decelerating,” Roubini wrote.
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Though the Obama administration has denied it plans to nationalize swathes of U.S. banks, speculators have asserted it is already happening, and will continue if Obama converts the government’s preferred shares in Citigroup Inc. into common equity to help the firm withstand losses. The Treasury has also announced that it is ready to throw even more money at the banks, in addition to the trillions in taxpayer dollars that have already disappeared.
While some economists have resigned themselves to accepting this as “the only way out”, CNBC’s Jim Cramer has warned that nationalization would crush America and plunge the financial system into “a world of chaos” which throughout history has led to “deep down insurrection and social unrest”.
Similar reports and analyses have recently predicted that the world is on the brink of severe social unrest due to the financial crisis. The weekend saw protests reach boiling point in Ireland, Governments in Iceland and Latvia have already been toppled, while police in the UK are preparing for a “summer of rage” and mass protests against the mishandling of the economic crisis by the government.
An increase in urban warfare training drills throughout the U.S. does not bode well in the light of such reports, particularly given that Northcom has highlighted that active duty troops inside the U.S. will be designated to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control”.
Of course, out of this chaos, as we have consistently warned for over a decade, is being presented a new order. Today British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a “global New Deal” which would see a government “clampdown” on all financial markets including hedge funds.
Essentially this would be the final nail in the coffin of the free market, and would usher in a new period of global government regulation of the financial system