Grande Dépression n°2 ou “Plus Grande Dépression” ?

Grande Dépression n°2 ou “Plus Grande Dépression” ?

A nouveau, les avis, les analyses, les prévisions sont absolument catastrophiques, et la crise financière apocalyptique est de retour. Le répit a duré une grosse quinzaine, le temps pour les rebelles d’investir Tripoli et de renverser Kadhafi. Aujourd’hui 7 septembre est une journée décisive de plus avec l’évolution de la situation allemande (voir le 29 août 2011). Même si l’issue de cette journée n’était pas trop défavorable, ce ne serait qu’un “sursis de plus”…

Par exemple, il y a l’article de Jeremy Warner, du Daily Telegraph de ce 6 septembre 2011. Nous sommes revenus à l’analogie de la Grande Dépression, et plus précisément à 1931 pour Warner.

«Europe is in disarray, stock markets are plunging, the banking crisis is back in full swing, gold is at record levels, and both the UK and US are self-evidently slipping back towards recession – not since the autumn of 2008 have things looked quite so ominous.

»We appear to be at another pivotal moment, with Western economies once more staring into the abyss. At a conference in Frankfurt this week, Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, compared events to the Lehman Brothers catastrophe of 2008 and warned that many banks in Europe are essentially bust. His opposite number at KfW went further still and said that the present cocktail of negatives was “much more dramatic than 2008”.

»Back then, governments and central banks still had the financial firepower and the will to attack the problem with massive injections of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

»Today, the fiscal armoury is exhausted, while it is not clear that further monetary easing through the printing presses of “quantitative easing” would have any positive effect beyond the negative of adding to inflation.

»Indeed, the parallels look alarmingly closer to the banking collapses of 1931, which plunged the world into prolonged depression, than the storms around the Lehman collapse.

»In Europe and the US policymakers are paralysed – by growing Euroscepticism among electorates on the one hand and fierce Republican resistance to further deficit spending on the other. There is little or no consensus about what needs to be done. In Europe, governments are a million miles away from either of the two remedies likely to resolve the crisis: break-up of the euro or the establishment of political and fiscal union.»

Pour charger un peu plus ce dossier, nous signalons une très longue interview de Doug Casey, un de ces francs tireurs de l’Internet (à CaserResearch.com), encore un à avoir prédit avec précision les crises précédentes et à disposer d’une clientèle de fidèles qui lui font toute confiance. Casey est interviewé le 4 septembre 2011 par Anthony Wile, de TheDailyBell.com. Pour Casey, ce n’est pas une “Grande Dépression” n°2, mais une “Plus Grande Dépression” (Greater Depression), ce qui est un peu plus original. Le début de son interview donne toutes les indications standard de l’apocalypse.

Daily Bell: «Welcome, Doug. Let's jump right in. Are you still convinced we are heading into a “Greater Depression”?»

Doug Casey: «Yes. There is no question in my mind about that. Governments all over the world have created trillions of currency units since 2007 in the mistaken idea that it would create prosperity. The Americans – but also the Europeans, the Chinese and others – have papered things over for the short run mainly by inflating the stock markets, artificially depressing interest rates, and slowing the fall of the real estate market. All that extra currency has made people think they're richer than they are, and has encouraged extra consumption – which is a large part of the problem. Now they're out of bullets.

»We are coming out of the eye of the hurricane and it's going to be much, much more serious than it was in 2007, 2008 and 2009. That's because all those currency units they created are causing tremendous price rises on the retail level. It's going to be devastating for the average guy.

Daily Bell: «How long do you expect it will take before there is a complete breakdown in confidence of the US dollar?»

Doug Casey: «It's happening right now. The Chinese – or at least their central bank – have more US dollars than anybody else, and they want to get rid of them. They are trying to offload those dollars, for instance in Africa, to get rid of them for real wealth. Nearly everybody in the world feels this way. The new deals that they cut, with the Iranians and the Argentines for instance, are almost like barter deals. Nobody wants to use the paper currency of an unreliable third party. The US dollar is like an Old Maid card; nobody wants to get stuck holding it.

»I think in five years the dollar will have lost its reserve status completely. It may be more like two or three years. I hate to put such a near-term time frame on something that's so momentous in size. But I don't see any way out.»

Daily Bell: «Will there be accompanying civil unrest – rioting, looting and assorted acts of criminal behavior?»

Doug Casey: «Almost certainly. I think the riots we have seen recently in London, the various flash mobs we have seen around the US, and even the rioting that happened in Vancouver, are just an overture. When people don't have jobs – and actual unemployment in the US is running at over 20% if it is calculated the same way it was 30 years ago – they become very unhappy, while they have lots of time on their hands. Combine that with the fact a vastly higher number of people live in cities than was the case in the '30s – trouble always arises from cities. Combine that with skyrocketing inflation and a generally collectivist/statist psychology on the part of all segments of the population, and the result is inevitable. Living in a big city, or even a suburb, impresses me as a mistake.»

Daily Bell: «Is there any way of stopping this train wreck from occurring?»

Doug Casey: «Right now the US Government is spending over a trillion and a half dollars more than they are taking in – but that's as good as it's going to get. We're already in the best of all possible worlds, considering what's happened. It gets vastly worse from here. As unemployment and business failures start going up the government's deficit will rise to $2 trillion per year. They talked about cutting $2 or $3 or $4 trillion, but that's over 10 years and it's loaded towards the end of the 10 years; their supposed cuts are inconsequential, trivial, and meaningless. In addition, there's no reason to believe that spending won't skyrocket from here, because Congress is going to change next year, and again two years after that. They'll all have new cockamamie spending ideas. So this is all a complete charade.

»To answer the question, the only ultimate cure for this is that interest rates go back up to the 12 or 14% level, which would reward prudent savers and punish borrowers. But that's just a start. Military spending should be cut 90%, with the closure of all foreign bases, covert operations, and aid. Regulatory agencies like the SEC, the FDA, HUD, USDA, DOE, OHSA, FAA, EPA, etc., etc. should be abolished. The Fed should be abolished and gold reinstituted as money. The national debt should be overtly defaulted on for numerous reasons, but certainly because it acts as a mortgage on future generations. But none of that's going to happen, rather than the opposite. These prescriptions, while economically and morally correct, are a complete political pipe dream…»

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