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Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday acknowledged his country was feeling ripple effects from the global financial meltdown and pledged robust government spending to keep the economy from stalling.
While the direct impact of the crisis on China has been relatively light, the accompanying global slowdown would "inevitably have an impact on China's economy," Wen said.
"We need to use every means to prevent the financial crisis from having an impact on the growth of the real economy," he said.
Chinese institutions held relatively little of the toxic sub-prime mortgage debt hobbling Western institutions, and were as such largely unscathed by the collapse of the U.S. housing market.
However, the Chinese economy overall is slowing and will be further hit by a decline in demand for Chinese exports ranging from toys to rolled steel. Growth in the third quarter slowed to 9 percent — down from 11.9 percent for all of 2007 — still the fastest rate among the world's largest economies.
Wen's remarks were delivered at the close of the two-day Asia-Europe Meeting in Beijing, where leaders of 43 nations issued a statement calling for new rules to guide the global economy and on the International Monetary Fund to take a leading role to aid crisis-stricken countries.
While short on details, the statement calls on the IMF and similar institutions to help stabilize struggling banks and shore up flagging stock markets. "Leaders agreed that the IMF should play a critical role in assisting countries seriously affected by the crisis, upon their request," it said.
They also agreed to "undertake effective and comprehensive reform of the international monetary and financial systems," the statement said.
Participants said the statement would provide the basis of a joint Asian-European approach at a Nov. 15 summit on the crisis in Washington involving the world's 20 largest economies.
The document is one of the strongest endorsements yet for the Washington-based IMF, long known as the international lender of last resort, to take a leading role in the crisis.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the Beijing summit had raised expectations for solid results at the Washington summit.
Beijing participants "have all expressed their willingness for the Washington summit to be a place where we make some decisions, and we have all understood that it would not be possible to simply meet and have a discussion, we need to turn it into a decision-making forum," Sarkozy said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the IMF to become a "guard for the stability of the international finance system," and said there was unanimous agreement that it needed to take on a supervisory role.
The IMF, whose loans normally include strict provisions, is discussing loan packages with close to a dozen countries from Iceland to Pakistan, and is examining ways to speed up the process.
Speaking to reporters separately, Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso suggested a stronger global agency was needed to monitor complex international financial deals and restore public confidence battered by the crisis.
"The problem is that the damage has been done and some people feel they have been taken for a ride," Aso said. "They feel this was a problem with supervision."
Asia and Europe have thus far responded rather differently to the crisis, with Europe focused overwhelmingly on propping up its financial institutions.
The 15 Eurozone countries and Britain have agreed to put up a total of $2.3 trillion in guarantees and emergency aid to help banks. Meanwhile, South Korea, China, Japan and the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations have merely recommitted themselves to jointly establishing an $80 billion emergency fund to help those facing liquidity problems — to be established by next June — even while their stock markets tumble and export markets dry up.
___
Associated Press writers Henry Sanderson in Beijing and Kwang-tae Kim in Seoul, South Korea, and researcher Bonnie Cao in Beijing contributed to this report.
© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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{"commentId":3688802,"authorDomain":"nicksauber"}
The fractional reserve policy perpetrated by the Federal Reserve, which has spread in practice to the great majority of banks in the world, is in fact a system of modern slavery. Think about it, money is created out of debt, and what the people do when they are in debt? They submit to employment to pay it off. But if money only can be created out of loans, how can society ever be debt free? It cant, and that´s the point.
And it is the fear of losing assets coupled with the struggle to keep up with the perpetual debt and inflation inherit in the system, compounded by the inescapable scarcity within the money supply itself, created by the interest that can never be repaid that keeps the wage slave in line. Running on a hamster wheel, with millions of others. In effect, powering an empire, that truly benefits only the elite at the top of the pyramid.
For, at the end of the day who are you really working for? The Banks! Money is created in a bank, and it variable ends up in a bank. They are the true masters, along with the corporations and governments they support.
Physical slavery requires people to be housed and fed. Economic slavery requires people to feed an house themselves. It is one of the most ingenious scams for social manipulations ever created, and at it’s core it is an invisible war against the population. Debt is the weapon use to conquer and enslave societies, and interest is it’s prime ammunition.
And as the majority walks around oblivious to this reality the banks in collusion with governments and corporations continue to perfect and expand their tactics of economic warfare, spawning new bases such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. While also inventing a new type of soldier, the birth of the economic hit man.
“We economic hit men really have been the one’s responsible for creating this first truly global empire and we work many different ways. But perhaps the most common is that we will identify a country that has resources our corporations covet, like oil, and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of it’s sister organizations. But the money never actually goes to the country, instead it goes to our big corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country. Power plants, industrial parks, ports… things that benefit a few rich people in that country in addition to our corporations. But really don’t help a majority of the people at all. However, those people, the whole country is left holding a huge debt.
It’s such a big debt they can’t repay it, and that’s part of the plan, that they can’t repay it. And so at some point we economic hit men go back to them and say ‘Listen, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debts, so sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies, allow us to build a military base in your country, or send troops in support of ours to someplace in the world like Iraq, or vote with us on the next U.N. vote, to have their electric utility company privatized and their water and sewage system privatized and sold to US corporations or other multinational corporations.’
So there was a whole mushrooming thing, and it’s so typical of the way the IMF and the World Bank work. They put a country in debt, and it’s such a big debt it can’t pay it, and then you offer to refinance the debt and pay even more interest. And you demand this quid pro quo which you call ‘conditionality’ or ‘good governance’ which means basically that they’ve gotta sell off their resources, including many of their social services, their utility companies, their school systems sometimes, their penal systems, their insurance systems, to foreign corporations.
So it’s a double, triple, quadruple whammie! “
[/John Perkins]
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#1 - Sat Oct 25, 2008 9:41 AM EDT{"canLink":false,"threadId":"398961","isPrivate":false}
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