Josef Ackermann , the top dog at the association representing the world’s multinational financial institutions, had just finished taking questions from reporters at a press conference for more than an hour.
As he stepped off the stage, dozens of journos, including yours truly, surrounded him.
So many, in fact, he didn’t know who to answer:
Finally, Ackermann, who’s also the head of Germany’s largest bank, was asked if he was confident Germany would come through with a rescue package of its own.
Click to see what he had to say:
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For years, the World Economic Forum coordinator has been suggesting that the G7 or G8 be expanded to include the BRICs (Brazil, Russia is already in G8, India, China), but also, as others have suggested, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, maybe Turkey. These suggestions were ignored with the usual polite arrogance of the ‘free world’.
The Asians have been trying to engineer macroeconomic convegence through the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and had even worked out a blueprint for an Asian Monetary Fund that would bring about a Common Asian Currency (based on the ASEAN acounting unit plus Chinese, Indian and South Korean currencies — ASEAN+3, but that was also torpedoed by the non-regional (i.e. Western) members of the ADB.
Now that the Western monetary temple, the IMF, seems about to come down tumbling, the former saboteurs call for Asian help. The IIE proposes an Asian Plaza Agreement.
And if somebody knowing something about international finance but far from too much, dares to point these things out in a blog and concludes that, in any case, like it or not, the surplus-capital Asians will have no choice but to bail out the profligate West, the ‘free world’, he is likely to be copiously insulted.
Might this particular instance be an exception? Maybe so, but I doubt it.
- Posted by Mohamed MALLECK