LaRouche on Eurozone Meltdown: You Cannot Bail This Thing Out!

April 29, 2010 (LPAC)—Panic is spreading across international financial markets as the Eurozone debt crisis is escalating, with Spain joining Greece and Portugal on the list of countries whose sovereign debt has been downgraded by Standard & Poors, and some analysts are asking the question, is Italy next?

When you add up the demanded bail-outs of the bank creditors of these countries, Lyndon LaRouche commented, you are talking about something in the range of $1 trillion. If you consider the insane derivatives built on top of this quicksand — in typical Goldman Sachs style — you are in the range of a quarter quadrillion dollars, or more. "You cannot bail this thing out," LaRouche asserted. You have to get the passengers off the boat, not try to bail out the Titanic—and hopefully there will be enough boats to do that.

The British Empire's media outlets and experts, looking at this situation, are urging an exactly contrary policy to LaRouche's: a second TARP-style mega bail-out. Barclays Capital economist Piero Ghezzi is cited in the New York Times saying that, in order to satisfy "the markets" — i.e., the predator financial institutions that created the problem in the first place — "the number would be huge. Ninety billion euros for Greece, 40 billion for Portugal and 350 billion for Spain — now we are talking real money." The Times article then calls for a TARP-style bail-out of Europe to be launched. "What a growing number of investors suggest is really needed is a 'shock and awe' figure ... something similar to the Bush administration's decision to provide $700 billion to shore up America's financial institutions in the peak of the 2008 crisis." Bloomberg.com concurred: "Europe may need to come up with a plan equivalent to the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program deployed by the U.S. after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc."

The head of the OECD, Angel Gurria — in Berlin to survey the damage along with the top dogs of the IMF, the World Bank, the ECB, and the ILO — was openly hysterical: "It's not a question of the danger of contagion. Contagion has already happened. This is like Ebola. When you realize you have it, you have to cut your leg off in order to survive."