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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (151545)	9/28/2008 1:12:42 PM
From: Asymmetric	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

'Germany Will Pay a High Price for US Sins' . Der Spiegel Sept 26, 2008 . spiegel.de German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück delivered an impassioned speech before parliament Thursday denouncing greed and government failures for the US financial meltdown. But German commentators are asking for reassurance rather than more finger-pointing. Politicians in Washington are keeping late hours this week fighting it out over the best way to save the country's ailing financial system. The fate of the Bush administration's proposed $700-billion bailout remains uncertain after talks between Democrats, Republicans and members of the Bush administration imploded Thursday evening, leaving everyone scrambling to reporters to get in the first word in the blame game. A haggard George W. Bush admitted to reporters that "We're in a serious economic crisis," while Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- who once lorded over Wall Street as the mighty master of Goldman Sachs -- got on bended knee to beg House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her party's support. As if the situation needed another exclamation point, while the talks were breaking up, federal regulators were seizing the assets of Washington Mutual, America's largest savings and loan as well as the biggest bank failure in US history. The seizure was followed by an emergency sale of bank assets to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion. On the other side of the world, Germans were reacting to the finger-wagging performance of German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück before the federal parliament, the Bundestag, on Thursday. "The world will never be the same as it was before the crisis," Steinbrück told German lawmakers. "The US will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system." His speech blamed Wall Street's "blind drive for double-digit profits" and insufficient regulation for the crisis. While admitting that it would hurt Germany's economic growth and labor market, he tried to comfort the lawmakers by stressing that the German economy was stable and that "more than anything, the finance market is an American problem." In Friday's papers, German commentators digest Steinbrück's comments in a number of ways. In general, though, none of them appear ready to gloat -- and none of them are ready to believe that the danger has passed. The center-right Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung writes: "It's the rhetoric of Sept. 11. … But this crisis actually has much larger dimensions than the attack against the twin towers and collapse seven years ago. Why? Because, this time, the attack on all-American doctrines is not the work of some foreign enemy. It comes from within, from the depths of the system. Largely unobstructed by its own state controls, American capitalism has created its own suicide bomber whose explosives -- derivatives -- have had an even greater effect than the flying bombs of the jihadists. The whole world -- and not just New York -- has a new ground zero now -- Wall Street." <snip>