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Politics : Clinton -- doomed & wagging, Japan collapses, Y2K bug, etc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cuemaster who wrote (424)	9/22/1998 9:00:00 AM
From: SOROS	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1151

Electronic Telegraph, UK Brazil begs for lifeline as its economy sinks By Christina Lamb BRAZILIAN officials are desperately trying to secure $100 billion (œ60 billion) in the United States to save the country - and the whole of Latin America - from the threat of bankruptcy. Investors have taken out more than $30 billion (œ18 billion) out of the country in the past six weeks as Brazil has become the latest casualty in what some observers are calling the worst international economic crisis for decades. Latin America's largest country is now in danger of defaulting on its debts - hitting banks worldwide. The government has increased interest rates to 50 per cent to try to stem the financial haemorrhage. With presidential elections due next Sunday, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso is trying to avoid devaluing the real, the currency he created after taking office in 1994 to defeat hyper-inflation. In an attempt to contain panic, his staff has been urging the media to play down the gravity of the crisis. But despite its damage-control efforts, papers such as the Rio de Janeiro-based Jornal do Brasil have been warning readers of apocalypse. Newspapers are full of advertisements from people selling cars and luxury items and restaurants are empty because people are eating at home to save money. Ken Baxter, a Rio-based merger and acquisitions adviser said: "Everyone's worried sick. We may not go broke, but we've just woken up to a two or three-year recession." Facing a total debt of $294 billion (œ175 billion) - of which œ28 billion matures next month - Brazil's Finance Minister, Pedro Malan, has spent the past week pleading with the International Monetary Fund, the Group of Seven leading industrialised countries and Washington for help to shore up the embattled currency. He is in daily contact with Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, and other American officials. However, Washington's failure to cut interest rates this week to ease the economic crisis prompted the Brazilian stock market to fall further after a 30 per cent drop so far this year. Rodrigo Fiaes, the head of equity research at Banco Icatu, said: "If Brazil goes, then Argentina goes, and if Argentina goes, then Mexico goes. This would be disastrous for the US and the world economy and we could see chaos and meltdown of wealth in a very short time." American banks will be hit badly if Brazil defaults, and US firms rely on the region as a big export market. The fear is that Washington is too distracted by its president's domestic difficulties to pay serious attention to Latin America, and that officials will be reluctant to commit so much money to one region. Giving Brazil even a quarter of what it is seeking would drain what little resources the IMF has left, and some people are giving warnings of throwing good money after bad. Brazil has been sucked into the crisis which began in Thailand last year, then spread across east Asia and on to Russia. Fearing further problems in "emerging markets", investors pulled money out of Brazil, the world's ninth largest economy. This hit Argentina, which sends a third of its exports to Brazil. Last week, the financier George Soros gave a warning that the global capitalist system was in danger of imploding. In testimony to the US Congress, he said there was "general panic" in Latin America. Stephen Rose of UBB Capital Markets said: "The one advantage that Brazil has is that it is so important to America." But he pointed out that any lifeline for Brazil would need to be more than $50 billion (œ30 billion) to make a difference, and that confidence had been so badly hit that investors were unlikely to return quickly. Brazil is also a lot healthier than Indonesia and Russia. But it has a serious weakness: a fiscal deficit which has doubled to seven per cent of gross domestic product in the past year. President Cardoso, a social democrat, has promised budget cuts and might be able to take advantage of the crisis to push them through Congress. After slashing inflation from 3,000 per cent to three per cent a year, he is now facing a crisis not of his own making. Strangely, the situation seems to have boosted his standing: Brazilians see him as a safer pair of hands than his socialist opponent.

To: cuemaster who wrote (424)	9/22/1998 9:05:00 AM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

September 20 1998 ....CLINTON CRISIS Riddle of the suicide trail White House conspiracy theorists could scarcely believe their luck. A piece of video, innocently shot by an official communications unit, seemed to show President Bill Clinton in a compromising position with yet another woman. The existence of the video made headlines last week, but the real surprise would follow. It was not the woman's identity that shocked those following the president's scandals. It was the fact that her first husband, like a number of other people linked to the Clintons, had committed suicide. When news spread that investigators had found a video sequence showing Clinton ushering a dark-haired woman into the Oval Office hallway where he used to linger with Monica Lewinsky, many in Washington leapt to an instant and erroneous conclusion: a new "smoking bimbo" had been found who might finally shatter the president's efforts to win back trust and respect. It eventually emerged that the woman was not a "mystery intern", as several media outlets reported. She was Lenora Steinkamp, a 49-year-old kindergarten teacher from Arkansas who has been a close friend of the Clintons since they were neighbours 20 years ago in Little Rock. Steinkamp's lawyer offered a detailed explanation for her presence in the Oval Office. The president had been jogging with his old friend and several other people, the lawyer said. When they returned, Clinton offered Steinkamp a drink. "After they went into a hallway, a valet brought them a glass of water and she and the president talked about their families for a few minutes," the lawyer said. Any suggestion of a sexual encounter was "absolutely false". For veteran Clinton-haters, the most startling revelation had nothing to do with Steinkamp's White House visits but the fact that she was the second woman linked to Clinton this year whose husband had killed himself. One of the most popular documents in anti-Clinton circles - and now circulated on the Internet - is a list of almost 80 names of friends and associates of the president who have met violent or mysterious ends. The names range from Vince Foster, the former White House legal adviser whose death was ruled a suicide, to Mary Mahoney, a former White House intern who was murdered in a coffee shop in Georgetown in 1997. Some initially think the list is a spoof, but their jaws drop as they read of the suicide of Kathy Ferguson, the wife of an Arkansas state trooper who was involved in the sexual harassment lawsuit brought against Clinton by Paula Jones; the apparent suicide of Danny Casolaro, an investigative reporter inquiring into claims against Clinton; the suicide of Jon Parnell Walker, a bank investigator linked to the Whitewater scandal; and dozens of other premature deaths. While there is not a shred of evidence of any plot involving mass murder, many investigators have been startled by the sheer number of violent deaths that have coincidentally dogged the president's career. The list was extended earlier this year when Kathleen Willey, a White House aide, claimed to have been groped by the president in the hallway cited by Lewinsky. On the day the incident allegedly occurred in 1993, Willey's husband, Edward, shot himself in a Virginia forest. Now Steinkamp has joined the list. Her friendship with Clinton dates back to his early days as Arkansas governor in the 1980s, when she worked as a caterer and was a well-known fixture on the Little Rock party scene. She ran a successful business "styling" food for magazine photography, before becoming a broker for an investment firm in 1987. It was in September 1986 that Steinkamp's first husband, Wallace Blaylock, was found dead at their colonial-style home. Blaylock, a restorer of historic houses, was said to have been having financial problems. Police said he had shot himself while his wife was out getting him some anti-depressant medicine. Steinkamp remarried two years later and moved to Washington after Clinton became president. In 1993 she was filmed jogging with Clinton. The next year her second husband, Richard, was named general counsel for the Office of Federal House Enterprise Oversight, an independent unit within the housing and urban development department. Ten days ago, as rumours of the new video were swirling about the capital, Steinkamp appeared in public again, this time in unimpeachable circumstances. Hillary Clinton paid an official visit to the elementary school where Steinkamp works. Steinkamp declined to comment last week on her friendship with the Clintons. "She is a private citizen and she wants to remain that way," her lawyer said. Matthew Campbell and Tony Allen-Mills