Financial lies are a confidence trick

More than 18 months after the onset of the GFC (global financial crisis) the City of London’s disinformation unit at Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian is now reporting what it knew and should have reported at the time—Australia’s banking system was about to collapse in October 2008.

Hang on—how many times was the public told Australia’s banks were “sound”? Repeatedly. Ad nauseam. Only the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) told the truth at the time. (See the Media Releases section of cec.cecaust.com.au).

In The Australian’s 21^st June edited extract of S*tstorm by News Ltd. journos Lenore Taylor and David Uren are the following revelations:

• Pious professor Ian Harper, an architect of Australia’s financial system, reassured everyone who asked in early October 2008 if Australia’s banks were safe, but personally withdrew a sizeable sum of money from an ATM on the weekend of 11^th-12^th October because he feared a run on the banks.
• The Reserve Bank printed around $10 billion in $100 and $50 notes in early October 2008, almost doubling their strategic cash reserve, the first time since their preparation for the Y2K crisis in December 1999.
• Among the wave of panicked withdrawals by depositors, $1 billion was withdrawn from Suncorp, and $2 billion from Bankwest.
• The RBA anticipated the crisis in a late 2007 paper for the Council of Financial Regulators, which discussed which institutions would be allowed to fail, and which couldn’t be allowed to fail.
• Six weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan secretly met with Treasury officials to plan their response to the GFC.
• In the immediate aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse, international investors who refused to roll over their exposures to Australian banks, called in $50 billion in short-term debt.

But colouring The Australian’s revelations are two continuing lies: 1) that at the time the media missed the seriousness of the picture; and 2) that the crisis was one of “confidence”.

CEC leader and candidate for Wills Craig Isherwood today attacked the lies:

“Whatever they pretend now, the media was and still is complicit in a cover-up about the real economic threat facing Australians,” he charged.

“Implying the crisis was about ‘confidence’ is a con-job. The crisis was about bankruptcy—Australia’s banks were completely exposed to the global meltdown because of their own enormous derivatives obligations of $14 trillion and foreign debts of nearly a trillion dollars, and they couldn’t meet the demands for repayment.

“If Rudd and Swan didn’t go guarantor for them in 2008, they would have gone under.”

The fact that Australia’s banks are still heavily exposed to the $1.4 quadrillion derivatives bubble, the domestic property bubble, and enormous short-term foreign debt prompted Mr Isherwood to ask, “If this picture of 2008 is only being reported now, what’s being kept from the public about the crisis at the moment? What lies are we being fed about the fall-out of the current European crisis on Australia’s financial system?”

He concluded, “The CEC and Lyndon LaRouche have the guts to tell the truth about the economic crisis, because we are the only ones who understand it, and know what to do about it.

“Australians should stop worrying about getting their confidence up, and instead find out the CEC’s solutions and join our fight to get them implemented.”

LaRouche will deliver an international webcast, Change is a’comin’, at www.larouchepac.com on Sunday 27^th June, 3am AEST, archived shortly thereafter.