Thursday, February 19, 2009

how the (financial) world nearly ended at 2:00 p.m., sep18, 2008



Rep Paul Kanjorski;
"On Thursday 18th Sep [08] at about 11 o'clock in the morning, the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the United States to the tune of 550 billion dollars, which had been drawn out in a matter of an hour or two. The treasury opened up it's window to help, they pumped 105 billion dollars into the system, and quickly realised that they could not stem the tide, we were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close down the operation, close down the money accounts, and announce a guarantee of 250,000 dollars per account so there wouldn't be further panic out there, and that's what actually happened. If they had not done that, their estimation was that by 2pm that afternoon, five and a half trillion dollars would have been drawn out of the money market system of the United States, would have collapsed the entire economy of the United States, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. We talked at that time about what would have happened if that happened. It would have been the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it.... This is a very difficult time; somebody threw us in the middle of the Atlantic ocean without a life raft, and we are trying to determine which is the closest shore, and whether there is any chance in the world to swim that far. We don't know."
One thing Kanjorski does not explain is; who was that "somebody" who "threw us in the middle of the Atlantic ocean without a life raft"?

Kanjorski also describes how Britain got the hapless US Treasury Sec Paulson to change his bound to fail bank bailout tactics - so perhaps Gordon Brown did save the world after all.

schmoo's credibility crunch package to restart britain

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