Today, Global Research brings to the attention of its readers a selection of analytical articles relating to the global economy.

Around the world, billions of dollars of wealth are seamlessly being moved from one hand to another, from one country to the next.

The global economy is run by powerful economic networks which undermine national sovereignty. These networks are controlled by non-representative neo-conservative “intellectuals” and corporate banking elites.

Below, you will see how such an agenda can lead to sketchy bailouts, rigged financial markets and covert transactions by central bankers.

SELECTED ARTICLES

The Greek Elections and the EU Bailout: From Hope to Fear and Despair. Greece’s National Wealth For Sale

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-greek-elections-and-the-eu-bailout-from-hope-to-fear-and-despair-greeces-national-wealth-for-sale/5471926 ]

By Prof. James Petras, August 26, 2015

Eight months will have passed since the election of Syriza onJanuary 25 up to the snap elections in September. During that time Syriza’s leadersplay-acted their ‘opposition to austerity’ and then knelt down in submission to the ‘Troika’.

The contrast between January and now is dramatic: Syriza’s leader, Prime Minister Alexi Tsipras, aroused joy and great hope among the Greek voters with his promises to end Greece’s subjugation to the European oligarchs (the “Troika”)

But now, it convokes snap elections exploiting the pervasive fear and misery among the population.

Greeks confront a future of even greater impoverishment and despair with an entire generation bound up and delivered to forty years of debt slavery and colonial subjugation by their elected Syriza leaders.

In January, Syriza swept into office on its promise of ‘change’ without specifics. ‘Change’ turned out to be an empty slogan.

Changes did take place: Changes for the worse! Since his election, Tsipras emptied the Greek Treasury to pay the EU bankers; stripped pension and municipal funds to meet IMF obligations and, worse yet, he allowed the flight of over 40 billion Euros to be transferred from Greek banks to overseas accounts – essentially de-capitalizing the financial system.

The linguistic perversion of “change” was not the worst of Syriza’s contribution to the corruption and discredit of the European left.

Its slavish pillage of the economy shocked and confused the impoverished Greek majority.

The voters had expected Syriza and its radical phrasemongers to do the opposite – to save the national economy and lead the country!

For a while Tsipras’s submission and betrayal was disguised by his theatrical poses of the ‘tough negotiator’ with the German bankers.

His perpetual boyish grin, frozen on his face, as if to reassure his followers: “You can trust me. I will make sure Madame Merkel and company do not shove another bristly cucumber up your backsides!”

Tsipras feigned resistance before the bankers, setting a stylistic template for other Syriza legislators, who likewise ‘protested and submitted’.

They too came to believe that ‘their efforts’ (and not their results) deserved public approval!

Between February and April, Tsipras endured stern lectures from his overlords in the EU, returning to Greece with his silly grin and empty pockets.

Tsipras did everything possible to distract, to entertain, to bluster and deceive Syriza’s befuddled supporters.

Tsipras resorted to radical rhetoric, empty gestures and verbal defiance.

His emotional outburst were just ‘hollow farts’ (kfes pourdes in demotic Greek) in the poetic language of an insightful, indignant grandmother whose pension had been cut by 40%!

Syriza bent and broke before the predictable intransigence of their German overlords and their 28 rubber-stamping, vassal states. Syriza got nothing and worse. The more they talked, the less they achieved…

Tsipras broke the Greek financial system and then declared defeat, but not before mounting one more grand electoral fraud. Syriza announced a popular ‘referendum’ on the EU dictates and 61% of the Greek voters said ‘no’ to the EU demands. But Tsipras immediately said yes!

Tsipras accepted the complete sell-off –-‘privatization’– of all the strategic, lucrative, major and minor public enterprises, properties and sources of Greek national wealth.

There were no popular uprisings in the street on Tsipras’ capitulation: just a little ‘tempest in the teapot’ in the Greek Parliament when the “Left Platform” voted no, showed their backsides to their now ex-leader, defected and formed a new party – Popular Unity.

With no mass organization and not supporting mass action, the ‘Left Platform’ just rose up on their hind legs . . . to bray out a manifesto calling for ‘popular unity’….within the confines of the Parliamentary cesspool of knaves and scoundrels.

Meanwhile, Syntagma (Constitution) Square was full of pigeons and homeless vagabonds… Is this another hollow fart?

These armchair rebels, who sat in the Cabinet and slavishly followed Tsipras for seven months, engaging in sterile internal party debates and giving interviews to the dwindling bands of leftist academic tourists, while ignoring the street fighting youth, will face a new election in one month.

They have the insurmountable taskof convincing a cowed, confused and fearful electorate that they should unite, organize and reject Tsipras, Syriza and infinite regression.

Tsipras, for his part, will take the EU ‘bailout funds’, pay the banks and finance his own campaign. He will get free publicity from the domestic and foreign press (the Financial Times editorializes in praise of ‘his courage and good sense’) and employ an army of campaign workers with bail-out funds to obliterate the ‘Left Platform’.

He will thus gain support from the Greek oligarchs and having adopted the platform of the right opposition, he has little to fear electorally from the boring old kleptocrats of Pasok and New Democracy, who cannot match his giveaways, theatrics and demagogy at the ballot box.

Disillusion and direct action—strikes, marches and fiery barricades– will set in after the September elections when Tsipras has further slashed pensions and shredded labor rights, when privatizations lead to massive layoffs at the docks, airports, power companies and oil refineries.

Tsipras’ call for rapid elections was designed to secure votes from a shocked electorate before the pain of his massive sell-out is fully felt.

With time, there will be tempestuous protests, but the EU will have pillaged Greece of its present and future wealth. Tsipras’ electoral support will dwindle and tear gas will once again perfume the streets of Athens.

Then, the old political whores and kleptocrats from the Right will trot out to center stage once more.

And who knows, Tsipras may even form a new ‘inclusive’ coalition regime with the sluts of the right. Bankers, oligarchs and kleptocrats are not fussy about their bed-partners, even played-out traitors with boyish grins are worth a ‘romp in the sack’ if it gets them back in power…

Conclusion

The financial press and the mass media concocted an image of Syriza as “far left” or “hard left”. In fact, Syriza did everything possible to destroy the hopes of the majority of downwardly mobile Greeks desperate for a reversal of the shock austerity policies imposed by the EU.

From the very first day in office, Syriza leaders embraced theoligarchical structure of the EU, retaining the Euro currency and recognizing the illicit foreign debt.

Caged from the outset, Syriza just made a big racket, rattling the bars and pleading for a long leash and more time.

The trained eyes of the EU autocrats recognized Syriza leaders as captives, given to inconsequential political ejaculations and ‘outraged protestations’.

They made no concessions: Indeed bankers decided to really punish the Greek voters for electing the clowns…

The Germans immediately sized Tsipras up as a marshmallow leftist – organically incapable of breaking out of the EU cage, of renouncing the Euro and the debt.

With their long historical experience, Euro-imperialists know how to treat ‘socialist’ and ‘nationalist’ subjects, who negotiate on bended knee: “The more you kick them, the less they ask”

Tsipras begged for money to pay the European and US banks! He agreed to sell twenty-nine Greek airports to German capitalists in order to pay the German bankers.

In other words, Syriza and Tsipras have impoverished millions of Greeks and sold off all of Greece’s lucrative enterprises so that German, French and English holders of Greek bonds will not miss a single interest payment!

Was Tsipras just posing as a Prime Minister while serving as a pimp for gang rape?

According to the latest polls, the Greek people will re-elect him!

The victims have gone mad!…God bless Greece –the cradle of democracy has become a roiling nest of vipers!

Economic Destabilization, Financial Meltdown and the Rigging of the Shanghai Stock Market?

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/economic-destabilization-financial-meltdown-and-the-rigging-of-the-shanghai-stock-market/5471533 ]

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 26, 2015

The dramatic collapse of the Shanghai stock exchange has been presented to public opinion as the result of a spontaneous “market mechanism”, triggered by weaknesses in China’s economy.

The Western media consensus in chorus (WSJ, Bloomberg, Financial Times) portend that Chinese stocks tumbled due to “uncertainty” in response to recent data “suggesting a downturn in the world’s second-largest economy”.

This interpretation is erroneous.

It distorts the workings of stock markets which are the object of routine speculative operations.

An engineered decline in the Dow Jones, for instance, can be precipitated in various ways: e.g. short selling, betting on the decline of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the options market, etc. 1

Amply documented, financial markets are rigged by the mega-banks.

Powerful financial institutions including JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, et al and their affiliated hedge funds have the ability of “pushing up” the stock market and then “pulling it down”.

They make windfall gains on the upturn as well as on the downturn.

This procedure also applies to the oil, metals and commodity markets.

It’s financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls “pump and dump,” defined as “artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price,” then profit more on the downside by short-selling.

“This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common,” (See Stephen Lendman, Manipulation: How Financial Markets Really Work, Global Research, March 20, 2009

The Shanghai Stock Exchange Collapse

The Shanghai SSE Composite Index progressed over the last year from approximately 2209 on August 27, 2014 to more than 5166 on June 21st, 2015 (circa 140% increase); then from July 21st it collapsed by more than 30 percent in a matter of two weeks to 3507 (July 8).

A further collapse occurred starting on August 19, in the week immediately following the Tianjin explosions (August 12, 2015) culminating on Black Monday August 24th (with a dramatic 7.63 percent decline in one day).

Did the Tianjin Explosion contribute to exacerbating “uncertainty” with regard to the Chinese equity market?

The evolution of the SSE over that one year period has nothing to do with spontaneous market forces or real economy benchmarks.

It has all the appearances of a carefully engineered speculative onslaught, an upward push and a downward pull.

The possibility of market rigging was investigated by the Chinese authorities in July 2015 following the June 21 meltdown of the Shanghai Stock Exchange (see graph above):

The regulator said [Report July 3] that it would be looking into whether parties were mis-selling financial products.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said it would base its investigation on reports of abnormal market movements from the stock market and futures exchanges.

Some reports have accused overseas investors of driving prices down by short-selling stocks on Chinese bourses, meaning they were betting on stocks falling.

Any criminal cases will be transferred to the police, the regulator said.The China Financial Futures Exchange (CFFEX) has suspended 19 accounts from short-selling for a month, reports Reuters news agency, citing unnamed sources. (BBC, August 25, 2015, emphasis added)

The media consensus (as well as statements emanating from the Chinese authorities) was that Chinese financial actors rather than foreign banks could have been behind the process of stock market rigging: “Overseas investors have limited access to Chinese markets”.

Market manipulation did not emanate from foreign sources, according to the Global Times.

This assessment, however, does not take into consideration that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC et al are major financial actors within China, operating in Shanghai through Chinese financial proxies in partner joint ventures.

Moreover, these Western financial institutions are known to have played an overriding role in manipulating stock markets as well foreign exchange markets:

Regulators fined six major banks a total of $4.3 billion for failing to stop traders from trying to manipulate the foreign exchange market, following a yearlong global investigation.

HSBC Holdings Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc, UBS AG and Bank of America Corp all faced penalties resulting from the inquiry, which has put the largely unregulated $5-trillion-a-day market on a tighter leash, accelerated the push to automate trading and ensnared the Bank of England.

Dealers used code names to identify clients without naming them and swapped information in online chatrooms with pseudonyms such as “the players”, “the 3 musketeers” and “1 team, 1 dream.”

Those who were not involved were belittled, and traders used obscene language to congratulate themselves on quick profits made from their scams,authorities said. (Reuters, November 11, 2014).

Goldman Sachs among other major financial institutions operates out of Shanghai since 2004 under a joint venture arrangement with the Beijing Gao Hua Securities Company.

Goldman is known to use so-called “high frequency trading programs” in stock market transactions:

“Markets can be rigged with computers using high-frequency trading programs (HFT), which now compose 70% of market trading; and Goldman Sachs is the undisputed leader in this new gaming technique. (See Ellen Brown, Stock Market Collapse: More Goldman Market Rigging, Global Research, May 8, 2010)

Another factor which has facilitated speculative operations on the Shanghai Stock Exchange has been the integration of the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock markets in 2014 under the so-called “Stock Connect” link.

The procedure enables foreigners to buy Chinese A shares listed on the Shanghai exchange out of Hong Kong, with “limited restrictions”, namely full access to China’s equity market.

Financial Warfare

These engineered upward and downward swings of the Shanghai Composite Index ultimately result in the confiscation of billions of dollars of money wealth including Chinese State funds provided by the People’s Bank of China to prop up the Shanghai Stock Market.

Where does the money go.

Who are the recipients of this multi-billion dollar trade?

In response to the August meltdown, the People’s Bank of China “offered 150 billion yuan ($23.43 billion) worth of seven-day reverse repurchase agreements, a form of short-term loans to commercial lenders.”.

This money was wasted.

It did not result in reversing the meltdown of the Shanghai stock exchange.

Geopolitics

Geopolitical considerations are also relevant. While the Pentagon and NATO coordinate military operations against sovereign countries, Wall Street carries out concurrent destabilizing actions on financial markets including the rigging of the oil, gold and foreign exchange markets directed against Russia and China.

Is the “possible” rigging of the Shanghai Stock Exchange part of a broader package of US actions against China which consists in weakening China’s economy and financial system?

Does China’s financial collapse serve broader US foreign policy interests which include routine threats directed against China, not to mention US military deployments in the South China Sea?

Are we dealing with “financial warfare” directed against a competing World economic power?

It is worth noting that speculative procedures (rigging) have also been used in the oil and foreign exchange markets against the Russian Federation.

Combined with the sanctions regime, the objective was to push down the price of crude oil (as well as the value of the Russian rouble), with a view to weakening the Russian economy.

“Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ directed against China is reinforced through concurrent destabilizing actions on the Shanghai stock exchange.

The ultimate intent is to undermine –through non-military means– the national economy of the People’s Republic of China.” (Michel Chossudovsky, US-NATO Military Deployments, Economic Warfare, Goldman Sachs and the Next Financial Meltdown, Global Research, August 8, 2015

“The Banksters Did It”: The Central Banks Have Engineered This Financial Collapse

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-banksters-did-it-the-central-banks-have-engineered-this-financial-collapse/5471914 ]

By James Corbett, August 26, 2015