HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

By Nick Beams*

25 March 2015 (WSWS)* – Global financial markets are on the road to another crash, with consequences even more serious than the collapse of September 2008. There have been a series of dire warnings from within the ruling class itself that present monetary policies have created massive financial bubbles with devastating consequences.

**Wall Street as seen from the air in 2009 | Author: Ibagli : Wikimedia Commons

In an interview with the Financial Times, James Bullard, the head of the Reserve Bank of St Louis, and a non-voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, said the Fed had to start normalizing interest rate policy as soon as possible. Continuing the present near-zero rate would feed into an asset price bubble which would “blow up out of control.”

Bullard and others are pointing to what has now become an obvious fact, that the combined effects of quantitative easing (i.e., printing money) and interest rate cuts by central banks are powering a feeding frenzy in global equity and bond markets.

Human Wrongs Watch

By Roberto Savio*

Rome, 23 March 2015 — The “surprise” re-election of incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 17 March 2015 elections has been met with a flood of media comment on the implications for the region and the rest of the world.

Roberto Savio

However, one of the reasons for Netanyahu’s victory has dramatically slipped the attention of most – the support he received from young Israelis.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, 200,000 last-minute voters decided to switch their vote to Netanyahu’s Likud party due to the “fear factor” and most of these were voters under the age of 35.

Perhaps the “fear factor” was actually an expression of the “Masada factor”. Masada is a strong element in Israeli history and collective imagination. The inhabitants of the mountain fortress of Masada, besieged by Roman legions at the time of Emperor Tito’s conquest of the Israeli state, preferred collective suicide to surrender.

Israelis today feel besieged by hostile neighbouring countries (first of all Iran), the continuous onslaught by the Caliphate and the Islamic State, overwhelming negative international opinion and growing abandonment by the United States.

Netanyahu played a number of cards to bring about his last-minute election success, including his speech to the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress on 3 March, which was seen by many Israelis as an act of defiance and dignity, not a weakening of fundamental relations with the United States.