Entries in the 'Economy' Category

IMF Lacks The Resources To Tackle The Crisis

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from BBC News): “The IMF says it will take decisive action to tackle the eurozone debt crisis and support the global economy.

“However, the communique, issued during a meeting between G20 finance ministers, the IMF and the World Bank, did not give specifics on whether extra funds would be available to the global fund.

“‘Advanced economies will ensure that banks have strong capital positions and access to adequate funding,’ said the communique.”

My Comment: If financiers and economists understood that nature prepared the only option—the economy of reasonable consumption, they would only have to bring their economic and financial systems in compliance with this requirement of our evolution. However, since they do not know and do not wish to know that yet, their attempts to act using old methods will cost us a lot of unnecessary suffering.
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The Economy Of Balance

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What changes do we have to implement at this point?

Answer: The most important task is to change man’s outlook on the world, his approach to it. In truth, we don’t need to do anything else. It is impossible to take any practical steps without this.

Indeed, people haven’t figured out what’s happening yet. They first must agree with the idea that we have to change internally in the direction of unity. It is enough to merely agree with it out of despair caused by the total extinction of the sources of fulfillment. People will reach a new understanding, will be imbued with a new feeling, and start to implement excellent ideas even before you think of them. As a result of the strong global connection, people will acquire wisdom.

Question: What does it mean “to agree to unite”?

Answer: People will agree internally that the world’s new and better future lies in the connection between everyone. This is already a different outlook on the world. I don’t object any more, I agree to learn about this, I become part of this plan, and I accept this message. I already understand that the crisis is caused by big egoism that has totally separated us and drawn us apart, while a single, whole system is being revealed to us.

This is what constitutes the agreement: Instead of following the price of the US dollar and interest rates, people will begin to change their way of thinking. “We will be better off if we unite more because this is the condition for success today, which Nature has posed to us.” A factory owner or a doctor at the clinic—no matter where a person is and what he or she does—will know that he can only succeed by way of unity, connection. A person will understand that it won’t help if he steals from someone, profits at someone’s expense, deceives someone, and so on. His entire attitude to life will change.

The present financial system is based on the principle of success at the expense of others. At first everything was fine: People saved money and invested it in industry. But then the speculative games started and prices soared. A fight starts over a glass that costs five dollars: One is ready to pay 20 dollars, and another 30, and we build an entire industry on these prices, as if it is based on real money. As a result, the dollar which was initially made of gold is now made of paper. We’ve lost control over the economy. It isn’t the economy anymore, but one big lie, and this is why it is being destroyed today.

We have to shift to a totally different system and most importantly, determine what we are doing this for. The global financial system has to help us balance the general system. We will operate not with inflated but real financial resources, which correspond to a real capacity of the world’s economy. Through this we will bring the world to balance. We will all discuss how to better invest the available means in order to reach maximum balance.

This is the new economic approach: to profit not from money in a bank account, but rather from strengthening the connection and balance betwen all the systems.
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From the 5th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/11/2011, “Peace in the World”

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IMF lacks The Resources To Tackle The Crisis

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from BBC News): “The IMF says it will take decisive action to tackle the eurozone debt crisis and support the global economy.

“However, the communique, issued during a meeting between G20 finance ministers, the IMF and the World Bank, did not give specifics on whether extra funds would be available to the global fund.

“’Advanced economies will ensure that banks have strong capital positions and access to adequate funding,’ said the communique.”

My Comment: If financiers and economists understood that nature prepared the only option—the economy of reasonable consumption, they would only have to bring their economic and financial systems in compliance with this requirement of our evolution. However, since they do not know and do not wish to know that yet, their attempts to act using old methods will cost us a lot of unnecessary suffering.
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Christine Lagarde: We Need Leadership, Not Brinksmanship

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion: (Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, IMF): “We are certainly living through times of great economic anxiety. Exactly three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the economic skies look troubled and turbulent as global activity slows and downside risks increase.

“In our inter-connected world, economic tremors in one country can reverberate swiftly and powerfully across the globe, especially if they originate in systemic economies. IMF research has shown that financial linkages transmit such tremors rapidly and broadly. And because of lingering debt problems, financial stability risks have risen significantly.

“Social tensions [are] bubbling below the surface. I see a number of interweaving strands here—entrenched high unemployment, especially among the younger generation; fiscal austerity that chips away at social protections; perceptions of unfairness in ‘Wall Street’ being given priority over ‘Main Street’; and legacies of growth in many countries that predominantly benefited the top echelons of society. These issues add more fuel to the confidence crisis.

“So, what can be done? I want to propose today four key policy dimensions needed to secure recovery and economic stability—repair, rebalance, reform, rebuild, the ‘4 R’s.’

“First, repair. Before anything else, we must relieve some of the balance sheet pressures that risk smothering the recovery—on sovereigns, on households, on banks.

“The second ‘R’ is reform.  If repair was about getting the economy moving today, reform is about laying the foundations for a more stable economic future tomorrow.

“The third ‘R’ is rebalance. This has two meanings. First, it means shifting back demand from the public to the private sector, when the private sector is strong enough to carry the load. This hasn’t happened yet.

“The second rebalancing involves a global demand switch from external deficit to external surplus count[r]ies… key emerging markets must take up the slack and start providing the demand needed to power the global recovery.

“My fourth—and final—‘R’ is rebuild. Here I am thinking mainly of the low-income countries that need to rebuild their economic policy buffers—including fiscal positions—that served them so well during the crisis, to protect themselves against future storms.

“I believe there is a path to sustained recovery, much narrower than before, and getting narrower. To navigate it, we need strong political will across the world—leadership over brinksmanship, cooperation over competition, action over reaction.”

My Comment: Only the problems are partially correct, but their solution is a “look back,” and they will bring only new problems because the old methods cannot solve anything. The world has become global, dear economists, and until you realize that the world is moving towards the economy of reasonable consumption, only the crisis will develop. So, what was said about brinksmanship is true….
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No One Will Be Unemployed

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Unemployment is rising around the world. It’s also affecting our friends from different groups and regions….

Answer: The world does not understand what disaster it’s facing. Soon half the population will be left without a job. And for this reason the first point of our proposed solution is to stop viewing unemployment as a catastrophe, which needs to be dealt with so everyone can get back to working 10-15 hours a day. Instead, everyone needs to work enough to provide one another with food, clothes, and other basic goods.

We are entering a time, a period, when we can forget everything there was before. We need to switch our minds to the new regime because it’s impossible to return to the old one. Very soon we will only need to care for the most necessary things. The next wave will wash over the entire world like a tsunami, and we’ll need to make a simple economic calculation: What we need to produce to provide us with more or less normal basic conditions and nothing else.

In other words, this means that we need to maintain balance with nature. The upper governance will not allow us to do whatever we want, just like it doesn’t allow a wolf in the woods to stock up several month’s cache of prey in order to feel secure about its future. The world will change dramatically, and the Creator will force us to live with so called “faith”: If everyone takes care of each other, things will go well, and if they do not, we have famine, destruction, and wars.

The calculation will be simple: We only work to provide everyone with the necessities, and nothing more than that, nothing in excess, no saving for the future or “rainy day money.” Naturally, this does not mean that everyone is wearing hand-me-downs or is half starving. We have simply forgotten what a normal life is, how life was 200-300 years ago.

And this is why unemployment is not the problem; it is simply the way that humanity is ridding itself of extra activities that only destroy and contaminate Earth. “Unemployed” is the wrong term. This refers to people who finally stop doing useless things. Now they need to start studying, and this will become the most important job along with unity and dissemination, while manufacturing will be reduced to life’s necessities.

People should not hope for the direction to change. More people will be losing work instead of finding it. We need to change our attitude towards life, and then we’ll see that those who have lost work are not unemployed. Having rid themselves of extra work that harms everyone, they are ready to take on a real job: correction. This is what it means to “serve the Creator.”
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From the Talk on the Economic Situation in the World 10/20/2011

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Foggy Economics Of The Transitional Period

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Economists explain that in the modern global and integrated world, the entire world influences an individual, and an individual influences the entire world. This is a very large system, which must be taken into consideration entirely, and this is why the old economic laws are no longer working. The problem with an individual person planning to open a certain business is that to do it, he needs to know about all the influence he receives from everywhere, but where can he learn this?

Answer: This knowledge can only be acquired from the wisdom of Kabbalah once we begin to reveal the common network. And then we will purely, instinctively be acting in a proper manner since otherwise this network would not have been revealed to us. It only becomes revealed under the condition that I act properly in it and wish to connect to it in bestowal.

Then this system becomes revealed to me, and I naturally receive only what I need to receive from it to bestow. And if something gives me the opportunity to bestow more to others, I will receive more with this purpose, but I myself will always remain in the “small state” (Galgalta ve Eynaim), in balance.

The wisdom of Kabbalah does not explain to us the process of the attainment of one’s first “balanced” state. This is called the transitional period or the period of preparation. It happens under the influence of the environment, while you want to find certain precise stages and mechanical economic laws here ahead of time so as to instruct every bank and organization what monetary sum to transfer and where, what loans to give and with what interest rate.

But this is impossible to do before we connect into a true system that has not yet been revealed. However, certain separate ways can already be figured out today, and we will keep trying.

We need new global education and fair distribution based on nationwide referendums, which will allow us to find out the speed with which the establishment of the mutual guarantee can advance. It’s like a statistic.

This must be revealed to us, but for now it’s hard to say something specific. It’s like we don’t know what our path will be like before the first spiritual degree. We only know the factors that influence it: environment and man’s efforts to be in touch with this environment and to find this net of mutual guarantee in it.

But we don’t know anything more than that; everything else becomes revealed along the way. Of course, with my spiritual vision I see a bit more and a bit further than a regular person does, but for me things are not clear all the way, and I am not embarrassed to say it. Right now no one can say how this process will be unraveling because our freedom of will is involved here.

When you are on the spiritual degrees, you can precisely determine your current and future states. You do not know when it will come, but it is clear to you that you will go from state “A” to state “B.” However, you can’t say this during the transitional period.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/2/2011, Shamati #219

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The Weakness Of The Powerful

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Today you published research results that discovered a nucleus of 147 leading world corporations that are tightly intertwined with one another, support each other, and to many, epitomize the notion of globalization in its negative sense, as those who hog the power over the world. Should anything change in this regard as a result of our unification?

Answer: I don’t think that the leaders of these corporations were smart enough to incite such a plan. Nature was pulling the strings, and it brought them to the current situation. Man does not choose anything here. He is simply driven by the egoistic desire, which develops to global proportions.

In reality the matter is not confined to 147 companies. If we make a truly deep and precise calculation, then we probably won’t find anything beyond this network. However, its “above-water” aspect, which connects everyone, can be imagined in this way.

On the other hand, there is a significant problem concealed here, which the big players are discovering today. The immense scope and interconnection with others gives them power, but at the same time, enormous weakness. After all, they are “tied together” and cannot do anything. None of them is able to budge a millimeter. The threads between them became ties that are impossible to escape.

Thus, it turns out that instead of providing anyone with power, the global network rules by itself, fully and entirely. The world is no longer able to break this connection, and as a result, it cannot change it in order to improve its situation in any way. No summits will improve the situation with the help of any means at their disposal. After all, these means are no longer effective, which is what we are seeing over the course of recent years.

The world leaders are powerless. In this situation the global network compels them to be idle because the regular methods—both economic and military force—do not help. Pour money into banks, change the dictators—nothing will help. The world is now governed by this network, and its movement cannot be stopped.

The only thing that can be done is to take care of people’s upbringing, about inner movements. It is necessary to change the quality of the “matter” that is connected by the threads of this network. You can’t change the network by itself, but you can improve the quality of its constituent parts, and then their connection will improve. That is the only way the entire system can be lifted to the level of interaction and prosperity.

This will already be something new, completely different from what the people in power had in mind. However, this will provide us with life. Otherwise the network will begin to kill those who are in it. The world has to understand that there is just one opportunity, just one approach to the modern problems: to take care of people’s worldview, to raise their consciousness, their moral level. Then their connection, which envelops their network, rises from negative, egoistic and protectionist, to unity, cohesion, and mutual guarantee.

All other plans won’t help. Moreover, the new upbringing should be conducted by people with a point in the heart, who attract the Light that reforms. Otherwise nothing will work. In the current conditions, only one clear and narrow direction for actions will work.
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From the 5th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/24/11, “Peace in the World”

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One Super-Corporation Runs The World

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News: “A University of Zurich study ‘proves’ that a small group of companies – mainly banks – wields huge power over the global economy. The study is the first to look at all 43,060 transnational corporations and the web of ownership between them – and created a ‘map’ of 1,318 companies at the heart of the global economy.

“The study found that 147 companies formed a ‘super entity’ within this, controlling 40 per cent of its  wealth. All own part or all of one another. Most are banks – the top 20 includes Barclays and Goldman Sachs. But the close connections mean that the network could be vulnerable to collapse.

“The financial collapse of 2008 showed that such tightly-knit networks can be unstable.

‘If one company suffers distress,’ Glattfelder says, ‘This propagates.’” (Source: Daily Mail)

“One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. ‘Such structures are common in nature,’ says Sugihara.

“So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.” (Source: NewScientist)

My Comment: The conclusion is surprising: Nobody rules the world, neither the Jews, nor the rich, nor governments—and this is correct. The world is ruled by Nature or the Creator, and we are unable to influence the program of the world’s development. Rather, we can determine the form in which the program will manifest in front of us: Whether it will be more or less friendly to us, whether we will move to our next mandatory state, the society of mutual guarantee, through the Nazi regimes, World War III, and the destruction of much of humanity, or straight to the society of mutual guarantee and reasonable consumption.
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Nazism In A New World

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from Ynetnews): “Several anti-Semitic incidents have been reported during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York as Jews were blamed for the turmoil in America’s financial markets. In addition, anti-Israel signs were raised against ‘Israel’s occupation of Gaza.’

“The Emergency Committee for Israel has published a hard-to-watch clip in which Jews are attacked and blamed for the financial crisis and assistance to Israel.

“It should be noted that the video is political in nature and seeks to tie President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to the protesters, urging them to ‘stand up to the mob.’

“The White House, on its part, is trying to take advantage of the demonstrations against Wall Street while the anti-Obama camp is attempting to tie the protesters to the far Left and Israel’s enemies.

“In the clip, a young demonstrator is seen arguing with an older Jewish man wearing a yarmulke. At one point, the young man says: ‘I work, earn seven dollars an hour. You have the money. You don’t speak English? You are from Israel? Go back to Israel.’

“Another African-American protester accuses the Jews of taking over America. ‘The smallest group in America controls the money, media, and all other things. The fingerprints belong to the Jewish bankers. I am against Jews who rob America. They are one percent who control America. President Obama is a Jewish puppet. The entire economy is Jewish. Every federal judge in the East Coast is Jewish.’”

My Comment: According to Kabbalah, after the capitalist system, we can continue our development along the evolutionary chain by moving either towards Nazism and World War III or towards communism, which can be reached through the establishment of the society of mutual guarantee. Hence, it is not surprising that similar slogans appear in the U.S., especially since there is no shortage of instigators, and the government is active.

The previous post “One Super-Corporation Runs The World” helps us to examine whether the instigators are right or indeed nobody rules the world!
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Russia’s Middle Class Will Suffer

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion: (Irina Hakamada, economist, from utro.ru): “’The U.S. economy is already in recession, Europe is experiencing tremendous debt pressure on the government, thus inevitably, the wave of recession will spread to Russia, and unpopular measures will be required.’

“’In Russia, 1 percent of the population consumes more than 50 percent of national income. We have an unjust society, and it is bad for many people. So I think that if the second wave of the crisis will cover Russia, it will again hit the middle class, who will lose jobs and will get burned with loans and mortgages.”

My Comment: However, due to the slave mentality of the population, the remnants of serfdom, and the habitual obedience during the Soviet era, the strengthening of nationalist and other circles or protests are unlikely.

By the way, this is for the better because it allows for immediately starting the search for new solutions—in the unity of society, similarity to nature, bringing Vernadsky’s ideas to life, and building in reality what was only spoken about during the Soviet years. Back then, the authorities forced it by power, artificially, and thus the people resisted, but today Nature compels us to reach mutual guarantee. There is no other alternative to survive.
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