Washington and the ‘ New New World Order’

By F. William Engdahl

(7 January, 2014) -In a famous speech to the US Congress in March 1991, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US Gulf War victory over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a triumphant US President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the dawn of a “New World Order.”^ⁱ The term, with its ominous freemasonic connotations, raised many an eyebrow and Bush never again publicly used the term. However, what he meant became starkly clear to the world in the two decades following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Now that very US globalization strategy is in a shambles and the outlines of possible alternative orders are slowly emerging.

End of ‘Old New World Order’

The US financial crisis that exploded on the world with a vengeance in March 2007 was the beginning of the end of the Old New World Order as Bush had envisioned in 1991, even though US elites were in denial of that reality. The Sole Superpower after the end of the Cold War had embarked on a quest of global empire disguised under the rubric of “globalization.” The Clinton Presidency from 1992-2000 marked an era of financial deregulation unprecedented since the 1930’s. Big banks were set free from virtually all restraints and became “Too Big to Fail” as a result. Wall Street Gods of Money knew they could literally “get away with murder” after their follies in the 1997-98 Asia financial crisis, the 1998 Russian sovereign debt default and the subsequent bank bailouts by the IMF and various governments.

When Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan made it clear to Wall Street in 2002 after the collapse of the dot.com stock bubble that the Fed would provide bank liquidity in unprecedented volumes and would encourage what Greenspan termed a “revolution in finance,” the Big Wall Street banks responded like piranha devouring a bleeding body.

They created an entire new concept called Asset-Backed Securitization in what soon became trillions of dollars of dodgy new financial assets called MBOs (Mortgage-Backed Securities). The only real collateral behind the new MBS bonds sold by Wall Street was a financial house of cards built by the Big Three credit rating agencies—Moodys, Standard & Poors and Fitch—together with a small group of specialized Wall Street asset insurers who ultimately became insolvent.

The ensuing financial crisis is well-known. The decision of former Wall Street mogul Henry Paulsen to deliberately let a major Wall Street investment bank, Lehman Brothers go bankrupt triggered a global systemic panic that almost brought the world down with it. Since that day in September 2008, the Fed and the European Central Bank have been adding liquidity...