PRESS RELEASE
Tremonti Echoes LaRouche,
Calls for Roosevelt's New Deal
Aug. 24, 2007 (EIRNS)—This report was published yesterday by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).
Giulio Tremonti, former Italian Finance minister and currently deputy chairman of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, reflected many aspects of Lyndon LaRouche's analysis and solutions to the current crisis in an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera Aug. 23. Most important, Tremonti called on Europe to "move from inertia to economic initiative such as with Roosevelt's New Deal" (The alternative between New Deal or free market policies was an issue Tremonti recently debated with Lyndon LaRouche and Alfonso Gianni, an Undersecretary of State to the Ministry for Economic Development, at a public conference in Rome on June 6).
"August 2007: tempus revolutum," says Tremonti in the interview. "The financial crisis is a hairpin turn at which part of our life changes. It will bring not just economic consequences, but also political, and even spiritual consequences. It marks the end of many equations: that the fatherland is equal to the world, that the Euro contains Europe, that the market is everything, that money is free, that consumption is the sublimation of existence, that desires are as important as needs. The vacuum left by finance will be filled by the return of values. Needs come before desires, Cain is different from Abel, life is not only GDP and not only science, 1968 is not the future but the past, Europe's government must move from inertia to economic initiative such as with Roosevelt's New Deal."
"The intensity of the current financial crisis has not yet been fully appreciated. It is probably still underestimated. In any case, it is a crisis whose effects will not be limited to finance, but they will extend to the economy and many other aspects of our life. It is a crisis that marks the end of the 'Golden Age,' the end of the last ideology of the 20th Century, which was both pagan and post-modern. The idea of finance as the universal fuel of an engine which, overtaking the past and present with all of their limits and complexities, overtaking history, is finally able to push humanity towards a 'new,' ever easier future, an ever freer future. The Crisis of 2007 overturns these conditions, stops the flight towards the future, marks the comeback of history".
Asked whether the comparison with 1929, earlier drawn by Tremonti, means that there will be a replay of 1929, Tremonti answers that "history does not repeat itself in a perfectly identical manner, but through analogies." And he ridicules those "who debate whether it is Substance or Accident, whether it is 1929 or not. Whatever it is, this is a Crisis with the big C."
"The impression," Tremonti says, "is that a fantastic Ponzi scheme has come to an end. The easy mortgages in the US is a link which has collapsed, but there are more weak links. The weakest link is the hedge funds, 'irregular banks' that in the last decade have developed outside of any control. A key date will be the end of the month, when the hedge funds must present their balance sheets and state how much they are worth and how much they have lost."
