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FINANCE: NGOs Call for Radical Reforms as IMF Offers New Loans
By Jim Lobe

New undemocratic “Washington Consensus” won’t fix global crisis, state over 630 groups from 104 countries
International, October 29th, 2008 – The day before the United Nations (UN) meets to discuss its new high-level taskforce on the global financial crisis, chaired by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and two weeks before the US hosts members of the Group of 20 to address the same issue, a coalition of 630 organizations from 104 countries have issued a statement demanding a truly global response to the global crisis and laying out a set of principles for doing so.

G7 Response to Financial Crises – Another Band-Aid

The frequent financial crises of recent years has exposed the systemic instability of global finance and resulted in devastating impacts on human development. Financial liberalization has meant that governments have lost their ability to control the global flow of capital, thereby surrendering monetary and economic policy sovereignty to investment firms and large banks.

These financial crises revealed the degree to which financial markets are under-governed in the global economy. An enormous discrepancy exists between an increasingly sophisticated international financial world and the lack of proper institutional frameworks to regulate it at the national and multilateral levels. The inevitability of future crises makes the re-regulation of capital a global imperative.

KANANASKIS G7 SUMMIT ISSUE BRIEFS (June 2002):
What’s Shutout of the G7? – The Tobin tax and Mountains of Money for Development

The Right Honourable Jean Chrétien
Prime Minister of Canada
House of Commons
Centre Block, 309-S
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

March 14, 2002

Dear Prime Minister,

We are writing to you, as representatives of Canadian non-governmental organizations, to express our dismay at the proposed outcomes of the UN Financing for Development process and Canada’s role in the negotiations leading to it. We call urgently for renewed leadership on the road to Kananaskis.

“A Global Agreement towards a United World”, June 1 – 3, 2001, Genoa, Italy

Experience with Currency Transactions (Tobin) Taxes – Debunking the Myths and Building Political Support

by Robin Round, Policy Analyst

The world of finance has become a global gambling casino, where investors seeking quick profits bet huge sums around the clock. Big banks and investment firms are the players, profiting from the minute-to-minute, hourly or daily fluctuations in prices on bond and currency markets around the world. These players are not investing in the `real economy', which generates jobs and produces goods and services, they are investing in the ‘paper economy’ in which money becomes a commodity rather than a means of exchange.

World Social Forum - Porto Alegre - Jan 25-30, 2001

Robin Round
Policy Analyst
Halifax Initiative Coalition

We use money everyday. Money is a tool; a means to simplify transactions in an economy based on the exchange of goods and services. But the way most of us use money is old fashioned, out of date. Money is no longer a means of exchange but an end in itself. We live in the era of the commodification of money, an era where money has become divorced from the real economy it was originally designed to serve.

Revised March 2000

What is the G20?
 The G-20 was set up to 'smooth out the bumps' of financial globalization. It was established in the wake of the financial crises that gripped the global economy and devastated much of Asia, Russia and Latin America in the late 1990's. The G-20's mandate is 'To promote discussion, and study and review policy issues among industrialized countries and emerging markets with a view to promoting international financial stability.'

Revised 1999

MEDIA RELEASE
CITIZENS ANNOUNCE 6 POINT PLAN TO DEAL WITH GLOBAL FINANCIAL TURMOIL