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Does the G-20 Show the Shape of things to Come -- austerity and extreme police actions?

By Paul Jay
Real News Network

With all the public attention during G20 on the 1000 arrests and such, something critical was overlooked. That's the paradox the assembled heads of governments created for ending the global economic crisis.

The G20 leaders recognize that "demand" needs to grow. That means people must have the means to buy stuff. Do a search in the G20 Toronto Summit Declaration and fourteen times you'll find a reference to boosting or increasing "demand".

By Michael Snyder
Business Insider

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

But is his U.S. Chamber of Commerce good for business?

By James Verini
Washington Monthly

Reuters

A new United Nations report released on Tuesday calls for abandoning the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency, saying it has been unable to safeguard value.

But several European officials attending a high-level meeting of the U.N. Economic and Social Council countered by saying that the market, not politicians, would determine what currencies countries would keep on hand for reserves.

"The dollar has proved not to be a stable store of value, which is a requisite for a stable reserve currency," the U.N. World Economic and Social Survey 2010 said.

By Stephen Long
Australian Broadcasting Company

Commitments by world leaders from the G20 group of major economies to cut spending will undermine economic growth and risk scuppering recovery, experts say.

Countries have agreed at least to halve their budget deficits within three years and to stabilise the level of government debt by 2016.

But the communique from their meeting in Toronto leaves nations free to do so in their own way and at their own pace.

How else can we interpret the G20 communiqué that includes not even a measly tax on financial transactions?

By Naomi Klein
Globe and Mail

My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I’m not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.

By Brian Love and Caren Bohan
Reuters

TORONTO (Reuters) - Recession made the G20 the main forum for managing the world economy last year. Now, the recovery is putting to the test the new sense of common cause that united rich and developing countries.

Meeting in Canada at the weekend, leaders from the Group of 20 struggled to maintain the solidarity they showed during the worst of the downturn last year, when they pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to prevent an even deeper slump.

By Daniel Tencer
Raw Story

TORONTO -- More than 500 people have been arrested in Toronto after a night of rioting that saw police cars burned in the financial district and storefront windows broken as leaders of the world's largest economies gathered in the city for the G20 summit.

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post

TORONTO -- The world's developed countries have built extensive public health systems, promised citizens a paycheck for life and erected a welter of protections around some industries and types of jobs. Now their leaders are conferring over a singular dilemma: how to take some of it back without undermining the economies they are trying to sustain.

By JACKIE CALMES and SEWELL CHAN
New York Times

TORONTO — Despite President Obama’s pitch at the summit meeting for developed nations here for continued stimulus measures to prevent another global economic downturn, the United States will go along with other leaders who are more concerned about rising debt and join in a commitment to cut their governments’ deficits in half by 2013, administration officials said on Saturday.

By Andy Kessle
The Daily Beast

he key to understanding the European economic mess is looking back to the American banking crisis, writes Andy Kessler—Greece is like Bear Stearns, Germany is JP Morgan, and guess which country plays the role of Goldman Sachs?

By Paul Abelsky
Bloomberg

June 19 (Bloomberg) -- Russia wants the ruble to be one of the world’s reserve currencies as President Dmitry Medvedev renews his push to reduce the dollar’s dominance and make Moscow a global financial hub.

“Only three, five years ago it seemed like a fantasy” to create a new reserve currency, Medvedev said yesterday in a speech in St. Petersburg, Russia. “Now we are seriously discussing it.”

By KEITH BRADSHER
NY Times

HONG KONG — The Chinese central bank announced Sunday afternoon that any changes in the value of its currency, the renminbi, would be gradual, in a clear attempt to reassure the Chinese people that a move Saturday evening toward a more flexible currency would not result in a sharp or disruptive change.

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) -- Currency markets will closely watch Chinese exchange rates Monday to see how far Beijing will allow the yuan to rise after announcing the end of its 2-year-old peg to the dollar.

A stronger yuan would make Chinese exports more expensive and bring relief to foreign manufacturers that have been struggling to compete. But Beijing plans to disappoint them, saying Sunday there will be no dramatic rise.

Beijing has long refused to allow the yuan to float and denied accusations that it is unfairly undervalued.

By Timothy R. Homan
Bloomberg

May 16 (Bloomberg) -- Greece is considering taking legal action against U.S. investment banks that might have contributed to the country’s debt crisis, Prime Minister George Papandreou said.

“I wouldn’t rule out that this may be a recourse,” Papandreou said, in response to questions about the role of U.S. banks in the crisis, in an interview on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” The program, scheduled for broadcast today, was taped on May 13. Neither Papandreou nor Zakaria mentioned any banks by name.

By Michael Hudson
Counterpunch

Financial lobbyists here in the U.S. are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

Agence France-Presse

Washington "strongly supports" Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization, a top US official said Wednesday, amid renewed calls by Russia for quick admission to the global trade body.

"The United States strongly supports Russia's accession to the WTO," said William Burns, US undersecretary of state for political affairs.

Burns noted in remarks made at the Center for American Progress, a Washington thinktank, that Russia is "the largest economy in the world outside the WTO -- the only G20 member outside" the influential trade bloc.

Agence France-Presse

TOKYO — Greece's debt problems may currently be in the spotlight but Japan is walking its own financial tightrope, analysts say, with a public debt mountain bigger than that of any other industrialised nation.

Public debt is expected to hit 200 percent of GDP in the next year as the government tries to spend its way out of the economic doldrums despite plummeting tax revenues and soaring welfare costs for its ageing population.

By STEPHEN CASTLE and JACK EWING
NY Times

BRUSSELS — European leaders provided a long-awaited financial rescue line to Greece on Sunday, offering the country up to $40 billion in aid to meet its giant debt obligations.

Under the plan, Greece would receive loans at about 5 percent interest, significantly lower than the rate of 7.5 percent that the markets were demanding last week, though not as low as Greece had wanted.