World facing ‘balance-sheet’ recession - Keiser

Compared to previous economic crises, which were about labor and manufacturing, the current turmoil is about banks and their balance sheets, financial analyst Max Keiser told RT.

“It is not a recession in a classic sense of labor and products and manufacturing, that is not the case at all. This is a balance sheet recession,” he said. “In other words, the banks’ balance sheets are collapsing, and it is causing the overall economy to collapse, because over the past ten to 15 years the real economy is now dominated by the banking industry, which controls more than 50 per cent of the US, UK and global economy, depending on how you account for their activities. So when the banks’ balance sheets collapse, as they are doing now, it collapses the global balance sheet and the continuation of the global depression.” Global political will is now needed to get out of the ongoing crisis, Keiser said, adding that this is exactly what is missing with the world’s political circles.  ”There needs to be a global concerted effort to balance everyone’s books and to recalibrate the global currency markets at one time as it did after World War II with Bretton Woods,” he said. “There needs to be a new Bretton Woods-style global conference to write-off all the bad debt that will never be paid, to recalibrate currencies and to restart the global economy.” “There is no political will for that, however, because the bankers would lose and the bankers control the agenda of the politicians,” Keiser concluded. Fears are increasing over a second wave of worldwide economic recession, as Asian markets opened with a slump, after an arduous session on Wall Street.It is the second straight day of bad trading, after Thursday's global markets had their worst drop for a month.