From Volume 5, Issue Number 18 of EIR Online, Published May 2, 2006

Latest From LaRouche

Characteristics of the Current Crisis

HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

April 26, 2006

On Thursday, April 20th, I issued my warning that, unless a drastic policy-change intervened, the world as a whole was now on the course toward a systemic monetary-financial collapse of a type comparable to that which was experienced by Weimar Germany during the second half of 1923.

That 1923 collapse in Weimar Germany was echoed on a broader scale by what became the Great Depression of the early 1930s. While the circumstances of the 1923 collapse in Weimar Germany played a significant role in causing the later 1929-1933 general depression, the latter depression was only a severe collapse within the system; it was not a collapse of the general system itself. The difference would be, that, this time, we are now faced with a general collapse comparable to what was the special case of a collapse in 1923 Germany; but, this time, what menaces us is a general collapse of the system, that on a global scale. This collapse would not be limited to one nation, or a few parts of the planet, but world-wide.

I projected September as the estimable limit at which such a general collapse of the present world system would occur: that is, unless fundamental reforms were introduced during the immediate months ahead. Unless the present world system is suddenly and radically reformed, a general breakdown-crisis of the entire world system were virtually assured.

To understand how this present catastrophe came about, we must first summarize the contrasting earlier case, of those principal changes in direction in our republic's economic policy, the which have occurred since Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the duties of our U.S. President in early March 1933. These principal changes can be clearly distinguished and defined, as I proceed now to do here.

Firstly, on the day he entered office, Franklin Roosevelt was confronted with a collapse of our national economy by about half, which had occurred during the period since the 1929 stock-market debacle through the day Roosevelt assumed office. This collapse had numerous contributing causes in world affairs, but it was also a collapse caused by the policies followed by both Presidents Coolidge and Hoover; but, it was Hoover's own response to the 1929 stock-market collapse, which produced the post-1929 collapse in the physical economy of the nation, over the period from that crash, up to President Roosevelt's inauguration....

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