ZEITGEIST:ADDENDUM 

The US Congress’ passage of a slightly modified form of the Bush Administration’s financial bailout plan on the week of October 3 has opened up the spectre for the first time of a 1931-style domino wave of worldwide bank failures. That process is already underway across the US banking sector with the failure, nationalization or forced liquidation in the past weeks of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of the giant Washington Mutual mortgage lender, and the rapid collapse of the nation’s fourth largest deposit bank, Wachovia. That was on top of a wave of smaller bank failures that began with IndyMac in the spring.

The new act has been described as the financial equivalent of the US Patriot Act, the law that gave the Bush Administration powers in violation of Constitutional safeguards under the climate of the September 11, 2001 attacks.  MORE