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Nussbaum’s revised budget involves new debts totalling almost €6 billion. In the meantime, the mountain of debt in Berlin has soared to €60 billion.

But just look at the differences between the area’s member-states.  The German debt would be 40 per cent of GDP, the Dutch debt 37 per cent, the Finnish debt 12 per cent.  But the Greek debt would be 150 per cent, the Irish debt 126 per cent and the Portuguese debt 89 per cent.

Britain is expected to borrow some £175 billion next year, leaving it with one of the biggest budget deficits in the developed world, projected to be about 14% of the country's gross domestic product

Developers say they now have to compete with banks, as well
as each other, to shift stocks of unsold property.

The government parties are intent on recouping these sums through drastic savings measures. Fearful of the reaction from the electorate, they are refraining from putting forward any concrete proposals until the federal election to the Bundestag. In utterly cynical fashion, Steinbrück told the press conference earlier this week: “I will not make any announcement here that could bring turmoil into politics before September 27.”

China’s May export figure was worse than the 22.6 percent fall in April and is the seventh consecutive month of decline. The slide of exports is the worst since the data is collected in 1995. Imports also fell 25.2 percent year-on-year in May—a further indication of weakening exports as China imports large amounts of semi-finished goods and components for re-export.

Other Asian exporters have been hit by the recession in the US, Europe and Japan. South Korea and Taiwan saw 25-30 percent annual falls in exports and imports in May and Japanese exports tumbled by 40.9 percent.

In the last quarter of 2008, Brazil’s industrial output dropped by 19%. Eight hundred thousand workers lost their jobs between October and January (nearly 1% of the workforce), and that doesn’t even begin to take account of job losses in the informal economy, which employs around 40% of Brazilian workers. Half a million Brazilians have found themselves back in poverty or extreme poverty.

Imports leapt by 52.7% between the first and second half of 1994. As a result, many Brazilian businesses closed or had to go into partnership with foreign companies, which accounted for 70% of Brazilian mergers and acquisitions between 1995 and 1999. Somewhat amazed by the brazenness of this denationalisation programme, the staunchly pro-liberalisation Veja magazine observed that “the history of capitalism has rarely seen the transfer of control on such a scale in such a short period” (7).

Today, Geithner got his first chance to show off his new “harder line” in his trip to China, as reported in Bloomberg:

In his prepared remarks, Geithner repeated the U.S. desire for a more flexible yuan. He has avoided a showdown on the issue, declining to repeat comments he made in written remarks to lawmakers after his Senate confirmation hearing in January that China was “manipulating” its currency.

It gets even sexier. Last decade, Geithner, working in the Treasury under Clinton, led the disastrous IMF bailouts of the Asian Crisis victims, forcing them to cut budget deficits by raising taxes and cutting social programs (in other words, doing what it took to take care of the Western banks that owned their debts).

Today, the Chinese are demanding–and Geithner is acquiescing–that we do for them what we made Thailand, Indonesia and the rest do for us:

S&P said the downward revision reflects a more cautious view of how quickly the country's finances can be repaired and that its projections incorporate new estimates of the cost of the government's bailout of the banking sector. It now esimtates that the government's net debt burden will rise to nearly 100 percent of economic output by 2013, way more than the government is currently projecting.

Now there is a deluge of non-stop revelations about MPs claiming money for second mortgages, swimming pool maintenance and all manner of luxuries, while they berate the unemployed for scrounging off the state.

But to press on with their austerity cuts immediately will not save them either. It will push the working class onto the industrial plain and unleash a new stage in the class struggle in Britain