What is that reality? It includes a number of factors. Alone they would be exceedingly serious; combined, they are very likely to be lethal.

First of all, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been undergoing both a structural and intellectual crisis. Structurally, its outstanding credit and loans have declined dramatically since 2003, from over $70 billion to a little over $20 billion today, leaving it with far less leverage over the economic policies of developing nations--and even less income than its expensive operations require. It is now in deficit.1

A large part of the IMF's problems are due to the doubling in world prices for all commodities since 2003 -- especially petroleum, copper, silver, zinc, nickel, and the like -- that the developing nations traditionally export. While there will be fluctuations in this upsurge, there is also reason to think it may endure because rapid economic growth in China, India, and elsewhere has created a burgeoning demand that did not exist before, when the balance-of-trade systematically favored the rich nations.

The U.S. has seen its net foreign asset position fall as Japan, emerging Asia, and oil exporting nations have become far more powerful over the past decade, and have increasingly become creditors to the U.S.2 As the U.S. deficits mount, with its imports being far greater than its exports, the value of the dollar has been declining -- 28 per cent against the euro from 2001 to 2005 alone.

Equally important, the IMF and World Bank were severely chastened by the 1997-2000 financial meltdowns in East Asia, Russia, and elsewhere, and many of the two institutions' key leaders lost faith in the anarchic premises, descended from classical laisser-faire economic thought, which guided policy advice until then. "{O]ur knowledge of economic growth is extremely incomplete," many in the IMF now admit, and "more humility" on its part is now warranted.3

Worse yet, the whole nature of the global financial system has changed radically in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with "virtuous" national economic policies that follow IMF advic. These are ways the IMF cannot control. The investment managers of private equity funds and major banks have displaced national banks and international bodies such as the IMF, moving well beyond the existing regulatory structures and they have "reintermediated" themselves between the traditional borrowers, both national and individual, and markets. They have deregulated the world financial structure, making it far more unpredictable and susceptible to crises. They seek to generate high investment returns, which is the key to their compensation, and they take mounting risks to do so.

A "brave new world" has emerged in the global financial structure, one that is far less transparent because there are fewer reporting demands imposed on those who operate in it. Financial adventurers are constantly creating new "products" that defy both states and international banks. The IMF's managing director, Rodrigo de Rato, at the end of May, 2005, deplored these new risks -- risks the weakness of the U.S. dollar and its mounting trade deficits have magnified greatly.4

In March of this year the IMF released Garry J. Schinasi's book, Safeguarding Financial Stability, giving it unusual prominence then and thereafter. In essence, Schinasi's book is alarmist, and it both reveals and documents in great and disturbing detail the IMF's deep anxieties. Essentially, "deregulation and liberalization", which the IMF and proponents of the "Washington consensus" advocated for decades, have become a nightmare, creating "tremendous private and social benefits" but also holding "the potential (although not necessarily a high likelihood) for fragility, instability, systemic risk, and adverse economic consequences."

Anyone who reads the data in Schinasi's superbly documented book will share his real conclusion that the irrational development of global finance, combined with deregulation and liberalization, has "created scope for financial innovation and enhanced the mobility of risks". Schinasi and the IMF advocate a radical new framework to monitor and prevent the problems now able to emerge, but success "may have as much to do with good luck" as policy design and market surveillance.5 Leaving the future to luck is not what economics originally promised. The IMF is desperate, and not alone.

As the Argentina financial meltdown proved, countries that do not succumb to IMF and banker pressures can play on divisions within the IMF membership, particularly the U.S., comprising bankers and others to avoid many, although scarcely all, foreign demands. About $140 billion in sovereign bonds to private creditors and the IMF were at stake, terminating at the end of 2001 as the largest national default in history. Banks in the 1990s were eager to loan Argentina money and they ultimately paid for it. Since then, however, commodity prices have soared and the growth rate of developing nations in 2004 and 2005 was over double that of high income nation, a pattern projected to continue through 2008.

As early as 2003 developing countries were already the source of 37 percent of the foreign direct investment in other developing nations. China accounts for a great part of this growth, but it also means that the IMF and rich bankers of New York, Tokyo, and London have far less leverage than ever. Growing complexity is the order of the world economy that has emerged in the past decade, and with it has come the potential for far greater instability, and dangers for the rich.

High-speed Global Economics

The global financial problem that is emerging is entwined with an American fiscal and trade deficit that is rising quickly. Since Bush entered office in 2001 he had added over $3 trillion to federal borrowing limits, which are now almost $9 trillion. So long as there is a continued devaluation of the U.S. dollar, banks and financiers will seek to protect their money and risky financial adventures will appear increasingly worthwhile. This is the context, but Washington advocated greater financial liberalization well before the dollar weakened. The world now has a conjunction of factors that have created a far greater risk than the proponents of the "Washington consensus" ever believed possible.

There are now many hedge funds, with which we are familiar, but they now deal in credit derivatives and numerous other financial instruments. Markets for credit derivative futures are in the offing. The credit derivative market was almost nonexistent in 2001, grew fairly slowly until 2004 and then went into the stratosphere, reaching $17.3 trillion by the end of 2005.

What are credit derivatives? The Financial Times' chief capital markets writer, Gillian Tett, tried to find out. She failed. About ten years ago some J. P. Morgan bankers were in Boca Raton, Florida, drinking, throwing each other into the swimming pool, and the like, and they came up with a notion of a new financial instrument that was too complex to be easily copied (financial ideas cannot be copyrighted) and which was sure to make them money. But she was highly critical of its potential for causing a chain reaction of losses that will engulf the hedge funds that have leaped into this market.6 It for reasons such as these, as well as others, even more opaque, such as split capital trusts, collateralized debt obligations, and market credit default swaps, that the IMF and financial authorities are so worried.

Banks simply do not understand the chain of exposure and who owns what. Senior financial regulators and bankers now admit as much. The Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund meltdown in 1998, which involved only about $5 billion in equity, revealed this. The financial structure is now infinitely more complex and far larger. The top ten hedge funds alone in March 2006 had $157 billion in assets. Hedge funds claim to be honest but those who guide them are compensated for the profits they make, which means taking risks. But there are thousands of hedge funds and many collect inside information, which is technically illegal but it occurs anyway. The system is fraught with dangers, starting with the compensation structure, but it also assumes a constantly rising stock market and much, much else. Many fund managers are incompetent. But the 26 leading hedge fund managers earned an average of $363 million each in 2005; James Simons of Renaissance Technologies earned $1.5 billion.

There is now a consensus that all this, and much else, has created growing dangers. We can put aside the persistence of imbalanced budgets based on spending increases or tax cuts for the wealthy, much less the world's volatile stock and commodity markets which caused hedge funds in May to show far lower returns than they have in at least a year. It is anyone's guess which way the markets will go, and some will gain while others lose. Hedge funds still make lots of profits, and by the spring of 2006 they were worth about $1.2 trillion worldwide, but they are increasingly dangerous.

A great deal of money went from investors in rich nations into emerging market stocks, which have been especially hard-hit in the past weeks, and if they leave them the financial shock will be great. The dangers of a meltdown exist there too.

Problems are structural, such as the greatly increasing ratio of corporate debt loads to core earnings, which have grown substantially from four to six times over the past year because there are fewer legal clauses to protect investors from loss, and to keep companies from going bankrupt when they should. So long as interest rates have been low, leveraged loans have been the solution. With hedge funds and other financial instruments, there is now a market for incompetent, debt-ridden firms. The rules some once erroneously associated with capitalism -- probity and the like--no longer hold even on paper.

Problems are also inherent in speed and complexity, and these are very diverse and almost surreal. Credit derivatives are precarious enough, but at the end of May the International Swaps and Derivatives Association revealed that one in every five deals, many of them involving billions of dollars, involved major errors. As the volume of trade increased so did errors. They doubled in the period after 2004. Many deals were scribbled on scraps of paper and not properly recorded. "Unconscionable" was outgoing Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan's, description. He was "frankly shocked." Other trading, however, is determined by mathematical algorithm ("volume-weighted average price" it is called) for which PhDs trained in quantitative methods are hired.7 Efforts to remedy this mess only began in June of this year and they are very far from resolving a major and accumulated problem that involves stupendous sums.

Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief economist, on April 24 of this year wrote that a major financial crisis was in the offing and that the ability of global institutions to forestall it -- ranging from the IMF and World Bank to other mechanisms of the international financial architecture ­ are utterly inadequate. Hong Kong's chief secretary in early June deplored the hedge funds' risks and dangers. The IMF's iconoclastic chief economist, Raghuram Rajan, at the same time warned that the hedge funds' compensation structure encouraged those in charge of them to increasingly take risks, thereby endangering the whole financial system.

* * *

The entire global financial structure is becoming uncontrollable in crucial ways its nominal leaders never expected. Instability is increasingly its hallmark. Financial liberalization has produced a monster, and resolving the many problems that have emerged is scarcely possible for those who deplore controls on those who seek to make money, whatever means it takes to do so. Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and if we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises.

It is often argued that the US can simply make large capital gains on its gross positions because its assets are denominated in foreign currency and its liabilities in dollars. However, the available data indicate that over the last two decades this factor has netted the US at most $300bn-$400bn. This still leaves a loss of well over $2,000bn to be explained.

The explanation comes in two tranches of about $1,000bn each.

The first source of accounting revenues for the US derives from an anomaly in the item "reinvested earnings" on foreign direct investment in the US balance of payments. This item improves the current account by about $100bn a year because foreign companies systematically report abnormally low profits for their US operations to avoid US corporate income taxes. If one assumes that foreign companies earn the same rate of return on their direct investment in the US as on their portfolio investment in equity, the US current account would deteriorate by about $100bn. Properly measured, the country's current account deficit would thus be about 1 per cent of gross domestic product larger than officially reported.

The underreporting of the current account deficit implies that US indebtedness is also underestimated. Over the past two decades the cumulative correction for the anomaly in "reinvested earnings" would lead to a higher US net debtor position of about $1,000bn.

A second source of gains comes from very large residuals - labelled "other changes" by the Bureau of Economic Analysis in its statistics on the evolution of the net US international investment position - the total of which also reaches about $1,000bn over the past two decades.

The US international investment position today should in principle be equal to the sum of past current account balances (mostly deficits). However, this is not the case by far, even taking into account the balancing item "errors and omissions". The quite detailed data available for the period 1989-2004 show that the exchange rate and valuation adjustments mentioned above have netted the US $300m-$400m, still leaving a discrepancy of around $1,000bn.

The discrepancy arises for a simple reason: the current account data are based on actual flows of payments recorded in the balance of payments. By contrast, the data on the US international investment position are based on surveys of depository institutions, which year after year tend to lose sight of US assets held by foreigners, especially portfolio investment and real estate.

Could the discrepancy be due to inaccurate statistics on the balance of payments? This is unlikely because the financial flows are just the mirror image of the current account which can be accurately measured given that it consists mostly of business-to-business transactions. With the improvement in current account statistics, the global current account balance discrepancy has now almost totally disappeared. If the current account figures constitute a more reliable source (except for "reinvested earnings"), it is likely that the true US net external debtor position is around $4,000bn (about 40 per cent of GDP) rather than the $2,500bn reported officially for end-2004. Taking into account the current account deficit of about $800bn for 2005 would bring the net current US debtor position to more than $4,500bn. (The official US net international investment position as of the end of 2005, to be published soon, is likely to again include a significant write-down of foreign assets in the US, so the official data are likely to show a net indebtedness below $3,000bn.)

A closer look at the data thus suggests that both the current account deficit and the net debtor position of the US are even worse than officially reported. This can only mean that the need for a substantial depreciation of the dollar and/or a period of sub-par growth is even bigger than generally accepted.

Microsoft Corp. shares were in focus as the company said after the bell that chairman Bill Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company in 2008.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 198.27 points, or 1.83 percent, to 11,015.19, closing above the 11,000 level for the first time in more than a week. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index made its biggest one-day gain in more than 2-1/2 years, rising 26.12 points, or 2.12 percent, at 1,256.16. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 58.15 points, or 2.79 percent, at 2,144.15.

"The reason it's up isn't so much that (Bernanke) said anything; it's what he didn't say," said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist with Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis, Minnesota. "Leading up to this, people thought he might be more hawkish" given recent data showing an uptick in inflation.

Speaking before the Economic Club of Chicago, Bernanke said inflation expectations had "fallen back somewhat" and that the impact of high energy prices on the economy has been limited. That offset worries from earlier this week when core consumer and producer price data rose above expectations.

His comments suggested the Fed may have room to pause in its two-year-long cycle of interest rate hikes in the next few months, investors said. Fed fund futures have fully priced in an interest rate hike at the Fed's next policy meeting on June 28-29.

Shares of Bear Stearns rose 5.9 percent to $131.56 on the
New York Stock Exchange after the investment bank said quarterly profit rose 81 percent.

Shares of Citigroup Inc., the world's largest financial services company, jumped 1.8 percent to $48.68.

On the technology front, shares of wireless technology company Qualcomm rose 3.8 percent to $44.89 on the Nasdaq. The company raised its quarterly earnings outlook on Tuesday.

"The Nasdaq has a lot of high volatility stocks so it's not surprising that they rebound a bit more rapidly," said Greg Fuss, Managing Director at Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management. "I'd give you pretty good odds that we've seen the worst."

Apple shares rose 3.1 percent to $59.38 after Citigroup reiterated its "buy" rating on the stock, and Yahoo shares climbed 4 percent to $30.79.

A rise in crude oil prices also boosted energy shares, including Exxon Mobil Corp., which gained 2.3 percent to $59.12. U.S. crude for July delivery rose 36 cents to $69.50 as gasoline demand remained strong despite high prices.

On the economic front, the U.S. Labor Department said jobless claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell to 295,000 last week.

Growth in factory activity in the mid-Atlantic region eased in June, though it was still above expectations, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. A separate report showed an unexpected decline in U.S. industrial output for May.

Trading was active on the New York Stock Exchange as it instituted trading curbs on the upside. Advancing shares beat decliners by about 4 to 1 on both the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange.

About 1.9 billion shares were traded on the NYSE, above the 1.61 billion daily average for last year. On Nasdaq, about 2.3 billion shares changed hands, above the 1.8 billion daily average last year.

The information was provided to AIG by 690 insurance brokers seeking quotes for coverage on special high levels of health insurance for employees of companies around the country. Winans did not identify the companies.

Winans said AIG had a copy of the stolen information and had been trying since the break-in to connect the names with addresses so it could notify people that their data had been taken. Letters to the 930,000 are expected to go out in the next week. AIG plans to open a phone center to respond to their questions.

The burglar also took a laptop computer, a camera and other computer equipment, Winans said, adding that the insurance company thought the burglar's objective was to take the equipment and may not have known about the personal data.

For that reason, Winans said, the insurance company did not announce the theft when it occurred. The theft was first reported Wednesday by MSNBC.com.

"We didn't want to send out a press release and run the risk of alerting the thief that he had something valuable," Winans said.

AIG did not want to give the location of its burglarized office because that information could also be useful to the burglar, he said. The crime occurred March 31 after normal working hours, he said.

The post, which trains medics, faces a $26 million budget shortfall this year - a problem that officials said is symptomatic of the financial woes facing posts worldwide.

Only commands at Fort Sam Houston funded by the Army Installation Management Agency are affected, which excludes Brooke Army Medical Center.

The installation management agency is wrestling with a $530 million deficit and is awaiting funding from a $94.5 billion supplemental appropriations bill. The Senate is set to vote on a revised supplemental bill following House approval earlier this week. The funds are intended for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as hurricane relief.

Martinson said the supplemental funding would be a temporary fix. To deal with the budget crunch, the post has fired 100 contract workers, frozen hiring, shut off cell phones and BlackBerry devices, turned in leased cars and stopped troops from using government credit cards.

Steve Oertwig, a spokesman for the installation management agency, said funding allocations from the supplemental bill would be prioritized on the basis of support for troops destined for the war zone, health and safety needs, and civilian payrolls for permanent civilian employees.

In the meantime, officials from CPS Energy and Fort Sam Houston are talking daily.

CPS officials said the shutoff notices were automatically issued by the utility's computer system.

Customer services director Sylvia Arnold said the utility would work to resolve the outstanding debt, as it does with other customers. She described the post as important to the utility and the community, and said it's not a high risk for nonpayment.

Post spokesman Phil Reidinger said CPS is working with post officials until the supplemental budget comes through.

"From my vantage point, they know we're not going anywhere," he said. "We're not going to skip town."