World stocks hit a 12-day low on Monday, depressed by recent weak U.S. economic data and failing to find support from the G20 summit, while the yen attracted fresh flows to hit an eight-month high against the dollar.

While the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) couldn’t possibly compete with the G20 summit in terms of headline-grabbing power, the organization did join with the world’s top leaders in breaking some good news that fueled the stock market’s fire.

For weeks now the liberal world media dutifully has been repeating dire threats against so-called “tax havens” from the big spending, high taxing, anti-tax competition likes of Germany’s Merkel and France’s Sarkosy.

The G20 leader are wrong to blame reckless private banks for this credit crisis, says Martin Hutchinson. They were allowed to disregard risks by an overly accommodative monetary policy. Martin says this error means the focus of imminent new bank regulation will miss the key issues.

The record drop in consumer spending in October is clear evidence of a profound weakening of the US economy.  Even President Bush think thinks the situation is bad. At the G20 summit over the weekend, he said it was conceivable that the US “could go into a depression greater than the Great Depression“.

There wasn’t a lot of activity in Thursday’s trading in gold in the Far East. However, at 3:00 a.m. New York time, there were some signs of life…but even the slightest attempt at a rally was met by equal bouts of selling. This ‘up-down-up-down’ activity went on for eight hours.

You know it’s a real financial crisis when capitalists are being told what to do by a bunch of socialists and communists. But these are the times we live in. Ironic and moronic.