Ahmadinejad: Capitalism on the verge of collapse

Posted By Joshua Keating Wednesday, March 11, 2009 - 11:35 AM Share

Here's what Iran's president had to say at a summit of the Central Asia's 10-nation Economic Cooperation Organization:

"After the collapse of the closed socialist economy, the capitalist economy is also on the verge of collapse," Ahmadinejad said in a speech.
"The liberal economy and the free market have failed," he said, pointing to the use of "thousands of billions of dollars" to bail out Western banks and companies.

Ahmadinejad proposed a single currency for the region to facilitate trade, though I'm not sure if even he'd go as far as Kazakh President (and fellow ECO member) Nursultan Nazarbayev's global "acmetalism" idea. The ECO definitely seems like a contender for the world's most outside-the-box regional trade federation.

EXPLORE:CENTRAL ASIA, ECONOMICS, FINANCIAL CRISIS, IRAN

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4:59 PM ET

March 11, 2009

ECO is a great idea

The ECO is an organization that unites all the world's Turkic and Iranic nations. What is so outside-the-box about that? Seems pretty natural to me. The Arabs are already doing this with their Gulf Cooperation Council. Now it's the non-Arabs' time...

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