By Richard Cottrell: Building
on their huge successes in wrecking the economies of Greece, Spain,
Ireland and Italy, the EU Politburo is off on a rapturous new adventure.
Breathtaking in his latest display of sheer daring, the technocrat
dictator of Italy, Mario Monti, is planning to reverse the historic
Risorgimento which created the modern united state of Italy in the
1860s.
Ever a man with a sense of history, he’s aiming to kick the Sicilian
football with that famous boot which represents the Italian mainland.
Garibaldi and his thousand-strong legion first seized the Sicilian
capital Palermo and then set out to Occupy Italy, in the now fashionable
parlance. Monti has a similar idea. He and his legions of bureaucrats
are planning to depose the island’s government and replace it with a
technocrat provincial administration cast in his own image.
Monti just held an emergency meeting with the country’s president,
the aging old tortoise Giorgio Napolitano, to persuade him to trash the
constitution yet again and sweep away the elected island
administration, just as Monti staged his own putsch against Silvio
Berlusconi last autumn.
The pretext is identical. According to this reincarnation of Mussolini in a grey business suit, Sicily is about to default on its public debts
to the tune of €7 billion (£5.49 billion) unless the poorest region of
Italy is immediately subjected to sweeping austerity cuts. Since no
elected politician on the island will go along with this, it will be
necessary to install a technocrat government.
There is no doubt that Sicily’s finances
are in a bad shape. The island government is close to running out of
money to pay public servants or fund schools, hospitals and other
essential services.
The New World Order’s favorite nanny, the Moody’s rating agency,
answered a 999 emergency call from Rome by downgrading a whole string of
provincial governments in southern Italy aside from Sicily: Piedmont,
Abruzzo, Calabria, Lazio, and Campania all felt the edge of the icy
blade. Naples was chopped to junk status, which came as no surprise to
anybody who knows Italy’s legendary, fascinating dystopian city.
The bleak forecast was part of a report by the IMF in which it urged the
Government to ease austerity measures and deploy a ‘Plan B’ in early 2013 if
economic recovery fails to materialise.
Submitted by Tyler Durden: Two years ago, in January 2010, Zero Hedge wrote "This Is The Government: Your Legal Right To Redeem Your Money Market Account Has Been Denied"
which became one of our most read stories of the year. The reason?
Perhaps something to do with an implicit attempt at capital controls by
the government on one of the primary forms of cash aggregation
available: $2.7 trillion in US money market funds. The proximal catalyst
back then were new proposed regulations seeking to pull one of these
three core pillars (these being no volatility, instantaneous liquidity, and redeemability) from the foundation of the entire money market industry, by changing the primary assumptions of the key Money Market Rule 2a-7. A key proposal would give money market fund managers the option to "suspend redemptions to allow for the orderly liquidation of fund assets."
In other words: an attempt to prevent money market runs (the same
thing that crushed Lehman when the Reserve Fund broke the buck). This
idea, which previously had been implicitly backed by the all important
Group of 30 which is basically the shadow central planners of the world
(don't believe us? check out the roster of current members),
did not get too far, and was quickly forgotten. Until today, when the
New York Fed decided to bring it back from the dead by publishing "The Minimum Balance At Risk: A Proposal to Mitigate the Systemic Risks Posed by Money Market FUnds".
Now it is well known that any attempt to prevent a bank runs achieves
nothing but merely accelerating just that (as Europe recently learned).
But this coming from central planners - who never can accurately
predict a rational response - is not surprising. What is surprising is that this proposal is reincarnated now. The question becomes: why now?
What does the Fed know about market liquidity conditions that it does
not want to share, and more importantly, is the Fed seeing a rapid
deterioration in liquidity conditions in the future, that may and/or
will prompt retail investors to pull their money in another Lehman-like
bank run repeat?
Brandon Smith: The subject of revolution is a touchy one. It’s not a word that
should be thrown around lightly, and when it is uttered at all, it
elicits a chaotic jumble of opinions and debates from know-it-alls the
world over. The “R” word has been persona non grata for quite some time
in America, and until recently, was met with jeers and knee-jerk
belligerence. However, let’s face it; today, the idea is not so far
fetched. We have a global banking system that is feeding like a
tapeworm in the stagnant guts of our economy. We suffer an election
system so fraudulent BOTH sides of the political spectrum now represent a
hyper-rich minority while the rest of us are simply expected to play
along and enjoy the illusion of choice. We have a judicial body that
has gone out of its way to whittle down our civil liberties and to
marginalize our Constitution as some kind of “outdated relic”. We have
an executive branch that issues special orders like monarchical edicts
every month, each new order even more invasive and oppressive than the
last. And, we have an establishment system that now believes it has the
right to surveil the citizenry en masse and on the slightest whim
without any consideration for 4th Amendment protections. (A: Sounds like the UK)