2 Dec 2012

Greece's Destruction And Europe's Bogus Growth Pact

Yanis Varoufakis: On November 27th, 2012, the Eurogroup (comprising the Eurozone’s finance ministers) reached a decision on Greece. Its essence is a guarantee that Greece will remain in the Eurozone (and therefore off the Northern European agenda) for another ten to twelve months; at the very least until the German federal political cycle has seen through the election of a new Bundestag. The repercussions of this short-sighted agreement are grave not only for Greece but for the Eurozone, and indeed the European Union, more broadly.
To accomplish the task of taking Greece off the minds of markets and Northern European electorates for this space of time, Eurogroup ministers came to an agreement with the IMF on how to patch up their conflicting agendas on Greece by means of a joint communiqué according to which Greece’s de-railed Bailout Mk2 is, supposedly, back on track. The basis of their agreement is twofold:
  • The IMF will pretend it believes Europe’s claims to have rendered Greece’s public debt viable without an OSI (i.e. a haircut in the loans provided to Greece by the troika, aka its European partners), while
  • Europe will pretend that it can do this without an OSI.[1]
The idea here is that, yet again, the Eurogroup-ECB-IMF alliance is not ready, politically, to reveal the truth to its various constituencies.

"The American Fiscal Cliff, the worsening recession in Europe, the slow-down in China and the possibility of some political event in Greece, Spain, Portugal or Ireland" Mark J. Grant: It's Me Baby, With Your Wake-Up Call

Tyler Durden's picture

Via Mark J. Grant, author of Out of the Box,
Alarm clock starts ringing
Who could that be singing
It’s me baby,
With your wake-up call!

 

                 -Toby Keith, How Do You Like Me Now

A great friend of mine and one of the best bond traders on Wall Street said this recently:  “Get ready for The Great Bond Shortage in North America.  If it has a cusip and it is rated, it is going higher/tighter.” I am down with his observation. The compression in bond spreads since the Fed started all of their “made-up/newly printed money for free” antics is the root of all of this and I do not expect a change anytime soon. There are various estimations for the 2013 net new issue supply in all sectors of Fixed Income but I peg it around $400 billion.  Around $800 billion will be paid to bond holders during the year in coupon payments and, if reinvested, will cause a supply deficit of about $400 billion for the year.  Exacerbating all of this is the Fed, who will buy around $500 billion in MBS this year and perhaps the same amount in Treasuries which could take $1 trillion out of the market all by itself. Consequently we face a lack of bonds denominated somewhere between $900 billion and $1.4 trillion, depending upon the Fed, which will increase the rolling train of compression, lower interest rates further in all likelihood and cause great angst for investors who will find very little of value left in the Fixed Income markets. Safety; yes but yield; no.

"If we can bank online we can vote online!" Gerald Celente on Red Ice Radio - The Decline of USA & The Individual Solution

By Gerald Celente is an American pioneer trend strategist who observes and analyzes the current events forming future trends for what they are. He is an author, business consultant and publisher of the Trends Journal, which forecasts and analyzes business, socioeconomic, political, and other trends. Celente has described himself as a "political atheist," unencumbered by political dogma, rigid ideology or conventional wisdom, his motto is "think for yourself." Gerald will discuss the 2012 USA Presidential Election aftermath. On a good note, 11 million less people voted in the US this year, although the masses are still in a state of Stockholm syndrome, allowing psychopaths get away with murder. We'll discuss the decline of the USA and how it is becoming a militarized, fascist nation. Gerald says the only way out of this system, is to not support it. He recommends the Swiss model of direct democracy. One of the top trends he sees is the state secession movement, which he says could happen easily, productively and economically. Bottom line, he explains how it comes down to the individual as the solution. Gerald shares the trend he sees for the next 4 years in America. We end on a discussion about leading by example, returning to a renaissance and honing your secret individual weapon. Source

The coming silver price eruption

Silver coins By Alasdair Macleod: There was a degree of predictability about the knockdown in gold and silver at the US futures market (Comex) last Wednesday. The reason is that the Commercials (together the producers, processers, fabricators, bullion banks and swap dealers) have large short positions, so they have a vested interest in lower prices. This is particularly noticeable in silver, which is shown below.


Silver long-short spread The chart is of Commercials’ shorts and longs as of Tuesday November 27. The Commercial shorts (the red line) now stand at 99,317 contracts, or 496,585,000 ounces, about two thirds of 2011’s worldwide mine production, and is the highest level of exposure since 2009. Because the longs have ticked up (the blue line), the net figure is not yet at record levels, but is only 9,212 contracts away from it.

Bank of America Mortgage Fraud - Max Keiser with Aaron Krowne

Max interviews Aaron Krowne from ml-implode.com. He talks about the latest in mortgage lending fraud and Bank of America and JP Morgan's role in forgiving debts already discharged in bankruptcy in order to claim creditSource

Assange - turnkey totalitarianism: Entire nations intercepted online


WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says all the necessary physical infrastructure for absolute totalitarianism through the internet is ready. He told RT that the question now is whether the turnkey process that already started will go all the way.
­RT: So you’ve written this book ‘Cypherpunks. Freedom and the Future of the Internet’ based on one of the programs that you’ve made for RT. In it, you say that the internet can enslave us. I don’t really get that, because the internet it’s a thing, it’s a soulless thing. Who are the actual enslavers behind it?
Julian Assange: The people who control the interception of the internet and, to some degree also, physically control the big data warehouses and the international fiber-optic lines. We all think of the internet as some kind of Platonic Realm where we can throw out ideas and communications and web pages and books and they exist somewhere out there. Actually, they exist on web servers in New York or Nairobi or Beijing, and information comes to us through satellite connections or through fiber-optic cables.
So whoever physically controls this controls the realm of our ideas and communications. And whoever is able to sit on those communications channels, can intercept entire nations, and that’s the new game in town, as far as state spying is concerned – intercepting entire nations, not individuals.

Mark Carnage - azizonomics

GS1
Aziz: The greater story behind Mark Carney’s appointment to the Bank of England may be the completion of Goldman Sachs’ multi-tentacled takeover of the European regulatory and central banking system.

But let’s take a moment to look at the mess he is leaving behind in Canada, the home of moose, maple syrup, Jean Poutine and now colossal housing bubbles.
George Osborne (who as I noted last month wants more big banks in Britain) might have recruited Carney on the basis of his “success” in Canada. But in reality he is just another Greenspana bubble-maker and reinflationist happy to pump the banking sector full of loose money and call it “prosperity” before the irrational exuberance runs dry, and the bubble inevitably bursts.

Bankster ‘Best Practice’ Takeover Template

: I’d describe myself as a self starting, workaholic with a heart.
I get involved in many activities which I hope will create a better world. In one incarnation I worked for an NGO which specialised in advising community groups on how to get European and other funding. Success in our organisation was measured by how good you were at getting the money from Europe. “Best practice” was the favoured buzzword, meaning the template of how to shape the programmes so you’d secure the funding.  Government ministers were heralded on their ability to get European money with the high point being the securing of IR£8bn of structural funds in the mid 90s. This coupled with securing FDI and the social partnership model were the waves on which Governments surfed to electoral and international success. Just before this time the IFSC got underway and that lightly regulated financial laudromat continued to do it’s thang.
I believe that this template of national ‘Best Practice’ morphed into a form of crony capitalism that created tax breaks and all kinds of deals for pals, allegedly agreed in the infamous Galway Tent which was a very salubrious marquee at a summer horse racing meeting.

Morsillini? The Counter-revolution Spreads: First Egypt, Now Tunisia

Tyler Durden's picture Several months after the world rejoiced following the 2011 Arab Spring took the world by storm, and replaced one dictator in the MENA region with what appears to be another now that the US-endorsed "democratically elected" Mursi is better known as Morsillini, having granted himself "temporary" dictatorial powers, we warned that it was only a matter of time before the Arab Spring turns into an Arab Thermodorian Reaction, aka an Arab Counterrevolution. And this time the world is devoid of such romantic concepts as a season of the year to tie this logical reaction to, as it now appears certain that this is going to be a long and drawn out process, lasting not only longer than just one season, but stretching years. Sure enough, after Egypt succumbed to the inevitable power vacuum response, it is now the turn of the place that started it all: Tunisia, where the local national guard is firing against its own people once more.

Dr. Nick Begich: The Technologies of Mind Control and the Batman Shooter

By : This is the century of the brain and the mind. The technologies that have advanced, under cover of secrecy and national security, now have the power to either enslave us or free us to our higher potentials.