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.
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.
By RedIceRadio: 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
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.
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.
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 credit. Source
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.
By Eileen Dublin 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.
Submitted by Tyler Durden: 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.
By TheAlexJonesChannel:
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.
