Cyprus is a tiny island at the centre of a three-dimensional chess game
‘[Cypus Finance Minister] Michael Sarris said the Cypriot Parliament
would adopt the taxes over the weekend and the money would be extracted
from accounts before banks take up business Tuesday. Monday is a public
holiday.’
(Market-Ticker on the Cyriot bank bailout)
‘….as FX markets open, it appears EURJPY is getting hammered (from 124.47 close to 121.6) implying S&P futures will open down around 30 points…..’
(Zero Hedge)
The burglars came at dead of night/
Seven percent they stole, no right/ to steal one day to stop the run/
and give the wolf gang lots more fun
The Slog
It looks like those the Gods wish to destroy
have rendered them mad. But don’t be too hasty in deciding: I still
believe that there is some method in this particular case of madness.
The pernicious EU persuasion machine is still working at full tilt. Take
the latest burst of salted media stories over the last 36 hours in
relation to Beppo Grillo’s Five Star movement that resulted in 136 new
Italian Deputies under his banner after the last election.
The Brussels Sprouts are beyond nervous
about Grillo: they’ve moved on to murderous. If 2012 was all about
leverage on the sovereign fiscal scene, then 2013 in media terms is
heralding the age of the lever. Reuters has a piece at the moment
suggesting that all Grillo’s deputies are incompetent, Beppo himself a
dictator in the making, and his first Mayor (in Parma) is a bit of a
ham. None of it really checks out…or is indeed relevant: if it came down
to a choice between dead-eyed sociopathy and hopeful inexperience, I’d
choose the latter every time.
I remain convinced that the key player in
all this is Schäuble, a man who may be the first quintuple-agent in
history. He might even be The Spy who came in from the Cold. How many
Schäubles are there – is he in reality a wolf gang? But at the
geopolitical level, remember the German adage which rules most of their
government planning: alles klar – we are ready. They have choices, and they are, as always, the nation of boy scouts who love to go on Wanderungs.
They have the blank currency paper ordered in late 2010, they have the
Merkel/Putin relationship, they have the export markets for posh
durables least affected by changes in currency values, they have the
Fiskalunion leadership stitched up, and thus – all up – they have the
least to fear from a collapse of the EU.
This is an extract from something I wrote to an eclectic euro-group earlier today:
‘At
the minute, the Anglo-Saxon West is obsessed by energy shortages and
Islamism, while Brussels-am-Berlin remains desperate to have it’s
political Union come to pass. My source in Brussels says they care not
for the human, social or financial cost involved in that. My source in
Madrid thinks this is a power struggle between Draghi and Schauble. My
Washington source says the American game is to secure victory in Syria
for the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, and thus isolate Iran further. My
Berlin source says that nobody in political circles there really knows
whose side Wolfgang Schauble is on. The British Foreign Office is (as
always) confused. I have two sources in Paris who insist that a victory
for the Syrian rebels and the avoidance of Greek default is all Hollande
cares about. My sole Italian source says Italy will secede from the
eurozone. My markets source in New Mexico is 90% certain that the
Iberio-Italian crisis will sink the euro within weeks.’
It is a cacophony of anarchy out there as
south-european fiscal blundering meets north-african revolution in the
context of American, German, Russian, Chinese and Islamic geopolitics.
Anything could happen, and probably will.
Stay tuned.
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