Europe drawn into global currency wars as slump deepens + Russia Says World Is Nearing Currency War as Europe Joins

The world is edging closer to all out currency conflict as Europe’s politicians join a chorus of policy-makers across the globe pushing for devaluations to fight for market share. 

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Jean-Claude Juncker, EuroGroup chief, has signalled that Europe is no longer willing to be the last economic player holding the toxic parcel of an over-valued exchange rate, describing the euro as “dangerously high” after its three-month surge against the dollar, yuan and yen.

The comments follow warnings by two French ministers this month that the strong euro is holding back efforts to pull the France out of deep industrial slump.

Alexei Ulyukayev, deputy head of Russia’s central bank, said the tilt in EMU policy marks a new escalation as every major bloc of the global economy tries to drive down its exchange rate at the same time. “We are now on the threshold of very serious currency wars,” he said.

Korea has asked the G20 take a stand against beggar-thy-neighbour policies in Moscow next month, accusing Japan and the West of covert debasement through loose money.

Your Govt Bought By Religious Money Changers - Anonymous

Submitted anonymously and read out by Morris: Americans are in a trance, not a dance. The dance would be fine. A dance of death. But to sit there and take what the government is giving them is bullshit.

The reason the government has publicized their ammo purchase is to terrorize the American public into submission, followed by the surrendering of their guns. "Come out with your hands up, people."

Where Is the Inflation? - Ludwig von Mises Institute

By Mark Thornton: Critics of the Austrian School of economics have been throwing barbs at Austrians like Robert Murphy because there is very little inflation in the economy. Of course, these critics are speaking about the mainstream concept of the price level as measured by the Consumer Price Index (i.e., CPI).
Let us ignore the problems with the concept of the price level and all the technical problems with CPI. Let us further ignore the fact that this has little to do with the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT), as the critics would like to suggest. The basic notion that more money, i.e., inflation, causes higher prices, i.e., price inflation, is not a uniquely Austrian view. It is a very old and commonly held view by professional economists and is presented in nearly every textbook that I have examined.
This common view is often labeled the quantity theory of money. Only economists with a Mercantilist or Keynesian ideology even challenge this view. However, only Austrians can explain the current dilemma: why hasn’t the massive money printing by the central banks of the world resulted in higher prices.
Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises, Benjamin Anderson, and F.A. Hayek saw that commodity prices were stable in the 1920s, but that other prices in the structure of production indicated problems related to the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. Mises, in particular, warned that Fisher’s “stable dollar” policy, employed at the Fed, was going to result in severe ramifications. Absent the Fed’s easy money policies of the Roaring Twenties, prices would have fallen throughout that decade.

The banks are being bailed out, the citizens are being fleeced. Quelle surprise - Cutting outlooks, wealth, services, electricity supplies, and hair. But not banking power.

The Slog: “A frustratingly slow economic recovery in developed nations is holding back the global economy,” pronounced the World Bank yesterday while cutting its world growth forecasts for 2013.
We’re cutting forecasts, cutting expenditure and cutting corners. But nothing’s cutting it. The Slog’s long-predicted emergence of Spanish banking reality is creeping out shock by shock. Bankia’s shareholders  may lose most of their investments and probably all of them says the Spanish bank rescue fund in its latest report.
According to the Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring, Bankia has a negative value of 4.2 billion euros, and its parent group BFA is 10.4 bn in the red.
So now we’re cutting wealth too. Bankia is about to receive 18 bn euros of eurozone aid. But not its customers.
Greece’s banking system needs 27bn euros. Its total worth is only 22bn. Finance Minister Stournaras says bondholder hair will soon be cut too. The euro and the banks must be saved.
But not the citizens.
Greece’s environment ministry yesterday announced that the 10% electricity price (inc tax) will actually be higher still as the Public Power Corporation hands them another 2.9bn in increases. Stournaras confirmed that the Euro Working Group should next Monday approve the disbursement of the January bailout tranche, which amounts to 9.2 billion euros.
None of it will go to the citizens.
The Fed and the ECB are both verging on $4 trillion balance sheets, the total for all of the world’s central banks is $14 trillion.
This is being readied to prop up banks – not people and their livelihoods.

Bundesbank Official Statement On Gold Repatriation

Submitted by Tyler Durden: When we first heard about it, we thought Handelsblatt had gotten something very wrong. The implications were just so staggering. Turns out the news was spot on. Here is the official announcement from the Bundesbank, which roundly refutes all the spin the Frankfurt bank spoon-fed the people in October and November when it repeated time after time that there is nothing wrong with keeping German gold in NY and Paris, and on the contrary, it was better for everyone involved.

From the Bundesbank:
By 2020, the Bundesbank intends to store half of Germany’s gold reserves in its own vaults in Germany. The other half will remain in storage at its partner central banks in New York and London. With this new storage plan, the Bundesbank is focusing on the two primary functions of the gold reserves: to build trust and confidence domestically, and the ability to exchange gold for foreign currencies at gold trading centres abroad within a short space of time.
The following table shows the current and the envisaged future allocation of Germany’s gold reserves across the various storage locations:

	31 December 2012	31 December 2020
Frankfurt am Main	31 %	50 %
New York	45 %	37 %
London	13 %	13 %
Paris	11 %	0 %

To this end, the Bundesbank is planning a phased relocation of 300 tonnes of gold from New York to Frankfurt as well as an additional 374 tonnes from Paris to Frankfurt by 2020.

Democracy and Self-Government now Staging a Fightback - Nigel Farage

European Parliament, Strasbourg, 16 January 2013 Transcript: 

So, there's nothing to worry about. Mr Barroso told us last week, 'I think I can say that the existential threat against the euro has essentially been overcome - nothing to see here, move along, crisis over.'

Well, Mr Draghi and Angela Merkel may well have committed the German taxpayer to unlimited sums of money in order to prop up the eurozone. And certainly ahead of the German elections there perhaps isn't much else she could have done. And I do accept that the pressure from the markets, Mr Barroso, has eased for now.

And from your perspective and everybody's perspective, I suppose, the champagne is still flowing, the chauffeur-driven cars are shiny, the salaries and of course the expenses are attractive, so everything is rosy in the EU garden.

But I don't think we should be kidding anybody, Mr Barroso, because the fundamentals haven't changed.

Ireland has paid 42% of the total cost of the European banking crisis

By Ann Cahill: The full extent of the burden should strengthen the Government’s demands for a deal on the bank debt, although Germany is especially reluctant.

The figures show that while the banking crisis cost Berlin €40bn, Ireland is liable for €41bn. With fractions of the population and GDP of the EU’s biggest state, the crisis has cost Ireland 25% of GDP and Germany 1.5%.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny is due to speak in the European Parliament today on the country’s work during its six months at the helm of the EU and is expected to address bank debt and the need for solidarity.

Labour MEP Nessa Childers urged him to point out that the bank debt is neither just or sustainable and must be written down if Ireland is to exit the bailout programme.

“Without burden sharing on banking debt in Europe, any pretence of solidarity left in the EU will be extinguished. If we have no burden sharing on bank debt, if the failed policies of austerity are pushed and pushed, what in the end will be left of our communities, our economies and our democracies?” she asked.

Stimulating growth with private jets + The EU is rotting from the inside - MEP Dan Hannan

EU Youth Unemployment: France 27%, Ireland 30%, Portugal 39%, Spain 57%, Greece 58%

Television has become big brother

By Brent Daggett: As if the inevitability of increased drones patrolling American skies, the Department of Homeland Security using keywords to monitor social networking sites and mannequins spying on consumers are all not Orwellian enough in nature, television could soon have the ability to monitor you as well.

On May 26, 2012, Verizon filed a patent (#20120304206) with the U.S. Patent Office titled  “Methods and Systems For Presenting An Advertisement Associated with and Ambient Action of Use.”
The patent would allow for image as well as audio sensors to detect your activities in your living room when watching television.
Also, the sensors would have facial and profile recognition capabilities and voice recognition technology as well.
This may seem out of the realm of believability, but here are some of the patents claims:

“1. A method comprising: presenting, by a media content presentation system, a media content program comprising an advertisement break; detecting, by the media content presentation system, an ambient action performed by a user during the presentation of the media content program and within a detection zone associated with the media content presentation system; selecting, by the media content presentation system, an advertisement associated with the detected ambient action; and presenting, by the media content presentation system, the selected advertisement during the advertisement break.

My son 'Aaron was killed by the government' - Robert Swartz

RT: The father of information activist Aaron Swartz blames US prosecutors for his son’s death, RT’s Andrew Blake reports from an emotional Tuesday morning funeral outside of Chicago.
Aaron Swartz, 26, was found dead on Friday of a reported suicide. Swartz had been instrumental in designing software that aimed to make the Internet easy and open for everyone, and also co-founded both Reddit.com and Demand Progress — one of the most visited sites on the Web and an highly touted activism organization, respectively.
But while friends, family and loved ones recalled Swartz’ compassion for technology and his utter selflessness during Tuesday’s service, those in attendance did not shy away from acknowledging the tremendous legal trouble that plagued the activist in recent years.
In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with a series of counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, crimes that could have sent him away to prison for upwards of 35 years if convicted. Swartz, said the government, entered a building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloaded millions of academic and scholarly papers from the service JSTOR with presumably the intent of distributing them for free.
“Aaron did not commit suicide but was killed by the government,” Robert Swartz said during Tuesday’s service at the Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois. “Someone who made the world a better place was pushed to his death by the government.”

Saddam was killed 3 weeks into Iraq invasion: Dr. James Fetzer

The United States government has lied on a massive scale regarding conflicts initiated in the name of so-called terror, a prominent political activist tells UK Banned Press TV.

UK Banks using Funding for Lending Scheme to 'rip off' customers

Banks have been using the Government’s taxpayer-backed cheap credit scheme to rip off customers by cutting rates on savings accounts more than on new loans.

By Philip Aldrick: The claim comes after Andrew Bailey, head of prudential regulation at the Financial Services Authority, told MPs yesterday that interest rates for borrowers had not come down “to the same extent” as those paid on deposits. He said “the jury is still out” on whether the Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS) was delivering what it was set up for.

The FLS was established to provide banks with cheap state-backed funding on around £80bn of loans, reducing their costs by about £800m a year. The gains were supposed to be passed on to households and businesses in the form of cheaper and more available credit.

But by providing an alternative source of funding to customer deposits, savings rates have been slashed since the FLS’s introduction in August. Sylvia Waycot, a financial expert at Moneyfacts, said: “Savers are being persecuted without borrowers getting the rewards. One would hope there will be better deals for borrowers coming through in the next few weeks.”