Louis James: Doug, a lot of our readers have asked
about getting a second passport. I realize this is a large and complex
issue – several issues, actually – but would you care to go over the
basics of where to go and what to do? And for those not already thinking
about this, why?
Doug Casey: Sure. We've talked
quite a bit about the increasing urgency of getting some of your assets
out of your home country, especially if it's the United States. We've
talked about having stores of precious metals in safe places abroad, and
setting up bank and brokerage accounts abroad as well. I've said that
safest way to store wealth abroad is to buy property, which can't be
seized by your home country without an act of war. The purchase of real
estate solves several issues all at once.
But that's all about protecting assets; to protect yourself, getting a second passport is unfortunately very important.
LJ: Why unfortunately?
DC:
Because you shouldn't have to need government papers to live as you
please. It used to be that a passport was a document that a ruler of one
country would give to a traveler to ask the rulers of other countries
to assist him in his travels.
Finegold2: "When We Grow...This Is What We Can Do" is an educational documentary
concerning the facts about cannabis. In this feature length documentary
we explore everything there is, from industrial hemp to medicinal
cannabis use, from the origins of cannabis prohibition to the legality
of growing equipment.
By Wolf Richter: Bailouts start out small. At first, Cyprus just had a funding crisis;
the markets had gotten smart, after years of dousing the country with
cheap euros. Not that the risks weren’t there before. But markets opened
their eyes. So Cyprus went begging to Russia, and got €2.5 billion in
November 2011. That money evaporated without a trace. Then last June,
the two largest banks were deemed to need €2.3 billion – €500 million
for the Bank of Cyprus and €1.8 billion for Laiki Bank – to fill a void
in their regulatory capital, the story went. No big deal.
But the banks had been eviscerated by mismanagement and corruption,
and their balance sheets were loaded with deteriorating Greek corporate
debt; Greek government bonds that had received a 70% haircut; loans to
developers extended during the real-estate bubble that had blown up;
loans on developments that were never finished or were built so shoddily
that they’ve been declared uninhabitable; loans to politicians that
were written off as gifts; and mortgages extended to homeowners who were
tangled up in a title-deed scandal that the banks themselves had aided and abetted, leaving 130,000 properties (in a country with 838,000 souls) without title deeds, with disputed ownership, and often worthless mortgages.
So by the end of June, as bailout talks with the Troika took off, “sources” mumbled something about €10 billion, including a government
bailout, that hadn’t been on the table before. People gasped. But it
was just the beginning.
Press TV's documentary program "Israeli Connection" looks into the
scandal caused by organ kidnapping from Palestinians
by Israel and from the odd poor Israeli too. Source
Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the Old Lady's gold habit, the gold
that may be leaving Cyprus' central bank (or not) and Confucius' famous
saying: "IMF STUPID SELL GOLD, I'M BUYING." They also look at the
Federal Reserve data accidentally sent to Wall Street bank lobbyists and
the venture capitalists entering the new Land Grab. In the second half
of the show, Max Keiser talks to James Turk about money, gold, bitcoin,
currency wars and the nature of bank failures: to look good until the
bank fails overnight. They also discuss Austrian school theories on
money and how they relate to gold and to bitcoin. Source
molucca Red: Explosive episode on Maggie Thatcher the Milk Snatcher. (MUST SEE!!!!!!)
The Slog: What you see left isn’t just the tale of a horrendous day for gold –
it fell $88, or just over 4%, in a day – it is the record of a fall
that steepened the minute New York opened, twice tried (and failed) to
rally, and yet managed to do all this on a day when the vast majority of
fundamentals should’ve been pushing the price up, not down.
The one exception to this was the Troika demand on Thursday that
Cyprus sell its gold to help pay off debt. I have two observations to
make about that: one, why do that to Cyprus now and not to anyone else
before? And two, on paper it didn’t look like the sort of volume to
start a gold freefall.
This is a murky business, so we need to consider it from all sensible angles.
The fundamentals
The US is degrading and diluting its currency, the UK’s austerity
strategy is falling apart, the EU economy is flatlining, and Russia is
massively overdependent on energy sales in a world where the outlook for
energy consumption is awful: indeed, only the coldest european Spring
for decades has enabled it to maintain any kind of momentum.
China’s slowdown now looks inevitable given the atrocious consumption
outlook outside its borders, and US economic nerves tightened yesterday
when the IMF cut its growth forecast for the year from 2% to 1.7%,
alongside official figures confirming a 0.4% slump in retail sales in
March – the biggest fall since last July. Factory output in the EU
declined, and the north-south imbalance worsened as Slovenia edged
towards the centre of the debt radar. Italy’s output fell by a
disastrous 8%, and Portugal’s constitutional Court has rejected the
Troika’s bailout plan. 41% of Germans no longer believe their banked
money is safe.
The myth of Obama’s ‘recovery’ long ridiculed here is now clearly seen for the lie it was. The Cyprus ‘bailin’ has caused massive leakage of capital from the eurozone. The Troika’s Athens talks are acrimonious and stalled.
AJ: Hijacking and crashing planes using an Android, Scientists hack the
brain to anticipate and potentially alter decisions and a special report
from Kristen Meghan on her personal involvement with chemtrails. Source
Michael Ratner: Kissinger files show important role Wikileaks continues
to play revealing real history of US foreign policy; Judge makes one
decision favorable to Manning, one not Source
US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said North Korea is nearing a
"dangerous line", as the Obama administration continues to escalate
nuclear war fears by making belligerent statements nearly every day.
Such hostility contrasts starkly with the perspective of the average
South Korean, as repeated polls show they favor not just peace with the
North but also reunification. Source
By Michael Snyder: The
stock market is not crashing yet, but there are lots of other market
crashes happening in the financial world right now. Just like we saw
back in 2008, it is taking stocks a little bit of extra time to catch up
with economic reality. But almost everywhere else you look, there are
signs that a financial avalanche has begun. Bitcoins are crashing, gold
and silver are plunging, the price of oil and the overall demand for
energy continue to decline, markets all over Europe are collapsing and
consumer confidence in the United States just had the biggest miss
relative to expectations that has ever been recorded. In many ways, all
of this is extremely reminiscent of 2008. Other than the Bitcoin
collapse, almost everything else that is happening now also happened
back then. So does that mean that a horrible stock market crash is
coming as well? Without a doubt, one is coming at some point. The only
question is whether it will be sooner or later. Meanwhile, there are a
whole lot of other economic crashes that deserve out attention at the
moment.
The following are 11 economic crashes that are happening RIGHT NOW...
#1 Bitcoins
As I write this, the price of Bitcoins has fallen more than 70 percent
from where it was on Wednesday. This is one of the reasons why I have
never recommended Bitcoins to anyone. Yes, alternative currencies are a
good thing, but there are a lot of big problems with Bitcoins. Why
would anyone want to invest in a currency that could lose 70 percent of
its purchasing power in just two days? Why would anyone want to invest
in a currency where a single person can arbitrarily decide to suspend
trading in that currency at any time?
Louis James: Doug, a lot of our readers have asked
about getting a second passport. I realize this is a large and complex
issue – several issues, actually – but would you care to go over the
basics of where to go and what to do? And for those not already thinking
about this, why?
