Charles Hugh Smith: It’s Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or Accept Debt-Serfdom
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Stacy Summary: I always love it how over the past two years, markets grow euphoric on any state intervention in the market. Probably a good time to offload some euros in the next few days . . . (btw, if you have lots of euros, I would buy German assets for when the euro currency dissolves; you might want to be converted back into Deutsche mark rather than franc, drachma, peso or lira).
UPDATE(S):
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Stacy Summary: Arguments for maintaining the current Credit Default Swaps market argue that the ‘markets’ should be free. Strangely, the threat of a real market exchange on which to trade these instruments gets met with howls of rage. If the entire market as it is at present is mired with fraud and betting against what only what a few insiders know is hologram paper based on fictional exchange rates and fake assets, then I say bring in the prosecutors, the exchanges and the light of day.
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Stacy Summary: Lots of German bashing in the comments. And some Greek bashing. Hopefully we can discuss more economic issues surrounding how to get out of the massive trade imbalances that have marked the past few decades and also the fiscal issues of many of these governments having expanded their deficits when they transferred massive amounts of money to bankers by buying their toxic assets last year. By the way, I’m surprised Ireland is so high up on the trade surplus list; I wonder, however, if they are including all the US services that are then counted as exports?
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Stacy Summary: Interesting post on Zerohedge with a great chart. Of course the imbalances between who gives and who receives are built into the integration paradigm. Spain and Ireland were early beneficiaries of this through the massive European funds to raise the standard of their infrastructure to that of other European nations. But it’s good to see the relative charts because on an absolute level it looks like Germany, France and Italy receive the most, until you see how much they put in. And, I might also add, there is a very similar chart that could be made in the US. As there have so far been no calls for federal bailouts of any states in the US, it has not become an issue.
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Stacy Summary: First, @mike, dude, lay off the weed! Ha ha. Wow, you were on quite the ranting rampage last night. Now, onto the headlines, I know Ambrose tends to exaggerate, but China is looking to me like it might be the ‘stimulus’ for the next leg down on this ongoing collapse of the global ponzi scheme. Which brings me on to the next headline that the ‘stimulus is working’ . . . unless you exclude the government’s fake money which is only a transfer of wealth from the future to today. And, that, brings us to the final bizarre headline about pirates seizing a Russian cargo ship. The real world is sinking into a Mad Max like crazy place of pirates and fake pirates. So the question is . . . anyone seeing signs of the ‘stimulus’ working at street level??
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