Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the UK Telegraph:Jean-Claude Trichet tells us the world faced a second Lehman crash in the days and hours before EU leaders launched their €720bn (£612bn) defence fund. If the European Central Bank’s president is correct, we are in trouble. The EU-IMF package is already unravelling. What will the West do for its next trick?
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 5:37PM BST 16 May 2010
Mr Trichet was ash-white at the Brussels summit a week ago. He distributed charts of credit stress to every eurozone leader. By the time he had finished his hair-raising discourse, everybody round the table finally understood what they faced.
“The markets had ceased to function,” he told Der Spiegel. “There is still a risk of contagion. It can happen extremely fast, sometimes within hours.”
The spreads on Greek, Iberian, and Irish bonds have, of course, dropped since the ECB stepped in with direct purchases. But the euro rally fizzled fast, to be followed by a fresh plunge to a 18-month low of $1.24 against the dollar. European bank stocks have buckled again. Spain’s IBEX index fell 6.6pc in capitulation fever on Friday.
Geneva professor Charles Wyplosz said EU leaders made the error of overselling up their “shock and awe” package before establishing any political mechanism to mobilise such sums. “The fund is an empty shell,” he wrote at Vox EU. “Worse still, crucial principles have been sacrificed for the sake of unconvincing announcements.”
Brussels was unwise to talk of smashing the “wolf pack” speculators and defeat the “worldwide organised attack” on the eurozone. As Napoleon said, if you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna. Besides, the language of the EU priesthood – ex-ECB board member Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa talks of the advancing battalions of the “anti-euro army” – frightens Chinese and Mid-East investors needed to soak up EU debt. These metaphors are a mental flight from the issue at hand, which is that vast imbalances – masked by EMU, indeed made possible only by EMU – have been decorked by the Greek crisis and now pose a danger to the entire world.
One can only guess what Mr Trichet meant when he said we are living through “the most difficult situation since the Second World War, and perhaps the First”. Is this worse than Credit Anstalt in the summer of 1931, the event that brought down central Europe’s banking system and tipped Europe into depression?
Or was Mr Trichet alluding to something else after witnessing the Brussels tantrum by President Nicolas Sarkozy? According to El Pais, Mr Sarkozy threatened to pull France out of the euro and break the Franco-German axis at the heart of the EU project unless Germany capitulated.
To utter such threats is to bring them about. You cannot treat Germany in that fashion.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has put the best face on a deal that has so damaged her leadership. “If the euro fails, then Europe fails and the idea of European unity fails,” she said. Too late, I think. The German nation is moving on. I was struck by a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine proposing a new “hard currency” made up of Germany, Austria, Benelux, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Poland, but without France. The piece entitled The Alternative says deflation policies may push Greece to the brink of “civil war” and concludes that Europe would better off if it abandoned the attempt to hold together two incompatible halves. “It can be done,” the piece says.
What makes this crisis so dangerous is not just that Europe’s banks are still reeling, with wafer-thin capital ratios. The new twist is that markets are no longer sure whether sovereign states are strong enough to shoulder rescue costs...
***
Read the rest.
Who cares?
You better.
The FedGov's ability to extract blood, sweat, and bone marrow from the American taxpayer on behalf of its master, the Federal Reserve Bank, is the only reed supporting the entire global financial structure.
That means as the Euro goes, so goes any restraint against seizing whatever they can from you.
Do you understand yet?
The spreads on Greek, Iberian, and Irish bonds have, of course, dropped since the ECB stepped in with direct purchases. But the euro rally fizzled fast, to be followed by a fresh plunge to a 18-month low of $1.24 against the dollar. European bank stocks have buckled again. Spain’s IBEX index fell 6.6pc in capitulation fever on Friday.
Geneva professor Charles Wyplosz said EU leaders made the error of overselling up their “shock and awe” package before establishing any political mechanism to mobilise such sums. “The fund is an empty shell,” he wrote at Vox EU. “Worse still, crucial principles have been sacrificed for the sake of unconvincing announcements.”
Brussels was unwise to talk of smashing the “wolf pack” speculators and defeat the “worldwide organised attack” on the eurozone. As Napoleon said, if you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna. Besides, the language of the EU priesthood – ex-ECB board member Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa talks of the advancing battalions of the “anti-euro army” – frightens Chinese and Mid-East investors needed to soak up EU debt. These metaphors are a mental flight from the issue at hand, which is that vast imbalances – masked by EMU, indeed made possible only by EMU – have been decorked by the Greek crisis and now pose a danger to the entire world.
One can only guess what Mr Trichet meant when he said we are living through “the most difficult situation since the Second World War, and perhaps the First”. Is this worse than Credit Anstalt in the summer of 1931, the event that brought down central Europe’s banking system and tipped Europe into depression?
Or was Mr Trichet alluding to something else after witnessing the Brussels tantrum by President Nicolas Sarkozy? According to El Pais, Mr Sarkozy threatened to pull France out of the euro and break the Franco-German axis at the heart of the EU project unless Germany capitulated.
To utter such threats is to bring them about. You cannot treat Germany in that fashion.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has put the best face on a deal that has so damaged her leadership. “If the euro fails, then Europe fails and the idea of European unity fails,” she said. Too late, I think. The German nation is moving on. I was struck by a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine proposing a new “hard currency” made up of Germany, Austria, Benelux, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Poland, but without France. The piece entitled The Alternative says deflation policies may push Greece to the brink of “civil war” and concludes that Europe would better off if it abandoned the attempt to hold together two incompatible halves. “It can be done,” the piece says.
What makes this crisis so dangerous is not just that Europe’s banks are still reeling, with wafer-thin capital ratios. The new twist is that markets are no longer sure whether sovereign states are strong enough to shoulder rescue costs...
***
Read the rest.
Who cares?
You better.
The FedGov's ability to extract blood, sweat, and bone marrow from the American taxpayer on behalf of its master, the Federal Reserve Bank, is the only reed supporting the entire global financial structure.
That means as the Euro goes, so goes any restraint against seizing whatever they can from you.
Do you understand yet?
Part of taking everything they can from us, should the Euro go, will include the nationalization of all private retirement accounts(see Argentina). This is already being talked about by the left-wing Keynsian elitists who are part of Barry's inner circle. There are plenty of websites that document this.
ReplyDeleteI was stupid enough to fall for these tax-deferred government scams back in the 1980's. So now, I am slowly liqiudating my IRA, paying the taxes on it and converting Bernacke's wallpaper into hard assets and supplies. You patriots and threepers who routinely visit this website may want to consider doing this also.
The majority of the populations of the countries involved in this disaster WILLINGLY drank the Left's (& some of the money maniacal Right's) Kool-Aid, wriggled happily in the false warmth, delighted @ the pretty colors, & nodded in childish approval w/ the soft, cooing noises of re-assurance that everything would be just fine made by 'the smartest people in the room'/'the experts', & damned those who DARED to disturb their reverie w/ the hard, brutal truth about what was REALLY going on & what it REALLY meant, then kept those who sweetly & tenderly lied to them in power. The question, IMO, now is, are you going to be a BS addled grasshopper that'll eventually die when the drugs of self-delusion eventually wear off, or are you going to be a Bulldog ant who agrees w/ Patrick Henry's devotion to the truth however unpleasant its taste. The time for dallying is almost gone, so get deciding, YESTERDAY.
ReplyDeleteCassandra (of Troy)
Btw, some of the word verification choices are hilarious, truly hilarious.
Anonymous @ May 17/5:03 AM,
ReplyDeleteShould you, hypothetically, be converting some of your paper assets to something more substantial like, oh, gold coinage/gold &/or silver bullion, I hope you avail yourself of every sub rosa method to effect such a transmutation. As the saying goes: What they don't know won't hurt you.......if you don't get careless!
;~>
Cassandra (of Troy)