tagged w/ eurozone debt crisis
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For better or worse, this crisis has exposed some of the flaws in the EU. One Dutch minister said that countries that are not willing to give up sovereignty over their budgets may be kicked out. You'll have to read the article to find out more. I'm not surprised we're hearing this. You can't share a single currency and maintain your own sovereignty. Something has to give, either the EU will fold or countries will have to give up some sovereignty. The threat to national identity was one of the major objections to forming the EU in the first place. We'll likely see a rise in nationalism and those that pointed to this possible outcome will come back out of the woodwork and say: "I told you so". And they'll be right.For better or worse, this crisis has exposed some of the flaws in the EU. One Dutch... more
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Ireland faces the most severe welfare cuts and tax hikes in its history - the high price it has to pay for receiving an international bailout. The budget is about to face a parliamentary vote, with protesters gathered outside the Parliament building. But Socialist Party MEP, Joe Higgins believes the Irish financial system is already broken beyond repair.
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It's The Bankers or UsIreland faces the most severe welfare cuts and tax hikes in its history - the high... more
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Austerity measures drive 100,000 protesters to the streets of Ireland, another 100,000 in Italy as Europeans continue to rage against the international banking machine.
The international bankster machine seeking to colonize Western nations through debt is now meeting resistance from Greece, to France, to Ireland, to Italy, to Spain, to Portugal, and to the U.K.
These new protests in Ireland and Italy follow a crippling 2-week strike in France where citizens took over fuel refineries and other vital infrastructure, more strikes in Greece which took over the Acropolis, and a massive student protest in the UK that caused physical damage to government buildings. All of these protests were sparked by governments reducing benefits or increasing fees and taxes on a population that had little to do with the private gambling of banks.
These European protests are intensifying as the international bankers move to collect their "pound of flesh" through austerity and sale of public assets. As Europeans are becoming acutely aware of the dubious plan to loot them and the anger at their corrupt elected officials for bowing to banks has reached a boiling point. In all cases the governments are enforcing austerity measures on the people after the private banks over-leveraged themselves to the breaking point, threatening to bring down entire nations.
For years the bankers churned out easy credit to these nations while they invested public and private funds into worthless credit default swaps and derivatives. As if orchestrated to perfection, they pulled the plug on those toxic assets, essentially bankrupting the more fragile developed countries, followed by calling their debts due. Now they're demanding that European governments be forced into IMF bailouts that impose drastic austerity measures on the populace.
By forcing tax increases and reducing benefits for the citizens of sovereign nations, the IMF is essentially rewriting their laws. Well, it appears that the citizens of Europe have had enough. The massive protests, strikes, and riots that have swept through the streets of many European countries have resulted in growing calls to reject the bailout money used to prop up failed banks and corrupt governments. The Irish people prefer to default on the debt which drove the EU 'completely mad'.
The protesters are getting support from someone who is experiencing the outcome of resisting public bailouts of private banking debts. The President of Iceland recently remarked that they're in much better shape than Ireland because they let the private banks fail and their currency naturally devalued, allowing them to regain some competitiveness relative to their neighbors:
“The difference is that in Iceland we allowed the banks to fail,” Grimsson said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Mark Barton today. “These were private banks and we didn’t pump money into them in order to keep them going; the state did not shoulder the responsibility of the failed private banks.”
UK's Libertarian politician, Nigel Farage, once viewed as a fringe player, is now getting international recognition for forewarning his European comrades about the troubles in the system. He's quickly becoming a hero to the banker resistance as his credibility reaches new heights for being proved right -- much like his U.S. counterpart Congressman Ron Paul. His rants in the European Parliament are going viral on YouTube as the people are waking up to their servitude to banks and a lack of true democracy and sovereignty.
Read More: http://globalpoliticalawakening.blogspot.com/2010/11/citizens-of-europe-rage-against-machine.htmlAusterity measures drive 100,000 protesters to the streets of Ireland, another 100,000... more
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The grand symphony of currency manipulation seems more finely orchestrated than ever before. However, it's not necessarily the fundamentals that are moving currencies so much as global perception. In the battle between the Fed's quantitative weakening of the dollar versus the eurozone debt crisis, the dollar is winning this round of who sucks less.
On October 1st, I posed the question, will the dollar rebound before being dissolved into a global currency? At that time, no one was predicting the dollar to gain strength with the Federal Reserve planning more quantitative easing. The windbag media promoted QE2 as a stock market stabilizer and a boost to U.S. exports, yet most experts openly called it a backdoor bailout, or monetizing debt, or plain old money printing. Nearly everyone agreed it would ultimately erode the value of the dollar even further and cause measurable inflation.
Indeed, it was a well-justified gloom-and-doom 6 months for the dollar by Fed critics. After all the media build-up, the Fed's announcement of the $600B easing plancame strategically on the day after mid-term elections, when most of the media was focused on feeding the false left-right frenzy by digesting the election results. In other words, QE2 got some mention, but the timing was clearly a tactic to keep a lid on the talking-head backlash. Then, Obama rushed out of the country for the G20 economic summit taking the remaining media distraction with him. Between stories of Michelle's shopping trips, it was revealed that China and other foreign economic players were not very happy about the Fed's move. Yet, the dollar started to rally.
Recent commentary by Chuck Butler in the Daily Reckoning questions the commodity sell-off and dollar rally:
But does it all make sense, given what I mentioned above that the FOMC is looking for inflation to inject into our economy? No… But since when, going back to the financial meltdown, does anything the markets do make sense?
Nothing makes sense if we still believe fundamentals actually matter. Sure the dollar is nearly dead, fundamentally, but it seems that perception now trumps concrete analysis. As I reported in October:
The fundamentals suggest that it (the dollar) should be finished, but just as the world is about to declare it dead, miraculously a global storyline seems to emerge just when needed and foreign investors rush back in for "safety." A clear example was the steady drumbeat of a sovereign-foreign-debt war that resulted in reports of whether the Euro would even survive, while the dollar enjoyed a triumphant ride up victory mountain.
Now, here we go again. As soon as the Fed announcement was made, the media shifted its focus once again to the eurozone debt "crisis." Story after story, day after day, about the developing crisis in Ireland -- and now Portugal. News agencies often salivate to repost these headlines, because crisis sells. And it sells because doom and gloomers, otherwise known as fundamental analysts, are waiting for reality to catch up to the numbers -- not just in the eurozone, but globally. The debt-infected PIIGS is a legitimate story, but it is clearly being heavily pushed to make the dollar look less pitiful.
READ MORE: http://globalpoliticalawakening.blogspot.com/2010/11/eurozone-debt-crisis-20-dollar-sucks.htmlThe grand symphony of currency manipulation seems more finely orchestrated than ever... more
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Max Keiser: Irish govt slaves to IMF terror machine!
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DUBLIN – Ireland's financial troubles loomed large Wednesday as investors — betting that the country soon could join Greece in seeking a bailout from the European Union — drove the interest rate on the country's 10-year borrowing to a new high.
The yield, or interest rate, on 10-year bonds rose above 8 percent for the first time since the launch of the euro, the European Union's common currency, 11 years ago.
Bond traders increasingly believe that Ireland soon will be forced to tap Europe's emergency fund for euro-zone nations facing a threat of bankruptcy. The 16 nations of the euro zone created that euro750 billion backstop in May as the EU and International Monetary Fund provided an emergency euro110 billion loan to Greece.
READ MORE: http://globalpoliticalawakening.blogspot.com/2010/11/irelands-crisis-flares-as-investors.htmlDUBLIN – Ireland's financial troubles loomed large Wednesday as investors... more
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