ancona
Praying Mantis
It's "the French way".
WTF?!?!?
WTF?!?!?
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IRELAND: think tank proposed to Irish Government "compulsory 15 pc private retirement contribution", on those middle-income workers, who currently don't have any (6 out of 10). Presumably, because they a)cannot afford it or b) don't see any economical sense in supporting private pension insurers, instead of themselves & their kids.
...guess that rings well with the private pensions insurers, no? Also, creates that one nice, juicy pot of money for government to seize "for the greater need" down the road, no?
http://campus.ie/news/national-news/million-of-us-face-paying-15pc-of-wages-into-pensions
..does not go much lower than this, right?
That sounds a whole lot like the U.S. Social Security. Mandatory % of your income in exchange for retirement money. Unfortunately, U.S. politicians treated that big pot of money like a personal piggy bank and Social Security is now projected to run out of money in the next 20 years.
I am sure no such thing could happen for the Irish.
It looks like the EU is considering making it standard policy to have the depositors of a bank fork over 8% of the cost a bank bailout. This would make it normal to haircut the depositors and I am sure this percentage will only go up.
Article in German:
http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachric...langt-8-prozent-zwangsabgabe-von-den-sparern/
Google translation:
http://translate.google.com/#de/en/
Imagine millions of people that angry, and you can understand that this country is close to reaching the activation energy necessary to make a revolutionary change."
My Geneva fund contact: Deutsche Bank is officially on suicide watch. DB will be the next 'Lehman' moment that triggers new collapse.
Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) is consolidating two debt-trading groups in London as it seeks to cut costs and riskier holdings, leading its head of European investment-grade bond trading to leave.
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My best German source informs me that 3 major banks are in trouble, and these 3 banks are fighting every single night to fight off insolvency and failure. He says CitiGroup in New York, Barclays in London, and Deutsche Bank in Germany- every single night are in trouble.
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The big immediate threat for Deutsche Bank though has to do with their problems in hiding debt for the Sovereign nations applying for the Eurozone. For example, Greece and Italy couldn’t have their debt ratios over certain levels, so what Deutsche Bank did was they turned nice big chunks of Sovereign debt into currency swaps.
For an example of how this works: Suppose you have a $250,000 bad business loan that is stinking up your credit report. So you call up your favorite Deutsche banker (or Goldman or Morgan- pick your criminal enterprise that is your personal favorite) and you tell him, look I have a $250,000 debt here and I want to make it go away. They say OK, we can do something clever here. We can pay off your debt so your credit report looks good, and we can establish this $250,000 Euro swap, and we’ll keep it off the books!
So you have this $250,000 bad loan stinking up your books, it goes away, and is replaced by something hidden- a euro currency swap! That’s precisely what was done on a larger macro scale by Greece and Italy- and Deutsche Bank is involved with several of these, and the total that is becoming disclosed is $400 Billion. Apply your typical ratios and you can conclude that they are $10, $15, $20 billion short for capital requirements!
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The leader of France’s far-Right party has vowed that the European Union would “collapse like the Soviet Union” as she conspired to form what would be the most radical faction yet seen in the European parliament.
Marine Le Pen, buoyed by a weekend by-election triumph in southern France, criticised the EU as a “global anomaly” and pledged to return the bloc to a “cooperation of sovereign states”.
She said Europe’s population had “no control” over their economy or currency, nor over the movement of people in their territory.
“I believe that the EU is like the Soviet Union now: it is not improvable,” she said. “The EU will collapse like the Soviet Union collapsed.”
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Two recent events regarding Marine Le Pen and her eurosceptic party have the nannycrats in Brussels worried. The first occurred in early October when Marine Le Pen's Eurosceptic "National Front" Party Took Lead in France National Poll.
Yesterday, a huge victory by the National Front in a local election had the nanmnycrat alarm bells ringing.
......A local council by-election in a small town in the sleepy hinterland of France’s Côte d’Azur would not normally be the stuff to shake national – much less international – politics.
But a decisive victory by the National Front (FN) in Brignoles on Sunday night has set alarm bells ringing in Paris that the far-right party, led by Marine Le Pen, will repeat the feat more widely across the country in municipal elections in March.
Just as ominous, not just for mainstream parties in France but across the EU, is the prospect that the vote signals a much-feared surge by the populist right in European elections due in May.
Those following the Euro FX pairs saw a plunge at 6 am Eastern, when Eurostat released the latest Eurozone unemployment and inflation statistics. They were, in a word, abysmal. After the August unemployment data finally saw a modest drop forcing many to announce the end of the European depression, not only did the the September number revise the August print from 12.0% to 12.2%, a new record high as 73,000 thousand people became unemployed, but more importantly made the September unemployment rate 12.2% as well following another 60,000 Eurozoneans losing their jobs, effectively meaning that for all the talk of a European recovery, its unemployment rate keeps hitting new all time record highs every single month.
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Spain's CPI has declined for four consecutive months and eight out of the last twelve. A decline of .4 percentage points in October pushed the CPI negative for the first time since 2009.
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Via translation please consider Recession Continues and Spain on Brink of Deflation
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The euro dropped below $1.35 on Wednesday after the European Central Bank was reported to consider a negative deposit rate if more stimulus was needed, according to Bloomberg. "ECB said to weigh minus 0.1% deposit rate if more easing needed," Bloomberg TV said in a tweet Wednesday. The report comes a day after ECB Vice President Vitor Constancio said that while quantitative easing was still a possibility, the central bank had not discussed how it would be implemented. ...
Germany's Bundesbank said on Monday that countries about to go bankrupt should draw on the private wealth of their citizens through a one-off capital levy before asking other states for help.
The Bundesbank's tough stance comes after years of euro zone crisis that saw five government bailouts. There have also bond market interventions by the European Central Bank in, for example, Italy where households' average net wealth is higher than in Germany.
"(A capital levy) corresponds to the principle of national responsibility, according to which tax payers are responsible for their government's obligations before solidarity of other states is required," the Bundesbank said in its monthly report.
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...mkay, so it is plain in the open for a good while now, that the banksters will have a go at everybody's money, right? How the f. is it possible, that people are not scrambling for PMs to at least hedge, at least part of their portfolio....?
Is Portugal about ready to implode?
That's what one hedge fund manager believes. For now, interest rate action suggests otherwise.
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Salanic maintains the status quo is not sustainable. Here is his overall thesis.
Portugal Debt Implosion Thesis
- The Troika Program is off track. Portuguese bondholders are at the mercy of that market.
- Portugal has excessive public and private debt financed from abroad. Portugal can neither grow nor devalue that debt.
- Austerity fatigue has set in as the people carry the full burden of the adjustment.
- Corporates are defaulting en masse and cannot sustain their debt burdens, leading to a vicious cycle of deleveraging.
- The long-term outlook is bleak.
- Debt-to-GDP is very high and growing one percent per month. Portugal is the third most leveraged country in the Eurozone.
- Accounting for growth and interest expense, Portugal's debt is the highest in the Eurozone and is not sustainable.
- Portugal can neither raise taxes nor cut expenditures, leaving little room to improve debt-servicing capacity.
- 40 consecutive years of deficit and 18 years without a primary surplus confirm that Portugal cannot sustain so much debt.
- In the most optimistic case, the Portuguese sovereign has at least 30% too much debt.
Salanic does a fantastic job presenting his case in a 62 page document, Rehabilitating Portugal.
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Art for money's sake: Portugal looks to recoup bank debts with Miro auction
Portugal is hoping a master of surrealism can help taxpayers recoup some of the millions they lost rescuing a failed bank.
The government is selling 85 works by Spanish artist Joan Miro that became public property when Banco Portugues de Negocios was nationalized in 2008.
Christie's in London, which is handling the two-day sale starting Tuesday, describes the collection as "one of the most extensive and impressive offerings of works by the artist ever to come to auction."
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Ukip wins European elections with ease to set off political earthquake
For the first time in modern history, neither Labour nor Conservatives have won a British national election
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Farage said the result justified the description of an earthquake because "never before in the history of British politics has a party seen to be an insurgent party ever topped the polls in a national election".
He claimed voters had "delivered about the most extraordinary result that has been seen in British politics for 100 years and I am proud to have led them to that." The Ukip leader predicted that as a consequence: "We may well see one party leader forced out of his position and another to reconsider his policy of opposition to a referendum on Europe, and David Cameron will have to take a much tougher negotiating stance. It is now not beyond the bounds of possibility that we hold the balance of power in another hung parliament."
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... Espirito Santo International SA - is in a "serious financial condition" according to a central bank driven external audit by KPMG identified "irregularities in its accounts." Sure enough, the 'ponzi-like' maneuvers have left the bank unable to pay its bonds as Bloomberg reports bonds plunged to record lows after a parent company delayed payments on short-term notes. More importantly, given the divisively dependent nature of the domestic sovereign bond market (and hence the health of the EU) and its banking system, it is noteworthy that Portuguese bond risk has surged to 4 month highs with the biggest 2-day spike in a year. As one analyst noted, “The bigger question is whether the government will have to get involved,” leaving the EU taxpayer on the hook once again (for fear of M.A.D. threats) as most critically, it "will have to step in to prevent systemic repercussions?"
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