Italy Moves Into Debt-Crisis Crosshairs After Spain!
- So much for the €100B Spanish banks bailout. The euphoria lasted not even for a day! Contagion is spreading like wildfire. Nothing has been resolved. Bailouts (more debts actually) are a fraud. It is creating an even bigger problem!
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Italy Moves Into Debt-Crisis Crosshairs After Spain!
by Andrew Davis and Nadine Skoczylas, http://www.bloomberg.com/
The 100 billion-euro ($126 billion) rescue for Spain’s banks moved Italy to the front line of Europe’s debt crisis as an initial rally in the country’s bonds fizzled on concern it may be the next to succumb.
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Italy’s 10-year bonds reversed early gains today in the first trading after the Spanish bailout and declined for a fourth day, sending the yield up 7 basis points to 5.84 percent.
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“The scrutiny of Italy is high and certainly will not dissipate after the deal with Spain,” Nicola Marinelli, who oversees $153 million at Glendevon King Asset Management in London, said in an interview. “This bailout does not mean that Italy will be under attack, but it means that investors will pay attention to every bit of information before deciding to buy or to sell Italian bonds.”
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Italy has 2 trillion euros of debt, more as a share of its economy than any developed nation other than Greece and Japan. The Treasury has to sell more than 35 billion euros of bonds and bills per month — more than the annual output of each of the three smallest euro members, Cyprus, Estonia and Malta.
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Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said on June 9 that he would request as much as 100 billion euros in emergency loans from the euro area to shore up a banking system hobbled by more than 180 billion euros of bad assets. Mounting concern about the state of Spain’s banks and public finances drove the country’s borrowing costs to near euro-era records last month, pushing up Italian rates in the process.
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Reversing Gains
The euro initially gained as much as 1 percent and the yield on Spanish and Italian 10-year bonds fell 12 basis points and 15 basis points. Both then gave up their gains as the euro faded.
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“The problem for Italy is that where Spain goes, there’s always the perception that Italy could follow,” Nicholas Spiro, managing director at Spiro Sovereign Strategy in London, said in an interview. “There is insufficient differentiation within the financial markets. It is clear as the light of day and has been that Spain’s fundamentals are a lot direr than Italy’s. That hasn’t stopped Italy suffering from Spanish contagion.’’
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read more!
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US Sings To Syria: ‘We Will, We Will Bomb You!’
- Keep in mind the context for what is happening in the Middle East. The Anglo-American-Zionist Illuminist western power’s global economic, financial and monetary empire is crumbling. They are facing the threat of China and a resurgent Russia. Many countries are increasingly opposing their global hegemony. Their petrodollar hegemony is under assault. The Anglo-American-Zionist Illuminist western power has 1 card left to play! It is the world war card. It is the full frontal assault of all nations who threaten their empire. The target is really Russia and China. Syria and Iran are but the hooks to drag them into a world war! The rest will fall in line once these 2 falls.
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US sings to Syria: ‘We will, we will bomb you!’
by Adrian Salbuchi, http://www.rt.com/
When they want something, the US and its allies will insist until they get it. That’s what they’re doing to Syria right now, where they NEED to give it a Libya-like treatment in order to further their Imperial Overdrive goals in the Middle East.
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Just as rock star Freddy Mercury & Queen used to sing “we will, we will rock you!!”, today’s US/UK/EU/Israeli war cry mantra goes something like this: “We will, we will BOMB you!!”. And if they can’t do the bombing “officially” themselves or through NATO as they’ve done in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia or Pakistan, then they’ll do the bombing through suitable proxies, especially their present favorite errand-boy Al-Qaeda.
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We may be seeing examples of this in the horrendous attacks taking place inside Syria which the Western powers and media systematically blame solely on the Bashar al-Assad government, which from the very beginning of the “Arab Spring” warned his country and the world against Western covert operations and a powerful media PsyWar.
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Common sense tell us that it would be monstrous and idiotic for al-Assad to purposely carry out such attacks that only play into the hands of the Western powers giving them further excuse for armed intervention. The Houla massacre came just as UN Special Envoy to Syria Kofi Annan was beginning his mission inside Syria; now the el-Quebeir killing comes just as Annan is about to submit his report to the UN Security Council. It makes no sense, so one must ask: who benefits from all this?
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Clearly, the Annan Mission is being sabotaged and – oh, coincidence – his proposed plan is the only one that counts with Russian and Chinese support after these two countries blocked US, British and French attempts at imposing a Libya-like Resolution 1973 against Syria at the end of 2011 and early 2012, which would have predictably led to Libya-like results in Syria.
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Annan proposes a six-point plan that includes cessation of hostilities and Syrian-led dialogue amongst ALL warring parties, unrestrained access of humanitarian aid, freedom for journalists to report what’s really happening and UN monitoring. Naturally, that does not please Hilary, Obama, Cameron, Hague, John MacCain, Joe Liberman and their controllers at AIPAC – American Israeli Public Affairs Committee – for it thwarts Western invasion plans against Syria.
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So the Annan Plan MUST be sabotaged. And what better way to do that then to carry out covert dirty tricks false flag-like horrendous killings as we’ve seen in Houla, Hama, and now el-Quebeir, putting all the blame, naturally, on “the Assad regime’s repressive troops” giving it the goriest of Western media coverage?
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But who are fighting inside Syria? We hear about a “Free Syrian Army”, “Local Coordination Committees”, a “Syrian National Council” and – most notably – good old Al-Qaeda. All wonderfully armed, trained, financed and supported by the Western Powers and Media and by groups like the UK-based “Syrian Observatory on Human Rights”, all suitably “appalled” and “outraged” over the killings and massacres.
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What options does a country’s legitimate government such as Syria’s have when confronted with civil war? Basically, two: they either fight the imported armed insurrection or they surrender and give up their country to the US, UK, NATO military, together with their darlings at ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Halliburton… They call it “democracy”, and we’ve seen where that leads to in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
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So now the Western Powers are having a temper tantrum and want to see “regime change” in Syria one way or another. If Russia and China blocked NATO bombings, well then let’s just bring in the Al-Qaeda “SWAT” Team and other “freedom fighting” thugs so they can do the bombing for us.
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Isn’t it strange that over the past two years Hilary Clinton has publicly admitted on FoxNews and CNN that it was the US who “created, trained and armed Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion of the 80’s”, and that “once the Soviets left, we just washed our hands and left the Taliban, Muhadejeen and Al-Qaeda with all those Stinger missiles and arms” running around Afghanistan?
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Wasn’t it Tony Blair’s Foreign Secretary Robin Cook who told The Guardian newspaper in June 2005 that “Al Qaeda was created by the US and the name means ‘the file’” – the CIA file containing lists of all those cute Al-Qaeda operatives? Too bad for big-mouth Robin as he promptly “died of a heart attack” just two months later in rather dubious circumstances…
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Wasn’t it Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinksi – co-founder and ideologue of the Rockefeller/Rothschild Trilateral Commission – who told the French “Nouvelle Observateur” magazine in 1998 that he masterminded the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone” which in early July 1979 whipped-up Taliban fighters against the pro-soviet regime in Kabul, thus triggering the soviet invasion of Afghanistan; boasting with president Carter that the soviets now had their Vietnam War?. All trained, financed, armed and supported by the US, Saudi Arabia, UK, Pakistan and Israel?
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So, is it any surprise that over the past year and a half of “Arab Spring”, we hear many times that Al-Qaeda is involved in the worst fighting, even raising their flag over a police facility in “liberated Libya”? Now we learn Al-Qaeda is working hard to “liberate” Syria…
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How much of the horrific killing is attributable to them and their insurrection partners which, in the final instance all goes back to their original controllers at the CIA, MI6 and Mossad?
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Is it a mere coincidence that during the secretive Bilderberg meeting earlier this month in Chantilly, Virginia (USA) that brought together key global power brokers and decision-makers of this world, they also invited Bassma Kodmani, member of the Executive Bureau and Head of Foreign Affairs at the Syrian National Council to attend?
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Surely Mr Kodmani must have met and chatted with other Bilderberg attendees like Henry Kissinger, the “black prince” Richard Perle of Destroy-Iraq-fame, and key think-tank bosses like the Council of Foreign Relations’ Robert Rubin, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Hudson and Hoover institutes, the neo-con American Enterprise Institute and – oh, yes! – Thomas Donilon, Obama’s powerful national security advisor…
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The message is clear, gentlemen: this is Total War. So, Syria, if we cannot bomb you to smithereens and impose regime change with UN and NATO backing as we did in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, then we’ll use our proxies at the Syrian National Council and call in our Al-Qaeda Global SWAT team killers.
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Either way, Hilary, Obama, Hague and Cameron will rock‘n’roll to the tune of “We will, we will BOMB you!!! Who’s directing the orchestra you ask? I think I see Bibi Netanyahu and the AIPAC and ADL boys playing the strings there, behind the curtain…
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Paul Brodsky: Gold Monetization, Revaluation of Gold 8x-10x Higher And The Big Reset
- You cannot solve a debt problem with more debts. The current €100B bailout of insolvent Spanish banks is a case in point. Another €100B of debt has been piled on top of existing debts. How does this help the situation? The problem becomes even bigger!
- - In the end, central banksters will return to gold. For eg: If a bank is insolvent to the tune of US$1B but has US$1B worth of physical gold at current prices. By simply raising the price of gold 10x, their US$1B worth of gold is worth US$10B and the bank is solvent! Revaluation of gold price is inflationary, it will cause other asset price to rise also. This in effect will put an end to asset price deflation. Gold is the ultimate debt extinguisher! Central banksters fear deflation more than inflation. Deflation kills bank, it collapses the banking system. This is an excellent piece by Paul Brodsky, excerpts:
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Brodsky On “Gold Monetization And The Big Reset”!
by Tyler Durden , http://www.zerohedge.com/
Macroeconomic Problems
1) The global banking system is functionally insolvent and will fail without exogenous policy action*- There is one, interconnected global banking system linked by global financial markets and coordination among currency boards and central banks
- In the current banking system model, debts due tomorrow are serviced by newly-incurred debts today (which create deposits)
- Stagnant or declining nominal global asset prices since 2008 have stressed bank balance sheetsCentral bank easing and asset purchases to date have only tempered the rate of asset price declines
- Loan book marks remain at substantial premiums to:
- The present value of their cash flows in real terms
- Liquidation prices at current or higher interest rates
- Loan book marks remain at substantial premiums to:
- Current adversity among European banks directly impacts global commerce and finance
*Bank balance sheets can deleverage either via nominal write-downs of assets, (leading to outright failure/insolvency as tangible equity is extinguished), or through nominal increases in system reserves via base money inflation (provided by central banks as they expand their own balance sheets)
2) Governments and private parties are heavily-indebted and this indebtedness is growing exponentially
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Conclusion
Asset monetization (and in, particular, gold monetization) would solve many more problems than it would create. The negatives would merely recognize the balance sheet damage already done and beginning to be manifest (first, in the private sector and now, increasingly in the public sector).Mechanically, policy-administered asset monetization would be quite simple. Using the US as an example, the Fed would purchase Treasury’s gold at a large and specified premium to its current spot valuation. The higher the price, the more base money would be created and the more public debt would be extinguished. An eight-to-tenfold increase in the gold price via this mechanism would fully-reserve all existing US dollar-denominated bank deposits (a full deleveraging of the banking system). An appropriate multiple of today’s spot price could fully-extinguish the public debt if desired.
In terms of the relative price spectrum, a speculative 50% increase in the US median home price would be most-welcomed to the US banking system (and certainly to mortgage holders). Clearly, such an operation would be a subsidy to leveraged asset holders and banks. Would this be another form of perpetuating moral hazard? Superficially, it would be easy to conclude so; however, we think this conclusion would be incomplete. Such a “subsidy” is already embedded and institutionalized in the system. The key distinction would be that the system will have been reset to promote fairness and efficiency going forward. Given today’s circumstances, that should be a universal, non-partisan goal.
Rolling unfunded debts and debating in the political sphere over the merits and risks of unfunded growth or policy-administered national austerity programs is a futile endeavor. The math suggests strongly neither can work. We are convinced policy-administered asset monetization would stop the global financial system from seizing, restore sorely needed economic balance, and reset commercial incentives so that real growth can once again gain traction.
Lee Quaintance & Paul Brodsky QB Asset Management Company, LLC pbrodsky@qbamco.com
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