EASY READING CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS: ROCK/PAPER/SCISSORS: DEVALUING ALL CURRENCIES « Culture of Life News 2
YouTube – The Big Bang Theory – Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock
Understanding global trade in the Floating Currency system is vital. The vital necessity of this is hyper-important to the US, above all others. The US is entirely and 100% at fault for creating this system which is now destroying us relentlessly. Just like banking gnomes invented the Derivatives Beast, in order to protect their illicit wealth gains, it ended up destroying these, instead. Because the entire planet is dependent upon the US consuming while not competing, no one is ready to stop this Floating Currency game. Least of all, the US itself. We are addicted to easy credit/easy import economic systems.
Aso, Obama Agree To Maintain Dollar As Key Currency
WASHINGTON (Nikkei)–Prime Minister Taro Aso agreed with U.S. President Barack Obama here Tuesday on the importance of maintaining the dollar as the primary global currency.
Japan Posts Record Trade Deficit In JanTOKYO (NQN)–Japan logged a record trade deficit of 952.6 billion yen in January, the Ministry of Finance said Wednesday.
M’bishi Motors, Nissan To Move Some Domestic Production Overseas
TOKYO (Nikkei)–Mitsubishi Motors Corp. (7211) and Nissan Motor Co. (7201)are stepping up efforts to transfer some domestic manufacturing operations abroad in order to bolster cost competitiveness.
Japan will move heaven and earth to keep the dollar as the ‘key currency’. Anyone looking at economic data of the last century can see that the troika of the US, Germany and Japan have been the main motivator of global trade. Despite epic, destructive wars, two of them, in the case of Germany, both Germany and Japan always bob back to the top of global industrial powers.
Few people in America think very much about all this. Why does this happen? This question is verboten. American exceptionalism beliefs [We are #1!] prevent us from riddling out this bizarre business. Up until the Floating Currency regime, the US used to be #1 in all industrial and trade matters. Now, we are dropping rapidly out of that particular race. Japan and Germany trade places with who is #1 in trade profits and international industrial power [ie: how many factories they own in other countries].
A major tool in this game is to have a weak currency. The European Union enjoyed a strong euro for the last 6 years and this has devastated Germany’s industrial position. The Japanese thought is was immensely funny that the weak yen, weakened against the dollar, also became weak against the euro. They used this aggressively to pull ahead of Germany and sat directly behind the US economy as the world’s #2 economic power even while telling everyone, Japan was suffering from a terrible, long depression!
This faux depression was always on the verge of becoming a real one because Japan ceased consuming and the relentless drop in wages was locking over 50% of the population into perpetual, inescapable poverty. Part time workers are now beginning to outnumber full time workers! But the industrialists saw nothing but wall to wall profits so they kept the ZIRP-based faux depression business going. They could go to G7 meetings and with a straight face, announce that prices were dropping in Japan and therefore, they had to keep their ZIRP lending system going.
Japan cheated on world trade. There was no ‘trade’ going on. It was all one-way aggressive business. Now, for the last 50 years, the only way—and I do mean ONLY—way the US could balance trade is to throw the entire planet into a severe recession or even a depression. During the Japanese ‘depression’, the Japanese people didn’t buy much or any industrial output from non-Japanese companies. They did import Japanese goods made in Japanese-owned factories in South America and Asia. But not foreign-made goods from say, the US.
Since the US had zero hope of changing this dynamic [the Japanese kept us at bay by buying Boeing jets and even there, they insisted that a good hunk of the jets be made in Japan and then assembled in the US as a sop to US job worries!] the US is forced to balance trade with the only tool Libra has: destroy world trade.
Libra is a strange thing. It is a force of nature, it is the obvious outcome of all systems: they must reset at zero or in balance. All systems in nature that run in a lopsided manner are ‘reset’ to zero suddenly and brutally. This is why overpopulation in any ecosystem doesn’t gently slow down, it crashes and has to restart from nearly zero or worse, it dies totally and forever. This is why all regulators of all systems run by humans have to keep a sharp look-out for imbalances.
Let’s go back to the seven fatted cows and seven lean cows: humans have a very hard time, grasping the concept of overgrazing. In the US, ranchers still, to this day, demand the right to overgraze public lands. Farmers who raise animals on lands they own are much more aware of the need to not overgraze. When there are too many cows, they eat all the grass, their hooves chop up all the topsoil and then winds turn all of this into dust storms. So a wise farmer gages how many cows he can graze on his lands. This is true in all economic systems for all systems are ultimately based on the incredibly ancient farming methods of the last 10,000 years.
Japan Exports Plummet 45.7%, Deficit Widens to Record
Japan’s exportsplunged 45.7 percent in January, resulting in a record trade deficit, as recessions in the U.S. and Europe smothered demand for the country’s cars and electronics.
The shortfall widened to 952.6 billion yen ($9.9 billion), the most since comparable records started in 1980, the Finance Ministry said today in Tokyo. The January drop in exports eclipsed a record 35 percent decline set the previous month.
Gross domestic product shrank at an annual 12.7 percent pace last quarter, the most since the 1974 oil shock, and economists predict the slump will drag into this quarter. Toyota Motor Corp., Sony Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. — all of which forecast losses — are firing thousands of workers, heightening the risk the recession will deepen.
“The drop in exports is unbelievably bad,” said Yasuhide Yajima, a senior economist at NLI Research Institute in Tokyo. “The pressure on companies to cut jobs and investment is rising and that will make the recession deep and protracted.”
The stupid Japanese export powers who run Japan, ran Japan into a long depression. Then, when Japanese export business took off like a rocket in the last 7 years and had the greatest expansion in their history, not one yen of these profits went to the Japanese workers and consumers. Instead, the exporters who run the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan simply crushed domestic spending as brutally as they dared.
This increased profits to the top 1% and is in the process of destroying Japan, itself, as a nation and as an ethnic population. In other words, while the Japanese workers had 7 years of starving cattle, the Japanese elite feasted on fatted trade cattle. Now, they have to go hungry, too! To preserve their own ill-gotten wealth via lopsided trade, the industrialists will use the government of Japan to impose utter starvation on the Japanese people. Firing everyone, closing factories and moving them to other Asian powers, the Japanese warlords will now get rid of the $9 billion trade deficit by ‘thinning the herd’.
This evil and contemptuous political/economic system is now waking up the average Japanese to their peril of perishing as the population crashes. I do hope they imitate the Chinese workers who are loud, strong-willed and easily angered. Now, on the other half of the equation, Germany:
FT.com / Brussels – ECB warns Germany against EU bail-out
The European Central Bank gave a thinly veiled warning to the German government on Friday not to violate the European Union’s “no bail-out” clause, which prevents members of the eurozone from supporting other members that are facing rising public debt.
Jürgen Stark, ECB executive board member, told Spiegel magazine in an interview released on Friday that the clause was an “important basis for the functioning of the monetary union”.
The warning follows reports that Germany was considering ways to help members of the eurozone that are facing fast-rising refinancing costs as investor fears rise about deteriorating public finances. Peer Steinbrück, finance minister, said this week that Germany would not remain inactive if the eurozone was in danger of breaking up.
Asked about the issue on Friday, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, foreign minister, said; “A process is now starting to consider to what extent support via the eurozone and the economically strong countries of the eurozone can happen.”
The “no bail-out” clause of the EU treaties prohibits countries from becoming “liable for” or assuming “the commitments” of other governments and is regarded by the ECB as an important weapon for ensuring fiscal discipline.
Imagine if Japan were in a monetary/political union with all of Asia! The Germans wanted political and economic stability so they joined France in forming the European Union and then, the euro currency system. This was quite unpopular in Germany, itself. The Germans were quite proud of learning lessons from the harsh past. They supported a strong currency.
But the temptations to sell to the US are great and in the past, Germany always gaged exactly how far to go in this matter. When the US began to throw tantrums, the Germans would renegotiate the value of the DM. This was done in the Bretton Woods II Accords [our surrender to Germany and Japan, post-WWII] and the Plaza Accords. Both German and Japanese exporters had to deal with the stresses of these sudden, arbitrary revaluations of their currencies with the dollar. One of the provisos of the Plaza Accords was, the US was not to do this again.
Instead, the US was supposed to balance trade via balancing the budget of the government and trading industries with the winners of the 20th century struggle for economic power over global trade [ahem, we did not win that 100 year struggle!]. The Japanese swiftly figured out, running a huge government deficit inside Japan with almost all the loans owed to the Japanese system, they could couple this with an immense FOREX reserve of dollars [and then, euros] to weaken the yen for good and thus, win trade advantages.
All of Europe together, held nearly the same amount of FOREX reserves [I actually sat down and added it all up] but had no central control over these reserves so they couldn’t be used to strengthen the US dollar, easily. So, while Japan and China happily grew their reserves and bought US government debt so one-way trade [minus Boeing jets] so they could grow their industrial power while destroying US industrial power, Germany found itself harnessed to the European system which was no protecting European export markets!
The recession which is turning into a depression began, like it did in Japan and then, the US, in the form of factory re-locations to ever-cheaper labor pools and the slow collapse in the real buying power of the working masses inside Europe. All of this was disguised by the strong euro which allowed workers in Europe to go on international shopping sprees, sex tours of poor Asian nations and so on. But the price was, Europe’s industrial base would vanish or end up controlled by either Japan or China.
ECB faces mutiny from national bank governors as recession deepens – Telegraph
For months the ECB held sternly to the high ground of orthodoxy as the US, Japanese, British, Canadian, Swiss and Swedish central banks slashed rates towards zero and embraced quantitative easing, but a confluence of fast-moving events is now forcing it to move.
The credit default swaps that measure bankruptcy risk on the debts of Ireland, Austria and a clutch of Latin Bloc states have vaulted to dangerous levels. In the case of Ireland, the slump is spilling on to the streets. Some 120,000 marched through Dublin over the weekend to protest austerity measures.
The slow fuse on Eastern Europe’s banking crisis has detonated, leaving Austrian, Belgian, Italian and other West European banks with $1.5 trillion (£1 trillion) in exposure.
It is happening just as industrial output collapses in the eurozone’s core states. Germany’s economy contracted at 8.4pc annualised in the fourth quarter. ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet said on Monday that “a process of negative feedback” has set in where the banks and the real economy are pulling each other down in a self-reinforcing spiral. Eurozone credit is contracting. Banks are rationing credit as deleveraging gathers pace.
Italy’s Mario Draghi is in the “activist-easing” camp. “The experience in the US in the 1930s and Japan in the 1990s suggests that it is necessary to fight, in the early phases of the crisis, the tendency for real interest rates to rise,” he said….
This amounts to a mutiny against the Bundesbank-dominated executive in Frankurt. It is no great surprise. They have to answer to their democracies. The plot is thickening.
Unlike Japanese workers who seem almost totally disconnected from reality, the European workers are more like Chinese workers: they are loud and they mean business when they get moving, en mass, to besiege their leaders. The hopes of the New World Order creeps is, there are no political leaders who can change one jot of the agenda no matter how enraged the masses are! When the masses march on helpless leaders, they get a government that is like in the US: the new leaders will refuse to listen to the masses just like the old leaders.
In Japan, when faced with no choices, the people there tend towards suicide. But in the US and Europe, they will riot and will kill leaders of all parties in what we call ‘revolutions’. History is clear: China, Europe and the US are very prone to revolutions. In revolutions, all the older leaders are killed or driven out. South America is the same, too. A long history of periodic revolutions is part of the history of these countries. And will continue to be a part of our history.
Europe, like America, wants the old status quo back. They also, like the US and Japan, want ZIRP interest rates. No one wants to reward simple savings. If one wishes to protect one’s money, one can play the economic lottery directly or one can save money via parking it somewhere safe which happens to be in a very unstable place: gold.
Gold’s utility used to be its immobility. It was safe because it retained purchasing power vis a vis a stable currency. But wars killed the golden goose and in order to pay for these wars, Britain and the US debased the currency which meant, they had to deny gold’s role as a stabilizer that prevented currency devaluations and government overspending as well as trade imbalances!
Failure to save East Europe will lead to worldwide meltdown – Telegraph
If mishandled by the world policy establishment, this debacle is big enough to shatter the fragile banking systems of Western Europe and set off round two of our financial Götterdämmerung.
Austria’s finance minister Josef Pröll made frantic efforts last week to put together a €150bn rescue for the ex-Soviet bloc. Well he might. His banks have lent €230bn to the region, equal to 70pc of Austria’s GDP.
“A failure rate of 10pc would lead to the collapse of the Austrian financial sector,” reported Der Standard in Vienna. Unfortunately, that is about to happen.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) says bad debts will top 10pc and may reach 20pc. The Vienna press said Bank Austria and its Italian owner Unicredit face a “monetary Stalingrad” in the East.
Germany always played ‘big brother’ to Eastern Europe. Sometimes, Germany would go insane and become a murderous ‘big brother’. But in general, Germany prefers to keep all the countries on its eastern flank fat and happy, not a herd of starving cattle, mooing for fodder. Austria ought to worry us.
The Long Depression began with a run on banks in Vienna. The Austro-Hungarian empire was very similar to the barely-stable European Union. It was prone to banking collapses. Germany itches to clean up the messes to its vulnerable eastern frontier [Putin gave them yet another reminder of all this during the winter]. Unlike childish American commentators, German leaders know that a collapsing Russia is not a good thing at all if there is any signs of powerful leadership that is ruthless, at the helm.
Russia will not sit idle while Eastern Europe and former Soviet states collapse, this is something history is crystal clear about: Russia will fill the political void. The collapse of energy prices harmed Russia but only temporarily. Europe still needs to consume Russian energy products and even with a global depression, the price of oil has stopped dropping. Eventually, it will begin to rise again.
All things are relative. We don’t see a void for long, all empty spaces are filled by something or someone.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
“This gold rally is driven by safe-haven fears and has a very different feel from the bull market we’ve had for the last eight years,” said John Reade, chief metals strategist at UBS. “Investors are seeing articles in the press saying governments should deliberately stoke inflation, and they are reacting to it.”
Gold jumped to multiple records on Tuesday, triggered by fears that East Europe’s banking crisis could set off debt defaults and lead to contagion within the eurozone. It touched €762 an ounce against the euro, £675 against sterling, and 47,783 against India’s rupee.
Jewellery demand – usually the mainstay of the industry – has almost entirely dried up and the price is now being driven by investors. They range from the billionaires stashing boxes of krugerrands under the floors of their Swiss chalets (as an emergency fund for total disorder) to the small savers buying the exchange traded funds (ETFs). SPDR Gold Trust has added 200 metric tonnes in the last six weeks. ETF Securities added 62,000 ounces last week alone.
In Mr. List’s book, Gold Wars: The Battle Against Sound Money As Seen from a Swiss Perspective: he mentions how South Africa and Russia should be happy to see gold be used as a source of savings, not jewelry. When gold is decorative, it is devalued. When it is used to balance trade or save value of currencies in decline, it becomes precious. The relentless rise in gold value when all other commodities, even other rare metals, were dropping, is a signal that gold still is the Queen of Currencies.
The long, long push to devalue gold and to deny Gold’s rightful spot on the Throne of Money, is collapsing. Even pushers who wanted to displace Gold with Paper are now giving up. This reminds me of the Japanese game, ‘Rock, paper and scissors.’ Paper wraps rock and rock breaks scissors but scissors cuts paper.
Paper is now being absolutely shredded as all paper currencies are flying in opposite directions, fast: to zero interest rates on savings, hyper inflation for the lesser currencies and absolute value to the main trade currencies. The rising value of paper money is due to restricting trade to the point of collapse via a collapse in the international lending system. This is the ‘scissors’ that is slicing up all bonds, banking certificates, etc.
The rock here is gold. It breaks the scissors. But can be controlled by paper only if paper isn’t being shredded.
Gold hits record against euro on fear of Zimbabwean-style response to bank crisis – Telegraph
Crucially, gold has decoupled from oil and base metals, finding once again its ancient role as a store of wealth in dangerous times.
“People can see that the only solution to the credit crisis is to devalue all fiat currencies,” said Peter Hambro, chairman of the Anglo-Russian mining group Peter Hambro Gold. “The job of central bankers is to allow this to happen in an orderly fashion through inflation. I’m afraid it is the only way to avoid disaster, but naturally investors are turning to gold as a form of wealth insurance.”
I agree with this latest Pritchard article. We can’t devalue all fiat currencies at the same time. Something has to give here and I would suggest, it is time for paper to give up and hand over things to rock at this point. For scissors is another name for the Goddess of Deflation.
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Culture of Life News 
There is a link over on Denningers; gold is the now the currency in Zimbabwe. .1 oz for a loaf of bread. Lucky for them they can still go out and pan it.
I see a lot of Euros trying to save their economy and making demands on this and that, to overthrow the US dollar etc
Fact is the world doesn’t need them, Germany is in a bigger bind than the US or Japan.
Their attempt at having their cake (manufacturing) and eat it too (socialist 38 hr working weeks) is just fanciful
I don’t understand how why people are forever talking about gold backed currencies. First of all, we don’t have nearly enough of it to back even a modest amount of money. Take the US for example – the US government and the Non-federal Reserve are said to have just over 8,000 tonnes – that would be enough to back every dollar with a few cents worth of gold.
Energy policy of the European Union
http://tinyurl.com/chgflb
The EU currently imports 82% of its oil and 57% of its gas, making it the world’s leading importer of these fuels.[1] Only 3% of the uranium used in European nuclear reactors was mined in Europe. Russia, Canada, Australia and Niger were the largest suppliers of nuclear materials to the EU, supplying more than 75% of the total needs in 2007[2]
The number of unemployed French has climbed by 90,000 to stand at nearly 2.2 million in January, a French news channel has reported.
http://tinyurl.com/cdlm8g
if,
The EU energy problem get worse than that, for example…
“Russia’s Gazprom (GAZP.MM) hopes to conclude a $2.5 billion oil and gas exploration deal with Nigeria by the end of March…
Some industry experts in Europe see Russia’s deals with African OPEC members like Nigeria as an attempt to increase control on Europe’s natural gas supplies.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssEnergyNews/idUSLP38656120090225
Also, the powers that be keep telling us the Iran is broke. Then I see this story on a Chinese site…
“Iran plans to invest in Nicaragua’s energy and agricultural sectors, the Iranian ambassador to the country said Tuesday.” http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-02/25/content_10890680.htm
They’re still making deals with anti-US regimes in this hemisphere!
What do we make of all this?
25 February 2009
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“Huge pension for former RBS boss”
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“Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, is already drawing a pension of £650,000 a year, despite only being 50″…
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http://tinyurl.com/aggv3g
Russian army wants you!
http://tinyurl.com/cpqp3y
The good old unemployment-treatment from 1930-something. Maybe we will see more of it everywhere. We know how it ended than, what will be the result this time? We live in “interesting times”(?!).
Iran launches test run of first nuclear power plant
http://tinyurl.com/cafauf
leavingtheoffice,
“They’re still making deals with anti-US regimes in this hemisphere!
What do we make of all this?”
Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend wrote a (sort of) answer: The US elite must face up to America’s economic and geopolitical aging. They are presented with a choice: share the global pie with new and rising authoritarian and semi-totalitarian nations such as Iran, or pretend that the US is still young and vigorous and “fundamentally healthy”.
http://tinyurl.com/b7t6pe
Swiss soldiers will protect from pirates (Schweizer Soldaten sollen vor Piraten schützen)
http://tinyurl.com/b8xjbb
The swiss navy on the march? Maybe nothing to laugh about. They can certainly afford it.
This is for JSmith,
You once said that you liked Chase Manhatten Bank after I posted that they seemed to be the only bank that did not try and trick me (I read all fine print and follow the rules, yet Bank of America and others shafted me anyway).
:
Well, I want to take back what I said. They are now reaming me out by adding a 10 dollar “service charge” (for what, they won’t say) each month starting this past January. At first I thought it was a new annual fee, but now I see it is for every month. Again, no additional service or transaction has been provided to me. If I don’t pay it, they will inform the credit bureau. The additional 10 dollar monthly fee raised my annual interest rate from 5% to 9%.
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They also doubled the monthly amount due, which I noticed because I read everything, but they gave no warning, so I suspect many people lost their low interest rate when they did not pay twice as much starting in January. Nice trick.
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They also raised my credit limit to 10 grand, thus tearing a hole in my credit score. You get docked for having a lot of “unused credit” available. Thanks JP!
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Of course, I paid off my balance and will close out the account, but not before they skim 30 dollars off of me for nothing.
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I suspect that JP Morgan is in serious financial trouble if they feel the need to get rid of customers like me who pay on time, pay the interest, and pay off some principal every month. I don’t see how I could be a liability to them when most people will simply pay nothing after they lose their jobs, houses, or whatever.
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I guess in the end they are all crooks really, and when pressed to the wall, they will use any means possible to steal money from you, even by tearing up your credit score if you don’t comply.
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Two things make me feel better though: 1) credit scores will become meaningless in a few years and 2) an appearance in small claims court might cost them a lot more than 30 dollars. We’ll see.
Fees and other off-the cuff stuff is the true profit producer for banks!
Kind of OT again, but I had just viewed a photo gallery by high school students. An entry which caught my eye featured a guy in a suit pointing at a “hockey stick” chart, claiming his fund would return 30% a year. Guess what the photo was titled:
“Challenging Libra”
ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ
ELAINE: Timothy, could you possibly give me a link to that picture? It would be just wonderful.
DeVaul:
If on a credit card you have balances carrying two differing interest rates, all payments go toward the balance with the lower interest rate.
So even if you were to send Citi an extra $10 to pay off the monthly gotcha charge, the 10 would go toward your lowest interest rate balance.
We just received one of those Citi letters, but the issue is that our balance with them is at 0% ( it was a special offer deal a few months ago that they want out of now ).
@ IF: Every male swiss is a member of the swiss armed forces. In every swiss household you will find their automatic weapons and ammo should they get a call up. The Swiss are a well armed and as a result a polite people. Would that that were true in some other nations on this side of the pond.
There is a famous and possibly true quote from the beginnings of WWII, Georing or some other Nazi bigwig was chatting with the swiss ambassador or some such dignitary. Georing stated that the wehrmact would attack Switzerland with many divisions. The ambassador replied that the swiss would shoot back. Georing said he would double the divisions attacking, the ambassador said in that case the Swiss army would shoot twice. True or not, in none of the wars in Europe since the 1700’s have any fools tried to mess with the swiss.
CK,
I belive you, the swiss are tuff fighters and I know, the swiss aiforce used to have bases inside mountains, so the planes could shot out of tunnels high up on the mountain slopes and I remember there used to be a merchant fleet under swiss flag (at least back in 1970-1980) but I never heard of a swiss navy. The swiss personal be probably deployed on foreign ships. I ment, when needed the swiss could afford to by the vessels to carry out the task.
money is a game ‘at least appears to be simply that’… and it absolutely costs me freedoms taken by government ‘i have no doubt government is near pure waste’… what is freedom blah blah blah most dont even care and half look at the free money as the provider of security, freedom means retards arent alowed to break the rules cuz they make the rules… thats tyranny… geitner believes that we can overcome this problem ‘i would prefer bury it a while longer with great success’ and enter a new 10-20 yr age of perverse debt accomidation where we can enslave anyone we want ‘in mud’… big business is a failure not that there is no place for leadership but somehow the subsidies have stolen the responcible mantra, its just a profit machine that uses patents to juice retail markups… and what was crap yesterday looks like a gleaming turd compared to the choices i have to pay for today
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-181259944046452879&q=iluminati&total=111&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4
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noone can do it all themself
There is news that a lot of states are now starting to pass
10th Amendment Resolutions. They claim that if the Fed Gov
continues to ignore the Constitution they will go another way.
http://tinyurl.com/ao26g2
Finally, you’ve arrived. Welcome to GoldBug central!
I have been a proponent for a gold basis to the main trade currency for a long time. But unlike many gold bugs, I don’t think this will stop wars [wars over gold are notorious!] nor do I believe it will bring riches [via faux funny money] but rather, it will provide some discipline to currency exchanges and stop the wild money making in FX markets. And good riddance to that ridiculous business!
@CK re the Swiss:
An old Iranian once told me that the West had a gentlemen’s agreement with the Swiss: Nobody will attack Switzerland, and the West will park our money with you.
I tend to believe that. If the Germans had wanted Switzerland, they would have taken it easily. But they had their money there. Even countries need a place to park their stash.
Interesting times now: The Swiss are really P.O.’d at the Americans and want to actually punish it: http://tinyurl.com/c7pt9a in Reuters the other day.
Pretty ballsy, for a teeny country like Switzerland to threaten the US. “What are we to make of this?”
Huffpo and DU have picked up on this now.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/02/20/let-housing-find-its-clearing-price/
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Best Comment:
Disorderly resolution will lead to a depression that will result in economic and social change where fear embraces what is currently unthinkable. The suggestion of letting the markets unravel this mess is as irresponsible as allowing the markets to assess fair value during this bubble.
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fear??? fear that the government is run by insiders… that taxes are high and theres not much to show for it other than afghanistan and iraq… or that if we do have a violent unwinding we were lead there by a government run by insiders who present our exposure ‘to international policy failure’ not thair incompetence… or fear that we cannot be duped by strong arm government that requires us to pay our bills and tax at threat of law enforcement… while they in responce to fear spend incredibly large summs of money when they have too much exposure ‘and have a terrible ballence sheet’… i say the government is threatening, insolvent, badly managed, overpriced, and irresponsible… It is a unthinkable disorderly social change where fear encourages WAR… time to grow up son whats good for the goose is good for the gander
i swear to god after WW3 is over all you will hear is about bernie madoff…
@ leavingtheoffice:
“Iran plans to invest in Nicaragua’s energy and agricultural sectors, the Iranian ambassador to the country said Tuesday.”–“What are we to make of this?”
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Why should we make anything of this?
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Iran has a very young population; something like 75% of them are under 19. High unemployment. Smart. Well-educated. Hungry.
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And a great empire under Cyrus. For all the right wing nutbag bible beaters out there: The Bible is full of Iran and its doings. If you people think that you can waltz in and destroy Iran, I think your god will stop you. Remember that Jewish history and therefore Christianity began when a Persian King ended the Babylonian captivity. God likes Iran.
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Governments take care of themselves and have a right to pursue their sovereign interests–just like the US does. Governments have a duty to take care of their people and make sure that they don’t suffer or starve. Because the Iranians just threw a bunch of corrupt, foreign-backed sons of bitches out 30 years ago. They had a big fat revolution, remember? The people spoke.
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So the Iranian government is taking care of its people. That is what we make of this.
guys that think that panic will ensue if government gets out of the way have never professionally dealt with government regulation
lol irans whistlestop tour of the globe
so yo’ iran you got freedom 7 days a week over there bannin’ ball caps
What you’re seeing with credit accounts is a drying-up of the once easily-available cheap credit that was a major cause of the current mess. Just about every credit issuer anywhere is in the process of repricing accounts to where they probably should have been to begin with.
Yes, credit is Funny Money and that is vanishing since it was all money created in the FUTURE and the future has collapsed into the present and there is NO FUTURE MONEY coming in the future. See? Time is money.
That may be so, but I view it more as a violation of contract. I had only one balance transfer at 5% interest, no purchases or other transactions ever on that card. The additional ten dollar fee for “nothing” is a violation of contract, especially if there was no adequate warning or explanation as to why they were adding it.
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It is not my fault that THEY mispriced their own credit. After all, they made it up out of thin air and collected money on it for years. Now they are unhappy and want to modify the contract at will.
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Perhaps the time has come to modify ALL contracts “at will”.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/02/26/the-challenge-of-health-insurance-reform/
February 26th, 2009 11:43 am GMT – Posted by Chris Cobb
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This is a stupid debate kept alive by insurance companies. If you give any real thought you would feel the same way. The only reason we have a blood sucking middleman that comes between the American people and there healthcare is because the health insurance industry keeps people scared and confused. The health insurance industry spends billions of dollars in lobby donations (bribes) to congressmen and senators to make stupid laws allowing them to game every last blood cent from our health care dollars before it actually goes to a doctor, lab, and hospital. Ask this question to any flag waving American. If your house was on fire and your family needed help. Would you find it weird if the fire department knocked on your door and asked for your fire insurance card and copy before he saves your life and puts your house fire out? Guess what you were just saved by a socialized service. IF your car gets stolen and you call 911 would you expect the operator to ask for your police protection insurance card and a visa copy before they dispatch an officer for help. The military protects the rights and freedoms of all Americans to exist not just insured Americans. Maybe we all should be required to buy constitutional protection insurance to pay for our military as well. Wake up America. Stop putting a profit price tag on humans. Preexisting exclusion kills
Americans everyday. IF you can’t get insurance because you will be unprofitable for the health insurance industry then you’re left out. The ER is for emergencies not preventive care. If a person has a small lump and no insurance he or she will stay home because there is not enough pain to justify 7 hours in a waiting room missing work to be a burden on society , six months later that lump becomes too painful to tolerate then he or she goes to ER and its too late. You catch stage 1 cancer with preventive medicine and stage 4 with ER medicine. The health insurance industry pays doctors more money if they don’t cure there patents to the best of there abilities. Its time to kill the parasite, that’s hurting American families.
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yup thats kinda how i see health insurance as just middle men sucking down the subsidies… however id just like to go to a doctor like i go shopping for food get what i need and go home… let doctors charge MORE FOR BETTER SERVICE and let word of mouth decide whos got the best care and cost… a great doctor should be able to stay as busy as he/she wants and not answer to any government dupe… and if you are a careless unskilled layz doctor hooked on a medical career, good luck
At Last, Accepting Some Clues From Across the Pond
http://tinyurl.com/bjxu2u