Saturday, October 29, 2011

"We Are All Greeks" - SocGen Presents The New World Order

"We are all Greeks" - so begins one of the best reports on the unsustainability of the status quo, and on what "the new world order" will look like, created by SocGen's Veronique Riches-Flores. Her overarching observation: "No one can claim immunity from a Greek-style spiral" because "Our economies are mature, with weak potential GDP, especially post the financial crisis" and due to that old standby which everyone chooses so conveniently to forget, yet which is the biggest threat to the world's "welfare-state" stability, in existence since 1860 and which has been responsible for not only the longest period of peace in world history, but for the longest stealth plundering of middle-class wealth (there is indeed no such thing as a free lunch): "We are aging - we have no chance to see our future income improving substantially in the long run ; our savings capacities are shrinking and our health and pensions spending is increasing." That, in a nutshell, is it, no matter how many protracted essays one reads predicting the future (or war in Europe): the truth is there is increasingly less cash flow, coupled with increasingly more demands for cash.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm.... Such As An Empty Box Filled With Promises Of Money, And Europe's Soup Nazi

Some amusing weekend observations from TTMYGH's Grant Williams: "The EFSF is basically an empty box filled with promises of money - many of them from the very people who are most likely to need to borrow that same money. Should they need to borrow the money, they won’t be able to make good on their promises so there will be less money for them to borrow. Now the brain trust running Europe have decided, in their collective wisdom, to apply leverage to the non-existent money in the empty box that they have yet to actually borrow, so it can backstop even more of the hundreds of billions of Euros of sovereign debt issued by countries whose finances are in such dire straits that they either require the kind of robust growth that is hardly likely to materialize any time soon or the forgiveness by the holders of that debt of a large part of it....Of course, granting Greece the package they did this past week, the Eurocrats have rather incredibly found yet another corner into which to back themselves. You can hardly champion the ‘One Europe’ manifesto on the one hand but then, as the next country lines up at the counter, declare “No soup for you!” - but that seems to be the ‘plan’ at this stage."

The Age of Bank Failures

October 29, 2011, at 2:25 pm
by Greg Hunter

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

Dear CIGAs,

The U.S. stock market surged yesterday on news the European Union (EU) would deploy a two trillion euro rescue fund to help get its sovereign debt crisis under control. This news was so good even battered Bank of America stock jumped more than 10%. Crisis averted? Hold on, not so fast. Some big French banks are in trouble because they are up to their necks with sovereign debt. Naturally, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants action now. Yesterday, the Financial Times (FT.com) reported the French leader said, “. . . an unprecedented financial crisis will lead us to take important, very important decisions in the coming days.” Raising the sense of urgency, the French president added: “Allowing the destruction of the euro is to take the risk of the destruction of Europe. Those who destroy Europe and the euro will bear responsibility for resurgence of conflict and division on our continent.” (Click here to read the complete FT.com story.)
Jim Rickards of Tangent Capital says you have to distinguish between the bonds, banks and the euro. He said recently in an interview on King World News, “The bonds are definitely going to crash and burn. The bonds are toast. . . . The banks own the bonds, and if the bonds are toast, the banks are toast. . . . But that doesn’t mean the currency is toast.” (Click here for the complete King World News interview with Mr. Rickards.) Rickards expects the euro currency will survive, but many banks will not.
Reggie Middleton of Boombustblog.com says the reason for the coming bank failures is simple—high debt loads. Middleton says many European banks have 40 to 1 leverage. He recently explained how dangerous this was by saying, “I take a dollar and I borrow $39, and I go out and buy something with it. All you need is a 2% move to totally wipe you out—100%. And we all know a lot of sovereign bonds have moved a whole lot more than 2%.” (Click here to see more of Middleton on the Boombustblog.com.) Middleton is expecting more European bank runs as the crisis picks up speed.
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