Spain Planning To Breach EU Budget Targets, Warns Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy

Spain is already planning to breach its budgetary targets, defying European leaders on the day they signed their historic fiscal pact.
by Louise Armitstead and Bruno Waterfield, Telegraph.co.uk:

Mariano Rajoy, prime minister of Spain, said the budget deficit would be 5.8pc of GDP in 2012 – more than 30pc higher than the 4.4pc target agreed by Brussels.
In a move that was heralded in Spain as defiance against the German-led austerity drive, Mr Rajoy said he had decided to set a new target rather than extract €44bn (£36.6bn) from the budget at a time of economic crisis. Mr Rajoy said it was now a “sensible and reasonable” target. “This is a sovereign decision made by Spaniards,” he said.
Spain’s appeals to Brussels to relax the targets have been rebuffed in recent days. The European Commission has reportedly insisted on investigating the reasons for Spain missing its previous targets first.
Read More @ Telegraph.co.uk

 

 

Prepare For Another Lost Decade

Admin at Jim Rogers Blog - 2 hours ago

We are all going to continue to get deeper and deeper into debt. You think that problems are bad now, you wait until we don’t have any more credit. Prepare for another lost decade or more. - in RT.com *Jim Rogers is an author, financial commentator and successful international investor. He has been frequently featured in Time, The New York Times, Barron’s, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and is a regular guest on Bloomberg and CNBC.*

WHY SILVER, WHY NOW?

The Central Banks' Assault On Savers

In the US, anyone who has chosen to live within his or her means over the past four years has paid a heavy price. As is the case everywhere else, the Fed gets things precisely backwards. Their contention is that borrowing is essential for economic "health". In reality, the ability to borrow is the RESULT of the economic health displayed by those who have savings to lend. But what the Fed and the other central banks want to "save" is not the economy, it is the financial system and the imaginary prices of financial assets which form its only foundation.

MF Global: What Happened to the Money - 'Well, This Is Not a Boat Accident'

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Triple Lutz Report – Corzine and MF Global Crimes to Go Unpunished – Episode 166

from The Financial Survival Network:

Surprise surprise, John Corzine, global elitist financier and flim-flam man will not be prosecuted for his role in the MF Global theft and fraud. It seems that the US Attorneys involved just can’t figure out if any crime was committed. There’s so much paper work for them to review and it’s just too hard. Never mind bringing the entire senior executive ranks before a grand jury to squeeze the truth out of them. Never mind the fact that CME Chief Terry Duffy, the head of a national exchange, testified before Congress that he was told that Corzine was aware that customer funds were being siphoned off to pay off MF Global bets that went South.
Obviously the competence level of all government employees has eroded to the point where they can’t prosecute a crime, even when it’s handed to them gift-wrapped. And don’t expect this matter to be resolved in civil suits either. Most of them will be handled by the Bankruptcy Court Judge and will probably be tossed. So what we have here is another connected insider getting a free pass from the government and the Justice Department. When the history of the early 21st century is written, this incident will be referred as a tipping point, when confidence in both the financial system and the government disintegrated.
Click Here to Listen to the Podcast

 

 

Debt Crisis Unintended Consquences, What Greece Should Do and What About Ireland?

by John Mauldin, MarketOracle.co.uk:
“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.” — Sigmund Freud
Let me introduce Mauldin’s Rule of Thumb Concerning Unintended Consequences:
For every government law hurriedly passed in response to a current or recent crisis, there will be two or more unintended consequences, which will have equal or greater negative effects then the problem it was designed to fix. A corollary is that unelected institutions are at least as bad and possibly worse than elected governments. A further corollary is that laws passed to appease a particular group, whether voters or a particular industry, will have at least three unintended consequences, most of which will eventually have the opposite effect than the intended outcomes and transfer costs to innocent bystanders.
This week we wonder about the consequences of the European Central Bank (ECB) issuing over €1 trillion in short-term loans to try and postpone a banking credit crisis and lower sovereign debt costs for certain peripheral countries in Europe. What if, instead of holding the European Monetary Union (EMU or Eurozone) together, that actually makes a breakup more likely? That would certainly fall under the rubric of unintended consequences, and be worth our time to contemplate in this week’s letter.
Read More @ MarketOracle.co.uk

 

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