Global Economic Crisis

A year ago, Australia’s Treasurer, Wayne Swan, boasted that the nation’s budget for 2013 would have a surplus of  $1.5 billion Australian dollars. This was supposed to herald a fall election campaign based on the wise stewardship of the ruling Labor Party and its Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. It now looks like Gillard’s government is headed for the political scrapheap, for to its surprise, instead of a surplus, Australia’s government budget is facing a massive and unforeseen deficit.

Australia seemed the last holdout from the fiscal ravages of the global economic and financial crisis. Buoyed by its robust minerals sector linked to exports to China, it seemed that the land of Oz down under was immune to the wave  of unemployment and fiscal deficits afflicting virtually every other major advanced economy. Now Swan, with egg on his face, has embarrassingly revealed that the 2013 Australian federal budget has a projected deficit of $19.4 billion. The Gillard government is scrambling to impose rapid spending cuts in a fit of panicked improvisations.

How is it that Australia’s budget went from modest surplus to big deficit in a matter of months? The government claims that unforeseen declines in mining revenues and the appreciation of the Australian dollar are to blame. The real lesson here is that governments during the ongoing global economic crisis have consistently displayed  a poor ability to project their revenue stream,  even in as short a time span as one year. This leads to the transcending economic lesson of  Australia’s current fiscal mess.

In virtually every major advanced economy, and especially in the debt-ravaged Eurozone, the politicians are engaged in massive deficit spending schemes, claiming that their projections show that if their policies are maintained, within a few years fiscal deficits will be magically transformed into balanced budgets. On the other hand, competing  politicians claiming that steep austerity measures will eliminate deficits are also relying on fuzzy math and illusory fiscal projections.

As Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan are about to embark on their political funeral dirge, they serve as suffering symbolism of how inept politicians are, be they for stimulus spending or budgetary austerity, in comprehending the fiscal dynamics of a large and sophisticated economy.

If Hillary Clinton runs for President of the United States  in 2016, see the video about the book that warned back in 2008 what a second Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

YouTube

Hillary Clinton Nude

Hillary Clinton Nude

YouTube

HILLARY CLINTON NUDE

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

global economic crisis australia economy, australian deficit crisis, julia gillard, wayne swan

The latest economic forecast to emerge from the Eurozone’s  bureaucrats shows a deterioration within the monetary union. The Eurozone’s GDP, which officially shrank by 0.6 percent in 2012, is now forecast to contract by 0.4 percent in 2013, a 0.1 percent worsening of economic activity among the 17 countries within the Eurozone.

The fractional differences with  initial and current forecasts, and 2013 versus 2012 may be small, but they solidify a negative and worsening trend. The Eurozone is mired in recession, with no end in sight. The worst impacted Eurozone member states are in a disastrous economic depression, with catastrophic levels of unemployment, particularly in Spain and Greece. The policymakers are clueless, and the European Central Bank just reduced already meager interest rates by another 25 basis points. Stock markets might get excited by such news, but in real terms, these are attempts to cure economic pneumonia with a placebo.

With the Eurozone trapped in an unending economic and fiscal crisis, how long can China and the United States still escape the consequences of the Eurozone crisis?

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

If Hillary Clinton runs for President of the United States  in 2016, see the video about the book that warned back in 2008 what a second Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

YouTube

Hillary Clinton Nude

Hillary Clinton Nude

YouTube

HILLARY CLINTON NUDE

global economic crisis eurozone crisis, eurozone economic forecast, eurozone fiscal crisis

The unemployment rate in the Eurozone’s  4th largest economy continues to soar, and has now reached 27.2 percent. After 5 years of unrelenting economic crisis, Spain’s deep depression shows no sign of ending. The IMF projects further contraction in the Spanish economy for 2013, with the unemployment rate expected to continue to rise.

The beleaguered Spanish Prime Minister,  Mariano Rajoy, has nothing to offer the six million plus unemployed Spaniards, except for more austerity measures, masquerading as “economic reforms.”  With the worst jobs crisis since the end of the Franco dictatorship, the political leadership in Spain is impotent, and unrest among the unemployed and disaffected is increasing, with calls for mass demonstrations opposing Madrid’s economic policies proliferating on social media.

With Spain’s economy in tatters, can democracy survive, or will the economic crisis  lead to calls for a “strong man” to rescue the millions of unemployed from the utter hopelessness now raging on the Iberian peninsula?

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

global economic crisis Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, spain jobs crisis, spain unemployment, spanish economic crisis

Just when everyone thought the Cypriote banking disaster could not get any worse-how can it get worse when the government is desperate enough to steal bank depositors’ money-it has suddenly become much worse. The President of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, is back on his hands and knees, begging the European Union for more help.

It turns out that the original estimate for the cost of bailing out Cyprus and its banks of 17.5 billion euros was way under the mark. In only a couple of weeks, the latest figure on the bailout requirement is now 23 billion euros, or about thirty billion U.S. dollars, a sum exceeding the entire GDP of Cyprus. Having already announced plans to seize a significant portion of bank deposits in excess of 100,000 euros, the desperate Cypriote government is frantically scrambling for resources to pay its share of the ever-growing cost of bailing out the insolvent banks of Cyprus, including selling off the nation’s gold reserves.

Let us recall that the root cause of the banking calamity on Cyprus was the decision by the Eurozone and IMF to force creditors holding Greek sovereign debt to take a haircut- a move that inflicted devastating losses on Cypriote banks. And with the unemployment rate in Greece now exceeding 27 percent, don’t expect the “prescription” emanating from Brussels to be any more benign for the already crippled economy of Cyprus.

In summation, the economic unraveling being imposed on Cyprus is a microcosm for the European monetary union’s disastrous continuity of policy prescriptions that are a train wreck of failures. In response to the Greek debt crisis, the technocrats and politicians in the Eurozone imposed austerity measures on Greece that sent that nation’s economy into a severe depression, while exporting a banking crisis to Cyprus. And now, in response to the banking calamity in Cyprus, the Eurozone policymakers are set to repeat the same formula on that embattled Island.

In the past two years in which the Eurozone has been afflicted with a profound economic and debt crisis, the monetary union’s policymakers have had nothing else to offer except for their own unique version of a circular firing squad, which continues to spread the contagion of economic contraction as a misbegotten cure for all that afflicts the Eurozone. Cyprus is only the latest victim of such ill-conceived  decision making in Brussels, and will certainly not be the last.

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

global economic crisis cyprus bailout, cyprus banking crisis, eurozone debt crisis, greek debt crisis, Nicos Anastasiades

As the Dow Jones surpasses previous records, in nominal terms, the striking contrast between fantasies on Wall Street, subsidized  by the Federal Reserve, and what is transpiring in the real global economy is best demonstrated by the latest data emerging from Europe. The unemployment disaster in the Eurozone, a by-product of the Eurozone fiscal and debt crisis and austerity-driven policy prescriptions, continues to worsen. The official unemployment rate in the European monetary union countries has now reached 12 percent, a record level.

While discordant and asymmetrical records are being recorded on Wall Street and in Europe, the very fabric of European society is fraying. The 12 percent unemployment figure is, of course, uneven. It is much worse in countries that are most afflicted by the sovereign debt crisis, especially Spain and Greece. But the countries in the core of the Eurozone, in particular Germany, with more robust economies, cannot forever see their job markets immune. They are export dependent, and many of those exports are to countries in the Eurozone with legion of unemployed. Inevitably, export-driven economies in the Eurozone such as Germany will see a day of reckoning within their own job markets, as the economic, fiscal and debt crisis continues to ravage the Eurozone with reckless abandon, most recently witnessed with the banking catastrophe in Cyprus.

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

Uncategorized eurozone debt crisis, eurozone unemployment

For those who thought that the Eurozone debt crisis had
simply gone away, they received a rude reminder that this destructive fiscal
disaster is not only still with us, but that its contagion continues to metastasize.
The private banks in Cyprus were among many privately-owned financial institutions
in the Eurozone that lost heavily on their investments in Greek debt-both
public and private. Proportionate to the size of its assets and the GDP of
Cyprus, the banks in that Island nation
were especially exposed to the ravaging collateral affects of the Greek sovereign
debt crisis.

As with other Eurozone economies whose private banks faced
insolvency, the Eurozone rescue specialists in Brussels offered a bailout
package to save the banks, with strings attached. In the specific case of
Cyprus, the terms were especially onerous. The price of a rescue package by the
Eurozone for Cypriote banks was the requirement that the individual depositors in
those banks bear most of the cost of the bailout. All savers with deposits of up
o 100,000 euros would pay a levy of 6.75 percent of the amount they had deposited with the
financial institution-a deposit of over
100,000 euros would be required to sustain a staggering levy of 9.9 percent.

Was it hubris, or simply rank stupidity (or perhaps a
combination of both) that led the politicians in Brussels and Nicosia to
believe that the Cypriote public that was about to be legally robbed, after
being lied to by their own government with sublime assurances that their deposits
were safe, would simply take such an outrageous policy prescription lying down?
When the understandably angry people of Cyprus engaged in mass protests, the
spin that came out of both Brussels and Nicosia simply defied all logic. The political
decision-makers claimed that they thought since half of the depositors of Cypriote
banks are Russian citizens living offshore, they could never imagine the
remaining Cypriote citizens who were about to be fleeced to pay for bad investment
decisions they had nothing to do with would feel so upset.

Now that reality has intervened in the bizarre punitive
bailout scheme hatched by the politicians, there is frantic back-peddling in
Nicosia. When the bank levy came before the Cypriote parliament, not a single
legislator voted in favor of it, for to do so would clearly be political
suicide. The policymakers are now scrambling for a “plan B,” but meanwhile
the damage has been done. The legalized theft of depositors’ assets that politicians in the Eurozone attempted
to enact is a precedent. Despite assurances
from Brussels that this was a one-time scenario only designed for Cyprus, every
citizen residing in the Eurozone, and in other advanced economies afflicted by
the sovereign debt crisis, now knows that a desperate government can, at any
time, seize their life savings, and employ them to bail out private investors
and bond holders. Again we see robust application of the economic maxim of our
age:”privatize all profits, but socialize all losses -with a
vengeance.”

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

global economic crisis cyprus bailout, Cyprus bank levy, eurozone crisis, eurozone debt crisis, greek debt crisis

Russian roulette is the macabre  game of death, in which a revolver with a single bullet is passed around, each player pointing a gun at his head and pressing the trigger. There is, mathematically speaking, a one in six chance of blowing one’s brains to smithereens. This morbid game of chance, strangely enough, has now been adopted as the primary fiscal model by that once-august body known as the United States Congress.

As numerous commentators have observed, the two-party political oligarchy that dominates American politics has becomes hopelessly polarized. That polarization in turn has morphed into  political paralysis, leading to an inability by policymakers to craft rational economic directives in the midst of an ongoing global economic crisis. The result is tepid economic growth at best, fueled by massive, trillion dollar per annum deficits that require staggering amounts of borrowing by the U.S. Treasury to stave off national insolvency. Therein lies the problem. The Obama administration must periodically come to Congress for authorization to raise the national debt limit; without such congressional approval, the government loses its authority to borrow money.  In a situation where Congress is politically divided, with the Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and venting unrestrained hostility towards President Obama,  the entire economy of the United States is held hostage to this political version of sausage-making. 

The last stand-off over the debt limit led to The Budget Control Act of 2011. The GOP acquiesced to raising the debt limit on condition that the Obama administration concurred with over 900 billion dollars in spending cuts over the next decade. And herein lay the minefield.  Since the Democrats and Republicans could not reach consensus on  those precise deficit reduction measures, they did agree  to creating a poison pill for themselves, which has since become known by the non-pharmaceutical name of sequestration. If Congress could not agree on which spending cuts to implement, arbitrary reductions in federal spending outlays would occur automatically, with 85 billion dollars in budget cuts coming into effect in the current fiscal year.

That wasn’t supposed to happen, for this was playing Russian roulette with fiscal policy and management of the overall national economy. Who in their right mind among the two political parties controlling Congress would want the entire globe to witness American legislators playing a game of Russian roulette as their methodology of economic management?  Yet that is exactly what has now happened.

There are arguments currently underway as to how much of an impact 85 billion dollars in arbitrary spending reductions will have on a still fragile economy. These concerns miss the essential point.  The fact that America’s political establishment has allowed such a spectacle to occur presents a discordant image to the global bond market that is essential for lending the credit that keeps the United States solvent. And increasingly, those critical lenders are seeing the fiscal decision-making of the United States being transformed into a farcical display of political expediency. There will come a time when  the bond vigilantes will simply have had enough of an increasingly dysfunctional political system still acting as though it presides over an unassailable superpower. When that time has come, the mother of all sequestrations will have arrived.

global economic crisis Budget Control Act of 2011, fiscal cliff deal, GOP, president obama, sequestration, U.S. Congress, U.S. economy

The British economy, still struggling from the aftereffects of the 2008 Global Economic Crisis and financial disaster, now has received another boot  in its ribcage. Moody’s, one of the three major credit rating agencies, has cut its assessment of the UK’s sovereign debt form AAA to  Aa1.

The U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne,  put a brave face on Moody’s slap in the face of the political managers of the British economy, by telling the media that the credit agency’s downgrade of the nation’s credit rating was “a stark reminder of the debt problems facing our country. Far from weakening our resolve to deliver our economic recovery plan, this decision redoubles it. We will go on delivering the plan that has cut the deficit by a quarter.”

Typical of other policymakers in the advanced economies gripped by a proverbial sovereign debt and economic crisis, Osborne engages in meaningless platitudes and cliches, hoping to restore market confidence shaken by a credit downgrade through the sophistry of political rhetoric. However, a politician’s words cannot on their own transform structural fiscal and economic realities that are driving the global economic crisis and its parallel sovereign debt crisis.

Cutting the deficit by a small portion through austerity measures that have thrown the British economy back into recession, which means the economic growth that is essential for the future servicing of the U.K.s massive sovereign debt, is looking increasingly more forlorn a hope, appears to be a dysfunctional remedy at best. In addition, Moody’s rating cut may impose upward pressure on gilt yields, leading to even higher future budgetary deficits. And, with a new Governor soon to take over as head of the Bank of England, it is not certain that the embattled and befuddled British politicians can rely on the nation’s central bank to again become the lender of last resort through the money printing engendered through quantitative easing.

Moody’s has done more than just kill the U.K.’s AAA credit rating; it is a reminder of how dire the economic and fiscal situation is in Britain, just as it is in the Eurozone, U.S. and Japan.

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

global economic crisis british economy, british recession, George Osborne, moody's, sovereign debt crisis, U.K. credit downgrade

The latest data released by Eurostat shows that in the final quarter of 2012, the Eurozone area’s combined GDP contracted by 0.6 percent. This follows a previous quarter of negative growth, reflecting the fact that the Eurozone is confronting both a staggering debt crisis and an economic recession simultaneously. The Q4 data shows that even Germany’s  economy, the strongest in the Eurozone, also contracted.

Negative growth will only exacerbate the Eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis. With the worst afflicted economies dependent on massive loans from German taxpayers and the IMF, the continuing negative economic trends demonstrate how improbable the calculations of the monetary union ’s policymakers are in their gamble that they can miraculously restore economic growth while solving the Eurozone’s debt crisis. The latest Eurostat data confirms the insoluble conundrum confronting the politicians  in the Eurozone.

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

 To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Street go in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

 

global economic crisis debt crisis, Eurostat, eurozone crisis, eurozone recession

With the Dow Jones having reached 14,000, it can be said that the worst losses on the index since 2008 have been made whole. But does that mean the global economic crisis is over? Hardly, as what we are seeing on Wall Street is totally unconnected to the real economy, American or global, as most economists and experts realize. The Dow Jones rally is a product of financial engineering, as opaque as any mortgage backed security, courtesy of the U.S. Federal Reserve and its chairman, Ben Bernanke.

While the rally on Wall Street has been occurring, unemployment in virtually every advanced economy, including America, has remained at historically high levels, despite unprecedented deficit spending  by governments. With austerity now replacing stimulus as the mantra of policymakers in the United States and Europe, there is no realistic likelihood for any meaningful reduction in the unemployment rate in the U.S., Eurozone and U.K.  in 2013. Currency wars are being waged by desperate governments, as economic strife leads to political unrest and instability, and geopolitical tensions threaten to blow up what remains of an anemic global economic recovery at anytime during the next twelve months. Yet, despite  the dire straits and fragility of the real economy, central bankers worldwide, but especially the Federal Reserve in the United States, have succeeded in raising equity valuations with all the deft  cunning of a snake charmer.

By design, the Fed, spooked over a moribund economy that is saturated with  sovereign debt and enfeebled by incompetent policymakers, has deployed monetary policy for one purpose; to create the mother of all asset bubbles, right on Wall Street.  Fed  Chairman Bernanke has imposed an essentially zero interest rate policy, or ZIRP, for what seems an eternity, with the objective of punishing savers and fixed income investors, and forcing them to plow their money into equities in search of any yield above real inflation, irrespective of risk factors.

The brokers on Wall Street are obviously delighted. But this stock market engineering by Ben Bernanke can only work in the long-term if the real economy recovers. Failing that, there is the old Newtonian law of physics; whatever goes up must surely come back down to earth.

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

 To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Street go in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

 

global economic crisis ben bernanke, dow jones, equities, federal reserve, stock market, unemployment rate