Global Economic Crisis

Continuing a two year trend that has seen the once AAA rating of French sovereign debt reduced, the ratings agency S & P announced it is cutting its rating on government debt from Paris to AA.  This decision flows from the moribund state of the second largest economy in the Eurozone, which is suffering from high unemployment, large public deficits and a failure to engineer strong economic growth.

The government of French President Hollande came to office on a pledge to create new jobs by defying the austerity trends of other Eurozone partners, in part to be financed by higher taxes. The populist message of Hollande, once translated into public policy, has failed to lift the French economy, and notwithstanding the boasts of politicians in Hollande’s administration, S & P clearly sees sovereign debt issued by France as being less credit worthy in the wake of current fiscal and economic policies.

In the meantime, the European Central Bank, which under its president, Mario Draghi, has followed in lockstep with the Fed’s Ben Bernanke in implementing a near zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), has just cuts its interest rate from half a percent to a quarter of a percent. The most recent rate reduction by the ECB, in conjunction with S & P’s lowering of France’s credit rating, demonstrates that the fiscal and economic woes in the Eurozone are far from over. The Eurozone crisis continues.

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Hillary Clinton Nude

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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 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.

According to the EU commissioner  from Germany, Gunther Oettinger , Greece will need another financial bailout form the Eurozone-which really means primarily German taxpayers. Not surpassingly, Greek politicians are denying the need for another bailout. This is an old game; the politicos  in the Eurozone, especially from the fiscally vulnerable PIIGS nations, always maintain they do not need a bailout just before they beg for one.

While the official word from Athens and the Eurozone is that things are getting better for the Greek economy and its fiscal balance, the truth is that the unemployment rate is at about 25 percent; the majority of the youth are unemployed, and  Greece still depends on massive loans to survive, rhetoric to the contrary not withstanding.

According to Oettinger, Greece will need in 2014 a bailout of at least 13 billion dollars. Bear in mind that Greece has already received two separate bailouts that exceed $200 billion, along with a write-off of more than $100 billion of its external debt, which is in fact another bailout. Chances are that the figure of $13 billion needed in extra support is a lowball figure. Despite the disappearance of the Eurozone crisis from the headlines in recent months, it remains an acute and dangerous reality, while Greece continues to be ground zero for the European debt crisis.

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.

According to Eurostat, the agency compiling data for the 17-member  European Monetary Union,  unemployment throughout the Eurozone continued to rise, reaching 12.2 percent in April. In the worst afflicted Eurozone economies, the overall unemployment rate is well above 20 percent, with youth unemployment in some cases exceeding 40 percent, such as in Italy.

Even if the Eurozone were to magically transition to high rates of economic growth, it would take years to reduce the level of joblessness to levels that existed prior to the onset of the global economic crisis. However, such a miracle is not in the works. All the leading prognosticators, including the IMF, project tepid  growth at best, with several major economies in the Eurozone remaining in recession. While pressure grows on the ECB (European Central Bank) to engage in more quantitative  easing, the politicians remain impotent in the face of continued economic malaise and stagnation.

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.

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

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.

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.

 

At their most recent meeting, the finance ministers representing the 17 countries that comprise the Eurozone, along with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and ECB (European Central Bank), have thus far failed to decide on releasing the next tranche of bailout funds to insolvent Greece. Without the bailout money being released, Athens is fiscally up the creek, without a paddle.

“Greece has done what it had to and what it had committed to doing. Our partners, along with the IMF, also must do what they have undertaken.” an increasingly desperate Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras pleaded.

The austerity measures enacted by Greece have imploded the economy, now entrapped in a frightful economic depression. The debris of the Greek economy has smashed social cohesion and political stability, witnessed by the sharp rise in popularity of the Fascist and neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which has promised economic salvation through bashing the immigrants they claim are the cause of the economic woes in Greece.

It is looking increasingly likely that the repeated bailouts at the expense of Eurozone taxpayers, especially from Germany, of the insolvent Greek state will run their course sometime in 2013. The odds that Greece will default on its vast and unsustainable public debt, prompting it to leave or be expelled from the Eurozone, are growing.

As the U.S. political establishment confronts its own self-made fiscal cliff, it should view what is transpiring in Greece as an ill omen and not a situation to gloat over. It is only because of the sovereign debt crisis ravaging Europe’s economies that has enabled a reality whereby the U.S. government can borrow more than a trillion dollars a year, accounting for about thirty percent of all federal government expenditures, at record low interest rates. This situation cannot endure indefinitely. If American politicians fail to craft a sensible, sustainable, long-term fiscal consolidation, America will end up in the economic wasteland that is contemporary Greece. As we can all currently observe, such a draconian reality would present the U.S. with the choice of either  crippling austerity measures imposed by the nation’s creditors, or some form of debt default ( including the option that the Federal Reserve engineers massive inflation).

Greece is not only suffering appalling economic devastation. It is also presenting to the world a modern-day national Cassandra, with a prophetic warning that is especially relevant for American policymakers.

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.

 

Economic data released by Eurostat, the statistics office of the Eurozone, indicated that the monetary union collectively entered a recession in Q3 of 2012. As both Q2 and Q3 indicated economic contraction, the Eurozone met the technical definition of a recession for the second time since 2009.

Within the statistics, one will find at best marginal growth within the healthier economies of the monetary union, with the periphery, especially Greece and Spain, experiencing calamitous levels of economic contraction.  Most economists observing the Eurozone project at best tepid growth or stagnation during 2013.

The economic disaster within the Eurozone, driven largely by a malignant sovereign debt crisis of massive proportions, is testimony to the ongoing and destructive character of the global economic crisis that arose in 2008. With Japan also experiencing economic contraction, China reduced growth and the United States tepid growth only made possible by massive (and unsustainable) budget deficits, the outlook for the global economy remains guarded and grim.

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.

 

The last of several versions of the Eurozone bailout of Greece had a projection that Athens would have its debt to GDP ratio peak at 167 percent. The Greek authorities are now saying (surprise) that this initial estimate was far too rosy. The latest forecast on the Greek debt bubble? It is now projected to hit a peak of 192 percent in 2014.

As for the Eurozone’s previous forecast that the Greek sovereign debt to GDP ratio would decline to  a still high 120 percent in 2020, that is clearly untenable. The Greek crisis is beyond salvaging, and more bailouts merely spread  the contagion throughout the Eurozone, eventually sucking in the strongest economies in the monetary union. But let’s be clear; should Greece leave the Eurozone, as is being increasingly speculated on, such  a policy measure would have its own negativities. Had an orderly exit by Athens from the Eurozone been crafted earlier in the crisis, those repercussions could have been managed. Now the Eurozone politicos have created a situation in which all the remaining options are saturated with dire consequences.

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.

 

According to the latest data, business confidence in Germany, the Eurozone’s strongest economy, declined for the 5th straight month. The German  IFO index slipped from  102.3 in August to 101.4 in September. The erosion of German business confidence is occurring amidst the two-year old Eurozone debt crisis.

The wave of economic recessions that have afflicted the most debt prone economies in the Eurozone are the driver eroding business confidence in Germany. The Eurozone crisis threatens to retard Germany’s massive export trade to the Eurozone bloc, which ultimately will affect GDP growth prospects in Germany.

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.