The economic crisis in Europe continues to get worse and eventually it is going to unravel into a complete economic nightmare. All over Europe, national governments have piled up debts that are completely unsustainable. But whenever they start significantly cutting government spending it results in an economic slowdown. So politicians in Europe are really caught between a rock and a hard place. They can’t keep racking up these unsustainable debts, but if they continue to cut government spending it is going to push their economies into deep recession and their populations will riot. Greece is a perfect example of this. Greece has been going down the austerity road for several years now and they are experiencing a full-blown economic depression, riots have become a way of life in that country and their national budget is still not anywhere close to balanced. Americans should pay close attention to what is going on in Europe, because this is what it looks like when a debt party ends. Most of the nations in the eurozone have just started implementing austerity, and yet unemployment in the eurozone is already the highest it has been since the euro was introduced. It has risen for 10 months in a row and is now up to 10.8 percent. Sadly, it is going to go even higher. As economies across Europe slide into recession, that is going to put even more pressure on the European financial system. Most Americans do not realize this, but the European banking system is absolutely enormous. It is nearly four times the size that the U.S. banking system is. When the European banking system crashes (and it will) it is going to reverberate around the globe. The epicenter of the next great financial crisis is going to be in Europe, and it is getting closer with each passing day.
The following are 27 statistics about the European economic crisis that are almost too crazy to believe….
#2 The average unemployment rate in Greece in 2010 was 12.5 percent. During 2011, the average unemployment rate was 17.3 percent, and now the unemployment rate in Greece is up to 21.8 percent.
#3 The youth unemployment rate in Greece is now over 50 percent.
#4 The unemployment rate in the port town is Perama is about 60 percent.
#5 In Greece, 20 percent of all retail stores have closed down during the economic crisis.
#7 Some of the austerity measures that have been implemented in Greece have been absolutely brutal. For example, Greek civil servants have had their incomes slashed by about 40 percent since 2010.
#8 Despite all of the austerity measures, it is being projected that Greece will still have a budget deficit equivalent to 7 percent of GDP in 2012.
#10 In the midst of all the poverty in Greece, several serious diseases are making a major comeback. The following comes from a recent article in the Guardian….
The incidence of HIV/Aids among intravenous drug users in central Athens soared by 1,250% in the first 10 months of 2011 compared with the same period the previous year, according to the head of Médecins sans Frontières Greece, while malaria is becoming endemic in the south for the first time since the rule of the colonels, which ended in the 1970s.
Spain
#11 The unemployment rate in Spain is now up to 23.6 percent.
#12 The youth unemployment rate in Spain is now over 50 percent.
#13 The total value of all toxic loans in Spain is equivalent to approximately 13 percent of Spanish GDP.
#14 The GDP of Spain is about 1.4 trillion dollars. The three largest Spanish banks have approximately 2.7 trillion dollars in assets and they are all on the verge of failing.
#16 The number of property repossessions in Spain rose by 32 percent during 2011.
#17 The ratio of government debt to GDP in Spain will rise by more than 11 percent during 2012.
#18 On top of everything else, Spain is dealing with the worst drought it has seen in 70 years.
Portugal
#19 The unemployment rate in Portugal is up to 15 percent.
#20 The youth unemployment rate in Portugal is now over 35 percent.
#21 Banks in Portugal borrowed a record 56.3 billion euros from the European Central Bank in March.
#22 It is being projected that the Portuguese economy will shrink by 5.7 percent during 2012.
#23 When you add up all forms of debt in Portugal (government, business and consumer) the total is equivalent to approximately 360 percent of GDP.
Italy
#24 Youth unemployment in Italy is up to 31.9 percent – the highest level ever.
#25 Italy’s national debt is approximately 2.7 times larger than the national debts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal put together.
#26 If you add the maturing debt that the Italian government must roll over in 2012 to the projected budget deficit, it comes to approximately 23.1 percent of Italy’s GDP.
Well, the powers that be are pulling out all their tricks.
For example, the European Central Bank decided to start loaning gigantic mountains of money to European banks. That accomplished two things….
1) It kept those European banks from collapsing.
2) European banks used that money to buy up sovereign bonds and that kept interest rates down.
Unfortunately, all of this game playing has also put the European Central Bank in a very vulnerable position.
The balance sheet of the European Central Bank has expanded by more than 1 trillion dollars over the past nine months. The balance sheet of the European Central Bank is now larger than the entire GDP of Germany and the ECB is now leveraged 36 to 1.
So just how far can you stretch the rubberband before it snaps?
Perhaps we are about to find out.
The European financial system is leveraged like crazy right now. Even banking systems in countries that you think of as “stable” are leveraged to extremes.
For example, major German banks are leveraged 32 to 1, and those banks are holding a massive amount of European sovereign debt.
When Lehman Brothers finally collapsed, it was only leveraged 30 to 1.
You can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt. But the European Central Bank has been able to use more debt to kick the can down the road a few more months.
At some point the sovereign debt bubble is going to burst.
All financial bubbles eventually burst.
What goes up must come down.
Right now, the major industrialized nations of the world are approximately 55 trillion dollars in debt.
It has been a fun ride, but this fraudulent pyramid of risk, debt and leverage is going to come crashing down at some point.
It is only a matter of time.
Already, there are a whole bunch of signs that some very serious economic trouble is on the horizon.
Hopefully we still have a few more months until it hits.
But in this day and age nothing is guaranteed.
What does seem abundantly clear is that the current global financial system is inevitably going to fail.
When it does, what “solutions” will our leaders try to impose upon us?
No matter how often the pretty people on television tell us that the U.S. economy is getting better, it isn’t going to change the soul crushing agony that millions of American families are going through right now. The stock market may have gotten back to where it was in 2008, but the job market sure hasn’t. As I wrote about a few days ago, the percentage of working age Americans that are actually employed has stayed very flat since late 2009, and the average duration of unemployment is hovering near an all-time high. Sadly, this is not just a temporary downturn. The U.S. economy has been slowly declining for several decades and is nearing total system failure. Right now, many poverty statistics are higher than they have ever been since the Great Depression. Many measurements of government dependence are the highest that we have ever seen in all of U.S. history. The emerging one world economic system (otherwise known as “free trade”) has cost the U.S. economy tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth. The federal government is going into unprecedented amounts of debt in order to try to maintain our current standard of living, but there is no way that they will be able to sustain this kind of borrowing for too much longer. So enjoy this bubble of false prosperity while you can, because things will soon get significantly worse.
As the U.S. economy experiences total system failure, it will be imperative for all of us not to wait around waiting for someone to rescue us.
And I am not just talking about the government.
Today, millions upon millions of Americans are waiting around hoping that someone out there will hire them.
Well, the truth is that our politicians have made it so complicated and so expensive to hire someone that many small businesses try to avoid hiring as much as possible.
Businesses generally only want to hire people if they can make a profit by doing so. When our politicians keep piling on the taxes and the regulations and the paperwork, that creates a tremendous incentive not to hire workers.
Michael Fleischer, the President of Bogen Communications, once wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Why I’m Not Hiring”. The following is how Paul Hollrah of Family Security Matters summarized the nightmarish taxes that are imposed on his company when Fleischer hires a new worker….
According to Fleischer, Sally grosses $59,000 a year, which shrinks to less than $44,000 after taxes and other payroll deductions. The $15,311 deducted from Sally’s gross pay is comprised of New Jersey state income tax: $1,893; Social Security taxes: $3,661; state unemployment insurance: $126; disability insurance: $149; Medicare insurance: $856; federal withholding tax: $6,250; and her share of medical and dental insurance: $2,376. Roughly 25.9 percent of Sally’s income is siphoned off by Washington and Trenton before she receives her paychecks.
But then there are the additional costs of employing Sally. In addition to her gross salary, her employer must pay the lion’s share of her healthcare insurance premiums: $9,561; life and other insurance premiums: $153; federal unemployment insurance: $56; disability insurance: $149; worker’s comp insurance: $300; New Jersey state unemployment insurance: $505; Medicare insurance: $856; and the employer’s share of Social Security taxes: $3,661.
Over and above her gross salary, Bogen Communications must pay an additional $15,241 in benefits and state and federal taxes, bringing the total cost of employing Sally to approximately $74,241 per year. Sally gets to keep $43,689, or just 58.8% of that total.
Are you starting to understand why so many businesses are hesitant to hire new workers?
The big corporations can handle all of the paperwork and regulations that come with hiring a new worker fairly well, but for small businesses hiring a new worker can be a massive undertaking. That new worker is going to have to almost be a miracle worker in order to justify all of the hassle and expense.
But the federal government just keeps piling more burdens on to the backs of employers. That is one reason why there is such an uproar over Obamacare. It is going to make hiring workers even less attractive.
These days, most small businesses are trying to get by with as few workers as possible, and many big businesses are trying to ship as many jobs as they can overseas.
Sadly, even if you do find a good job it can disappear at any moment.
The following is from a comment that a reader named Jeff recently left on one of my articles….
It’s sad what’s happening here in this country. So many lucky ones defend it. In America it’s not exactly about hard work anymore, it’s about who you know always. The ability to keep people stupid as well as in debt was established here well by corporations also. You cannot start a solid hiring business like you could years ago.
I know many of folks who don’t break a sweat and earn more money than I ever will in a week. The system is getting crazy only creating two extremes. I fought for this country right after 9/11 as a young naive person. Using my grandfather’s old stories to see the dream that this country was always suppose to have.
The company I still unfortunately work for (cause other places are worse), 4 years ago they froze our salaries. No raises yet, this is when the company was bought by an investment group for 500 million.
Now we are getting sold to Japan for 1 billion. A 500 million dollar profit. Sorry if I may be ignorant in this way of business. But it seems the only one who benefited from this is that group of investors. 400+ well skilled jobs lost, no raises or rewards, a whole lot more work and contract obligations to meet, and less contact with management when problems surface.
I just think the United States of America is becoming the world’s poker table.
I want out of this country so bad. I don’t even know what happen to people here. The younger generation scares me how dumb they are and everyone seems so easily bought with eyecandy.
Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine your boss walking in one day and declaring that the business has just been sold to foreigners and that you are about to lose your job?
In America today, it can be absolutely soul crushing to lose a job. It isn’t as if you are going to run out and get another fantastic job in a week or two.
When you are unemployed, people look at your differently. It gets to the point where you don’t even want to interact with other people because you know that your unemployment is probably going to be the number one topic of conversation.
When you are out of work for six months or more, it is easy to feel like a failure – especially when so many other people are looking at you as if you are a failure too.
But in most cases, individual Americans are not to blame for not being able to find work.
Rather it is the entire system that is failing all of us.
The U.S. economy is bleeding good jobs and the middle class in America has become a bizarre game of musical chairs. When the music stops each round you might lose your spot. You just never know.
Looking for work in the United States in this economic environment can be a demoralizing endeavor. For example, a recent Esquire article described what one unemployed man named Scott Annechino found when he attended a job fair in San Francisco….
A glass elevator carries him to the third floor, where the front-desk girl, who knows it’s her job to be cheerful, told him the job fair is supposed to be.
A pasty kid, maybe thirty, in a too-big shirt and a cheap tie, greets him and tells him the companies are set up in rooms along the hall and that he should definitely visit all of them. Annechino, forty-four years old, wearing his best suit and shined black shoes, walks to the first exhibitor: Devcon, a home-security company. The door is closed, no one inside. Annechino looks around for an explanation. “Oh, I just got an e-mail from my contact there saying they wouldn’t be able to make it today,” the pasty kid says, fingering his BlackBerry.
A couple of other potential employers who were supposed to be here didn’t make it, either — Konica Minolta, Santa Clara University. “Yeah …” the kid says. Annechino moves to the next room. State Farm. They’re looking for people who can put up fifty grand to start their own insurance agency. The Art Institute is next, mostly looking for people who might want to go to art school. New York Life. The U. S. Army, where men wearing fatigues and combat boots offer brochures.
That’s it.
If you want to check out the rest of the sad unemployment stories in that article, you can find them right here.
But even if you do have a job, that doesn’t mean that everything is just fine. Average American families are finding that the prices of the basic things that they need are rising much faster than their paychecks are.
According to one recent study, more than half of all Americans feel as though they are really struggling to afford just the basics at this point….
“Every retailer wants to think ‘Everything I sell is worth it! Shoppers will love it’, but the hard reality is 52% Americans feel they barely have enough to afford the basics,” said Candace Corlett, president of WSL/Strategic Retail.
Just buying food and gas is a major financial ordeal for many families these days. On average, a gallon of gasoline in the United States now costs $3.83. Many Americans burn up a huge chunk of their paychecks just going back and forth to work in their cars.
So what is the solution?
Well, according to the Obama administration the answer is even more government dependence. The federal government is now actually running ads encouraging even more people to go on food stamps….
Can you believe that?
Apparently having 46.5 million Americans on food stamps is not enough. The federal government is spending our tax money on advertisements that try to convince even more Americans that they need to be on food stamps.
What the American people really need are good jobs, but those keep getting shipped out of the country.
For example one Colorado man was recently caught stealing parts from toilets in public restrooms….
Donald Allen Citron, 48, faces 18 charges, including burglary and theft. He’s accused of stealing toilet parts from several locations, including Southwest Plaza Mall, University of Denver, and Craig Hospital.
Most of the crimes happened in just a few minutes, but police Citron is a plumber and all he needed was a wrench and a screw driver to steal pipes and the plumbing in toilets. The items he’s accused of stealing are valued at around $6,400.
They are calling him “the crapper scrapper”.
Other Americans are not willing to stoop to crime and instead suffer quietly and anonymously.
A reader named Katie recently left the following heartbreaking comment on one of my articles….
I’m almost homeless. Through no fault of my own I’d like to point out. I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. I don’t even eat fast food unless I have too.
Four years ago I had a house, car, family, stuff, an IRA, and really everything that people in this country aspire to. I had a great job that I enjoyed so did my boyfriend. Even our relationship was great.
We didn’t get hit by the economy right away. We were in Katrina damaged parts of the country and there was still a lot of construction going on and the economic boom that comes with it.
Then I got laid off. Doesn’t seem to matter that I go to interview after interview. I use indeed, monster, craigslist, and newspapers to search for jobs even outside my area.
Now my boyfriend has passed away suddenly, and his family got everything. I personally have only a living father left, who hasn’t the room but I’m camping in his yard. All my friends say they don’t have the room either. Which makes me wonder just how much of friends they are. Considering if the situation was reversed I have in the past and would open my home to anyone that needed help.
If something happens to him I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I need to get on my feet and I know that jobs are hard to come by. I’m sick of the people who have jobs saying ‘get a job you lazy bum’. I’m hardly lazy and I’m trying desperately to be employed; not being homeless would be rather awesome in my opinion. I’m not picky, regardless of my degree I’ll pick up trash or clean toilets. McDonald’s, Taco Bell and the other fast food places don’t even bother with a call back. And when I call to inquire about my application it’s always the same, ‘we will call you when we make a decision’. Such a cop-out.
So no. In my (granted meaningless opinion) the economy is not getting better. To even suggest that when unemployment is so high or the rate of food stamps. Is utter ludicrous at best. I notice that those talking heads on the cable news and radio never seem to mention that the homeless shelters have a higher occupancy level than ever before. Nor would they mention the fact that we have those shelters in abundance now across the country in comparison to the Great Depression.
I’m getting real tired of hearing how great the economy is doing. When obviously it’s not. All you have to do is open your eyes and see. Business are not coming back yet and foreclosed homes sit empty everywhere. The unemployment rate only counts the people who are getting unemployment benefits. So the people who fall off the unemployment benefits don’t get counted. Because the must have gotten a job, right? Hardly. In fact the homeless in this country are almost never counted correctly. It’s too hard to count them all, or at least that’s the excuse.
I know it’s meaningless, especially to those who see homeless and immediately have a bias, but that’s my opinion on the current state of our economy. You can count me in the 80%. Only a fool would see this as a recovery.
Please say a prayer for Katie and the millions of other Americans just like her. It can be absolutely soul crushing to lose everything that you ever worked for and not see any light at the end of the tunnel.
Unfortunately, the U.S. economy is not going to be improving in the long run. What we are experiencing right now is about as good as it is going to get. The truth is that it is pretty much downhill from here.
It is fairly simple to figure out what is happening to us as a nation.
You can’t keep buying far more than you sell.
You can’t keep spending far more than you bring in.
You can’t keep running up debt in larger and larger amounts indefinitely.
The U.S. economy is running on borrowed money and on borrowed time.
Any financial system that is based on debt is doomed to fail. Today, we are living in the greatest debt bubble that the world has ever seen, and if all of a sudden people could not use credit to buy things our economy would immediately ground to a halt. Unfortunately, no debt bubble can last forever. When this current debt bubble finally bursts, faith in the financial system is going to disappear, credit is going to freeze up and there is going to be a massive wave of bank failures. Right now, Greece is a warning sign for the world. Nobody wants to lend money to Greece, the Greek banking system is dying, one out of every four businesses has already shut down, unemployment is soaring and the Greek economy has now been in recession for five years in a row. Sadly, the economic implosion in Greece is rapidly accelerating. The Greek economy shrunk at a 7 percent annual rate during the 4th quarter of 2011. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Things were supposed to be getting better in Greece by now. But instead the Greek depression is getting even worse, and very soon the rest of the world is going to be going through what Greece is currently experiencing.
Unfortunately, most in the mainstream media are treating what is happening in Greece as an “isolated incident” rather than as a very serious warning sign for the world.
Thankfully, there are at least a few reporters out there that are realizing the gravity of the situation. The following is how one reporter from the New York Times recently described what life is like in Greece now….
By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people signed up. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards. One banker, part of whose job these days is persuading people to keep their money in the bank, said to me, “Who would trust a Greek bank?”
Can you imagine?
Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic collapse and nobody can see a light at the end of the tunnel at this point.
As I have written about previously, the overall rate of unemployment in Greece has now risen above 20 percent and the youth unemployment rate in Greece has soared to an astounding 48 percent.
Deleveraging can be an extremely painful process. Greece has been forced to try to reduce the size of its budget deficit, but every time it cuts government spending that causes economic activity (and thus government revenues) to slow down as well.
Now the EU and the IMF are demanding that even more very painful austerity measures be implemented in Greece even though Greece is already experiencing a full-blown depression.
The EU and the IMF are demanding that Greece fire 15,000 more government workers immediately and a total of 150,000 government workers by 2015.
The EU and the IMF are demanding that wages for government workers be cut by another 20 percent.
The EU and the IMF are demanding that the minimum wage be slashed by more than 20 percent.
The EU and the IMF are also demanding significant reductions in unemployment benefits and pension benefits.
Of course all of those cuts are going to make the short-term economic conditions in Greece even worse.
The rioting, looting and burning of buildings that we are witnessing right now in Greece is likely to continue for quite some time as exasperated citizens attempt to express their frustrations to politicians that simply do not seem to care.
According to the National Confederation of Greek Commerce, recent rioting resulted in damage to 153 businesses in Athens. 45 of those businesses were totally destroyed.
You can view some stunning footage of the current rioting in Greece right here.
Despite all of the austerity measures that have already been implemented, the truth is that Greece is very likely to default soon anyway.
There is a very good chance that the new austerity agreement that the Greek parliament just approved will never be implemented. There are new elections scheduled for April and the current party in power is polling in the single digits.
The new Greek government is likely to look much different from the current one, and nobody knows for sure if the new government will follow through on any of the promises being made by the current government.
In addition, the German parliament must approve this new deal with Greece, and the German parliament is not scheduled to vote on it until February 27th. Considering the mood in Germany right now, approval is not guaranteed.
So there are all kinds of things that could go wrong with the “deals” that are currently being discussed. The truth is that a Greek default in the coming months seems to become more likely by the day.
Some in the financial world almost seem eager for a Greek default. The following is what Jon Moulton, the chairman of Better Capital, recently told CNBC….
“If I was Greek, I wouldn’t be going for these measures, I’d be going for default and getting it over with. Would you like two to three years of pain or 20?”
But a disorderly Greek default would not be a pleasant thing for the global economy at all. A recent article in the Guardian detailed what some of the consequences of a Greek default and exit from the eurozone might be….
But default and “re-drachmatisation” would be a costly and chaotic process. In the long term the euro might be strengthened if some of its weaker members headed for the door. But in the short term banks across the eurozone might have to be closed to prevent a run on the single currency as investors speculated about which country might be next. A new wave of bank nationalisations would be likely to follow as lenders counted their losses on now worthless Greek debt.
Capital controls would have to be imposed and borders shut to stop money flooding out of Greece. Portugal, Italy and Spain would come under intense pressure from investors wary about the risk of another victim. Banks everywhere, already reluctant to lend, would cut back hard, nervous about their exposure to the bonds of all Europe’s crisis-hit states.
And the financial crisis in Europe is going to continue to spread well beyond Greece. Moody’s Investors Service just downgraded the credit ratings of six European nations. The following is how Bloomberg described the downgrades….
Spain was downgraded to A3 from A1 with a negative outlook, Italy was downgraded to A3 from A2 with a negative outlook and Portugal was downgraded to Ba3 from Ba2 with a negative outlook, Moody’s said. It also reduced the ratings of Slovakia, Slovenia and Malta.
Countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Hungary are heading down the exact same road that Greece has gone. Greece was the first one to experience a full-blown depression, but soon Greece will have a lot of company.
Greece is most definitely a warning sign for the world. If you keep recklessly piling up debt, eventually a day of reckoning comes. It is inevitable.
But Barack Obama does not seem to understand this. He continues to pile another 150 million dollars on to our national debt every single hour. He knows that cutting spending significantly right now would hurt the economy and that would significantly hurt his chances for another term.
Needless to say, Barack Obama is not likely to do anything that is going to significantly hurt his chances for another four years in the White House.
So we continue to roll on toward disaster.
The U.S. financial system is like a car with no brakes that is heading straight toward a 5,000 foot drop at 100 miles an hour.
It is all going to seem like fun and games to some people until we hit the canyon floor.
Do you want to see what a 21st century economic depression looks like? Just look at Greece. Once upon a time, the Greek economy was thriving, the Greek government was borrowing money like there was no tomorrow and Greek citizens were thoroughly enjoying the bubble of false prosperity that all that debt created. Those that warned that Greece was headed for a financial collapse were laughed at and were called “doom and gloomers”. Well, nobody is laughing now. You see, the truth is that debt is a very cruel master. Greeks were able to live way beyond their means for many, many years but eventually a day of reckoning arrived. At this point, the Greek economy has been in a recession for five years in a row, and the economic crisis in that country is rapidly getting even worse. It was just recently announced that the overall rate of unemployment in Greece has soared above 20 percent and the youth unemployment rate has risen to an astounding 48 percent. One out of every five retail stores has been shut down and parents are literally abandoning children in the streets. The frightening thing is that this is just the beginning. Things are going to get a lot worse in Greece. And in case you haven’t been paying attention, these kinds of conditions are coming to the United States as well. We are heading down the exact same road as Greece went down, and the economic pain that this country is eventually going to suffer is going to be beyond anything that most Americans would dare to imagine.
All debt spirals eventually come to an end. For years, Greece borrowed huge amounts of very cheap money, but there came a point when the debt became absolutely strangling and the rest of the world refused to lend the Greek government money at such cheap rates anymore.
Greece would have defaulted long before now if the EU and the IMF had not stepped in to bail them out. But along with those bailouts came strings. The EU and the IMF insisted that the Greek government cut spending and raise taxes.
Well, those spending cuts and tax increases caused the economy to slow down. Tax revenues decreased and deficit reduction targets were missed. So the EU and the IMF insisted on even more spending cuts and tax increases.
Even after all of the spending cuts and all of the tax increases that we have seen, the debt to GDP ratio in Greece is still higher than it was before the crisis began. Today, the Greek national debt is sitting at 142 percent of GDP.
Now the EU and the IMF are demanding even more austerity measures before they will release any more bailout money.
Needless to say, the Greek people are pretty much exasperated by all of this. They created this mess by going into so much debt, but they certainly don’t like the solutions that are being imposed upon them.
Protesters in Greece are absolutely outraged that the EU and the IMF are now demanding a 22 percent reduction in the minimum wage.
Most families in Greece are just barely surviving at this point. Unfortunately, Greece is probably looking at depression conditions for many years to come.
Over the past three years, the size of the Greek economy has shrunk by 16 percent.
In 2012, it is being projected that the Greek economy will shrink by another 5 percent.
Sadly, that projection is probably way too optimistic.
Over the past couple of months, it has been like someone has pulled the rug out from under the Greek economy. Just check out the following numbers from an article in the Telegraph by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard….
Another normal day at the Hellenic Statistical Authority.
We learn that:
Greece’s manufacturing output contracted by 15.5pc in December from a year earlier.
Industrial output fell 11.3pc, compared to minus 7.8pc in November.
Unemployment jumped to 20.9pc in November, up from 18.2pc a month earlier.
I have little further to add. This is what a death spiral looks like.
Can you imagine unemployment going up by 2.7 percent in one month?
This is what a 21st century economic depression looks like.
And needless to say, civil unrest is rampant in Greece.
The following is how a USA Today article described some of the protests that we saw in Greece this week….
Scores of youths, in hoods and gas masks, used sledge hammers to smash up marble paving stones in Athens’ main Syntagma Square before hurling the rubble at riot police.
The country’s two biggest labor unions stopped railway, ferry and public transport schedules, and hospitals worked on skeleton staff while most public services were disrupted. Unions were planning protests in Athens and other cities around midday.
Greek citizens are exasperated by the endless rounds of austerity that are being imposed upon them. They wonder how far all of this is going to go.
Greece has the third highest rate of VAT in Europe, second highest gas/petrol tax, third highest tax on social insurance contributions, fifth highest VAT on alcohol, highest property tax and one of the worst corporate tax rates, without the quality of living or competitiveness to match.
How much farther can government pay be cut? Greek civil servants have had their incomes slashed by about 40 percent since 2010.
How would you feel if your pay was reduced by 40 percent?
Large numbers of Greeks are rapidly reaching the end of their ropes. The following is from a recent article in the Independent….
“People are scared and haven’t really realised what’s happening yet,” George Pantsios, an electrician for the country’s public power corporation, said. He has only been receiving half of his €850 monthly wage since August. “But once we all lose our jobs and can’t feed our kids, that’s when it’ll go boom and we’ll turn into Tahrir Square.”
Instead of turning violent, others are simply giving in to despair. According to the Daily Mail, large numbers of Greek children are being abandoned because their parents simply cannot afford to take care of them anymore. The note that one mother left with her little toddler was absolutely heartbreaking….
One mother, it said, ran away after handing over her two-year-old daughter Natasha.
Four-year-old Anna was found by a teacher clutching a note that read: ‘I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her. Please take good care of her. Sorry.’
Sadly, there are an increasing number of Greeks that are giving up on life entirely. The number of suicides in Greece rose by 40 percent during just one recent 12 month time period.
But we haven’t even seen the worst in Greece yet. The worst is still yet to come.
And the people of Greece are going to get angrier and angrier and angrier.
According to one recent poll, about 90 percent all of Greeks are unhappy with the interim government led by Prime Minister Lucas Papademos.
This week, that government has started to fall apart. Over just the past few days, 6 members of the 48-member government cabinet have resigned. Not only is there real doubt if the new austerity measures will be approved, there is very real doubt if this government will be able to hold together much longer.
Frustration with the EU and the IMF has reached a fever pitch in Greece. Just check out what Reuters is reporting….
In a letter obtained by Reuters on Friday, the Federation of Greek Police accused the officials of “…blackmail, covertly abolishing or eroding democracy and national sovereignty” and said one target of its warrants would be the IMF’s top official for Greece, Poul Thomsen.
So what is going to happen next in Greece?
The truth is that nobody knows.
But whatever kind of “deals” are reached, the reality is that nothing is going to keep Greece from continuing to experience depression-like conditions for quite some time.
Unfortunately, Greece is not an isolated case.
Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain are all going down the same path and Europe does not have enough money to bail all of them out.
To get an idea of how much money it would take to bail out the financially troubled nations of Europe, just check out this infographic that was recently posted on ZeroHedge.
A day of reckoning is coming for the United States as well. As CNBC recently noted, the U.S. debt problem is far worse than the European debt problem is.
As a result of the absolutely stunning 29-23 overtime victory by the Denver Broncos over the Pittsburgh Steelers, it seems inevitable that “Tebow Time” will become a household phrase all over America. The string of last second victories that we have seen Tim Tebow pull out this season is unprecedented and we will probably never see anything quite like it again. Unfortunately, miracles don’t always happen in real life when we need them. Right now it is “Tebow Time” for the U.S. economy, the U.S. political system and the global financial system, and things look really bad. So will we see heroes rise up at this time to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or will we see the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world implode and plunge the entire planet into a devastating economic depression? Most people have no idea how fragile the global economic system has become at this point. Global leaders are currently engaged in a frantic juggling act in a desperate attempt to keep all the balls in the air. One wrong move could unleash a financial panic that could potentially be even worse than what we saw in 2008.
It is Tebow Time for the global financial system.
Lately I have been spending a lot of time writing about Europe. Many Americans have not really been too interested in these articles because they only want to hear about what is happening in the United States.
But the truth is that what is happening in Europe is of the utmost importance. The EU actually has a larger economy than the United States does, and when the European financial system collapses it is going to dramatically affect the entire globe.
For those that have not seen my recent articles on Europe yet, you can find some of them here, here and here.
The euro continues to drop like a rock. As I write this, the EUR/USD is sitting at 1.2693. That is shockingly low, and in the weeks and months to come it is going to go even lower.
But I am not the only one warning about these things. Trends forecaster Gerald Celente recently told ABC Australia that he is more concerned about the global financial system today than he has ever been before….
“I would say, since I’ve been doing this work, over 30 years ago, I’ve never been more concerned than I am right now.”
Celente also told ABC Australia that many areas of Europe are already essentially experiencing an economic depression….
“If you live in Greece, you’re in a depression; if you live in Spain, you’re in a depression; if you live in Portugal or Ireland, you’re in a depression,” Celente said. “If you live in Lithuania, you’re running to the bank to get your money out of the bank as the bank runs go on. It’s a depression. Hungary, there’s a depression, and much of Eastern Europe, Romania, Bulgaria. And there are a lot of depressions going on [already].”
Yes, things are stable (and even slightly improving a bit) in the United States right now. But it won’t be long before the financial tsunami that is sweeping Europe hits us as well.
It is Tebow Time for U.S. consumers.
We should all be thankful that the employment situation in the U.S. has stabilized, but things are not as good as the mainstream media would have you to believe.
Instead of 8.5%, the “official” unemployment number put out by the federal government should be about 11 percent, and the “real” unemployment number is somewhere around 22 or 23 percent.
And if you take a long-term view of things, there is no reason to celebrate at all. The truth is that the middle class in America is being systematically destroyed and we won’t see much permanent improvement until this country fundamentally changes direction.
Right now, there are tens of millions of Americans that can’t find a decent job. A lot of people are sitting at home as you read this staring blankly at the television as they wonder why nobody will hire them.
Once in a while, a little bit of this despair leaks into the mainstream media. The following comes from a CNBC article that was posted on Saturday….
Despite an upswing in hiring during 2011, the jobs crisis could last many more years as millions of Americans struggle to find work.
In Orlando, Florida, Brenda Solomon lost her retail job last May at a department store and was unable to find even temporary work during the holiday season.
“I’ve tried and tried and tried,” Solomon, 58, said on Friday while visiting a job center.
As they struggle to make ends meet each month, millions upon millions of U.S. consumers continue to run up even more debt as an article posted on CNBC recently detailed….
During the third fiscal quarter of 2011, U.S. consumers added $17 billion in new credit card debt, wiping out what remained of a $33 billion first-quarter pay down and putting us on pace for a $64 billion net gain in credit card debt during 2011, according to a Card Hub study.
It is Tebow Time for the Republican Party.
America desperately needs a fundamental change of direction, but right now a candidate heavily backed by the Wall Street banks is threatening to run away with the Republican nomination.
Mitt Romney is a politician in the worst sense of the word. He just wouldn’t be a bad president. He would be an absolute disaster. In fact, if Romney gets elected, it will basically guarantee a Democratic victory in 2016 (could be Hillary) and the Republican Party will be so damaged that they may never have another shot at turning this country around.
When it comes to evaluating Mitt Romney, do not listen to what he says. The reality is that what he says changes a little bit every single day. His flip-flopping is legendary.
No, when it comes to evaluating Mitt Romney, it is absolutely imperative to look at his record.
And when you look at his record (what he has actually done), it quickly becomes clear that he is basically just a more experienced version of Barack Obama.
When the mainstream media says that Mitt Romney has the best chance of beating Barack Obama, that is because they feel as though he is the candidate that is most like Barack Obama.
If it is Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney in the general election, we are basically guaranteed four more years of establishment rule. Yes, there will be some minor changes, but everything will pretty much continue running the way that it is now no matter which one wins.
And please don’t believe that Mitt Romney will get government spending and government debt under control. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the Romney tax plan would add 600 billion dollars to the federal budget deficit in 2015.
Mitt Romney is not going to fix any of our fundamental problems. If he was a master at “job creation”, then Massachusetts would not have been 47th in the nation at creating jobs while he was governor.
If Mitt Romney gets the nomination, it will just be another indication that the Republican Party is bought and paid for by the establishment.
Just check out who is giving money to Romney. Did you know that Goldman Sachs is his biggest donor? The following numbers come from opensecrets.org….
Goldman Sachs $367,200
Credit Suisse Group $203,750
Morgan Stanley $199,800
HIG Capital $186,500
Barclays $157,750
Kirkland & Ellis $132,100
Bank of America $126,500
PriceWaterhouseCoopers $118,250
EMC Corp $117,300
JPMorgan Chase & Co $112,250
The Villages $97,500
Vivint Inc $80,750
Marriott International $79,837
Sullivan & Cromwell $79,250
Bain Capital $74,500
UBS AG $73,750
Wells Fargo $61,500
Blackstone Group $59,800
Citigroup Inc $57,050
Bain & Co $52,500
But the numbers above are nothing compared to the money being poured into the “Super PACs” that are backing Romney. The financial elite are dumping tens of millions of dollars into these “Super PACs”, and these “Super PACs” are playing a huge role in this campaign.
The New York Times reports that New York hedge-fund managers and Boston financiers contributed almost $30 million to “Restore Our Future” before the Iowa caucuses. And “Restore Our Future“‘s faux independence has allowed Romney to publicly distance himself from them, their money, and the dirty work that their money has bought.
More than anyone else running for president, Mitt Romney personifies the top 1 percent in America — actually, the top one-tenth of one percent. It’s not just his four homes and estimated $200 million fortune, not just his wheeling and dealing in leveraged-buyouts and private equity, not even the jobless refugees of his financial maneuvers that makes him the Gordon Gekko of presidential aspirants.
It’s his connections to the epicenters of big money in America — especially to top executives and financiers in the habit of investing for handsome returns.
The way the political game is played in America today, the candidate with the most money almost always wins.
Mitt Romney and the organizations that are supporting Mitt Romney are sitting on gigantic mountains of cash.
Can any of the other Republican candidates overcome that disadvantage?
History would tell us no.
That is why it is Tebow Time for the Republican Party.
It is late in the game and things look desperate.
And if we don’t turn the country in a different direction in 2012, we may not get another chance.
Right now, the U.S. debt crisis is getting worse by the day. To get an idea of just how bad the U.S. national debt has become, just check out the infographic that is posted right here.
If we do not get our financial house in order and fundamentally change our economic policies, we are absolutely doomed.
If Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is elected in 2012, that is pretty much going to seal our fate.
For a lot of Americans, this is the worst time of the year. If you don’t have any money, it can be really hard to hear others go on and on about how good “Santa Claus” was to them this year. For many, there is simply not much to be cheerful about as the year ends. There are millions of people in this country that do not have a “happy family” to spend the holidays with, there are millions of people in this country that do not have any money to spend on gifts, and there are millions of people that are either already sleeping in the streets or that are in imminent danger of losing their homes. It can be really difficult to feel “holiday cheer” when you are freezing cold and you don’t have any food in your stomach. The realization that you are not going to enjoy any of the good things that other people get to enjoy this time of the year is enough to push many people over the edge. Yes, for most of the country this time of the year is filled with food, family and fun but for millions of others this time of the year tends to magnify despair, depression and thoughts of suicide. If you are blessed as we get ready to enter 2012, please remember those out there that are really hurting. If someone does not help them, they might not make it to 2013.
In our society today, the “holiday season” is held up as the ultimate time of the year. Often expectations are so high that they are almost impossible to fulfill. The truth is that materialism is never going to bring anyone true fulfillment, and once Christmas is over many Americans are left with a very hollow feeling.
But all of the “Christmas hype” on television and in the movies can make it seem like this is a “magical” time of the year for most people. For those that are in a tremendous amount of emotional pain, the holidays can be excruciating because they can feel as though they are “missing out” on all the fun and happiness that everyone else is experiencing. That is why for many Americans that are “on the edge”, this can be the absolute worst time of the year.
When people go “over the edge”, the consequences can be devastating.
For example, have you noticed how there always seems to be a rash of murder-suicides at this time of the year?
One murder-suicide that made national headlines happened down in Texas. It turns out that the killer actually dressed up as Santa Claus. The following description of this stunning incident comes from an article posted on USA Today….
Police said the man they believe is responsible for a Christmas Day shooting that left him and six members of his extended family dead was dressed as Santa Claus.
Grapevine police spokesman Sgt. Robert Eberling said Monday the shooter “showed up shortly before the incident took place” in the Santa outfit and was a member of the family opening gifts in the apartment.
Could you imagine being killed by a family member dressed as Santa Claus?
But sometimes people do not snap in a family setting. For some, it is the work environment that sets them off. Just consider the following example from a recent article in the Washington Post….
A Southern California Edison employee chatted calmly with co-workers in the moments between gunning down four managers during a rampage at an office complex, authorities said as the building reopened Tuesday.
Investigators still were trying to determine what pushed gunman Andre Turner to finish a normal workday by shooting the workers with a semiautomatic handgun before turning it on himself.
Every year we also see reports of Christmas presents being stolen right out from under the tree. The following comes from an article in the Los Angeles Times….
A Northern California family victimized in a burglary a few days before Christmas is hoping to at least get their dog back.
The Lancers lost all of the presents under the tree along with their dog when their home in Morgan Hill, southeast of San Jose, was broken into last week, authorities said Sunday.
There are a lot of people out there that do not have any hesitation about stealing from others. Desperate people do desperate things, and right now the number of desperate people in America is growing.
Tonight, there are millions upon millions of Americans that cannot find work and that are incredibly stressed. The truth is that there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. If the number of Americans considered to be “looking for work” was the same today as it was back in 2007, the “official” unemployment rate would be up to 11 percent.
But the Obama administration does not want to report such a depressing number.
8.6 percent just sounds so much more pleasant.
For even more crazy economic numbers that show just how bad the U.S. economy really was in 2011, just check out this article.
But of course our leaders are enjoying a good, long break from all of the “hard work” that they have put in toward fixing the economy.
Nancy Pelosi has jetted off to Hawaii and is spending her holidays in a suite that rents for $10,000 a night.
Barack Obama and his family are in Hawaii as well. It has been estimated that their Hawaiian vacation will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million dollars.
It is shameful that our “leaders” are enjoying such luxury at a time when so many millions of Americans are barely surviving.
One of the reasons why my site has struck such a nerve is because the pain that millions of Americans are going through right now is very real.
I sleep in my car. I have nowhere else to go. It gets really cold and hurts my bones. I would love love love to go back to work but I was hospitalized 12 times in two years. I wouldn’t be able to keep a job because of my health i’m not dependable. THESE are the people who are homeless. It’s also a LOT of veterans that are homeless. But I sleep in my car. Often on family property and I’m still stalked and harassed by police and I’m sick of it.
In another comment, Ricci shared even more of her story….
Wow….do you really think that? I am a licensed social worker for 10 years. In 2005 I lost a son & daughter 3 hours after they were born. For 3 years I suffered in pain, still working my ass off, but found I was very ill. After chemo, immuno-suppressants, and a myriad of other medications I could not afford, I went bankrupt and lost my house. By this time, I was awarded disability on the first try w/o an attorney. I wasn’t expected to live. But here I am. I can barely move somedays I hurt so much. I don’t have family willing to take me in. I look fine on the outside you know. If I would just have more faith or exercise more or eat the right foods I would be cured. Whatever. I often worked 50 to 60 hours a week to protect kids from real problems (not taken away for poverty as people say……so sick of the myths about social services). Anyway, before that I worked mental health, and worked in the school district. I have busted my ass to care for other people. My husband left, children died, and when my health failed I lost everything and fell through the cracks. It’s people like me who are homeless…I do not drink. I do not use drugs. I can barely get the medications I need even w/ supplemental insurance. I get stalked and harassed by police if I so much as get tired and pull over so I don’t wreck. I was on my dad’s property in my car 3 times in two months I was approached by police…one time there were 4 cops that came to my car……on our family’s private property. My car has totally been profiled. I’m so sick of it. At this point, I would be better off dead.
So what do you say to someone like Ricci?
I have never slept in my car. I have never lost a son or daughter. I have never lost a house. I have never been homeless.
How can I identify with someone who has gone through all of that?
But we do need to tell people like Ricci not to ever give up. The vast majority of us have been at very low points in our own lives, and the secret is to keep on fighting and to never, ever give up. No matter how bad things get, they can always be turned around if you will just have faith.
We should remember to pray for people like Ricci and the millions of other Americans that are going through similar trials. We should also look for ways to help people that are really hurting in our own communities.
Yes, we cannot possibly rescue everyone is hurting. But what we can do is love the one that is in front of us.
Unfortunately, our economic problems are only going to get worse. America is in the middle of a long-term decline that is rapidly accelerating. That means that there are going to be lots more people that are going to lose their jobs and their homes.
So let us do what we can to focus on real world solutions and to focus on preparing for the hard times that are coming.
We waste so much time on unnecessary things. For example, did you know that there are over 695,000 status updates on Facebook every single minute?
Every 60 seconds.
Amazing.
As bad as 2011 was, it looks like 2012 is going to be significantly worse. It won’t be the end of the world of course, but huge challenges are ahead. Now is the time to get our priorities in order and to start focusing on the things that really matter.
What happens when you attempt a cold shutdown of one of the biggest debt spirals that the world has ever seen? Well, we are about to find out. The politicians in Europe have decided that they are going to “take their medicine” and put strict limits on budget deficits. They have also decided that the European Central Bank is not going to engage in reckless money printing to “paper over” the debts of troubled nations. This may all sound wonderful to many of you, but the reality is that there is always a tremendous amount of pain whenever a massive debt spiral is interrupted. Just look at what happened to Greece. Greece was forced to raise taxes and implement brutal austerity measures. That caused the economy to slow down and tax revenues to decline and so government debt figures did not improve as much as anticipated. So Greece was forced to implement even more brutal austerity measures. Well, that caused the economy to slow down even more and tax revenues declined again. In Greece this cycle has been repeated several times and now Greece is experiencing a full-blown economic depression. 100,000 businesses have closed and a third of the population is living in poverty. But now Germany and France intend to impose the “Greek solution” on the rest of Europe. This is going to create the conditions needed for a “perfect storm” to develop and it means that the European financial system is heading for an implosion of historic proportions.
The easiest way to deal with a debt spiral is to let it keep going and going. That is what the United States has done. Sure, “kicking the can down the road” makes the crisis much worse in the long run, but bringing the pain into the present is not a lot of fun either.
Europe has decided to do something that is unprecedented in the post-World War II era. They have decided to put very strict limits on budget deficits and to impose tough sanctions on any nations that break the rules. They have also decided that they are not going to allow the European Central Bank to fund the debts of troubled nations with reckless money printing.
Without a doubt, this is a German solution for a German-dominated Europe. Germany does not want to pay for the debt mistakes of other EU nations, and so they are shoving bitter austerity down the throats of those that have gotten into too much debt.
But this solution is not going to be implemented without a massive amount of pain.
In fact, this solution is going to make a massive financial collapse much more likely. The following are 17 signs that the European financial system is heading for an implosion of historic proportions….
#1 As noted above, when you reduce government spending you also slow down the economy. We have already seen what brutal austerity has done to Greece – 100,000 businesses have shut down, a third of the population is living in poverty and there is rioting in the streets. Now that brand of brutal austerity is going to be imposed in almost every single nation in Europe.
#2 As the economy slows down in Europe, unemployment will rise. There are already 10 different European nations that have an “official” unemployment rate of over 10 percent and the next recession has not even officially started yet.
#3 Before it is all said and done, the EU nations that are drowning in debt will likely need trillions of euros in bailout money just to survive. But at this point Germany and the other wealthy nations of northern Europe are sick and tired of bailouts and do not plan to hand over trillions of euros.
#4 The European Central Bank could theoretically print up trillions of euros and buy up massive amounts of European sovereign debt, but this would go against existing treaties and most of the major politicians in Europe are steadfastly against this right now. But without such intervention it is hard to see how the ECB will be able to keep bond yields from absolutely skyrocketing for long. In fact, without massive ECB intervention it is hard to see how the eurozone is going to be able to stay together at all. Graeme Leach, the chief economist at the Institute of Directors, said the following recently….
“Unless the ECB begins to operate as a sovereign lender of last resort function, with massive purchases of eurozone public debt, the inexorable logic is that the eurozone will break up.”
#5 European leaders are hoping that the new treaty that was just agreed to will be ratified by the end of the summer. In reality, it will probably take much longer than that. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made it clear that the solution to this debt crisis is going to take a long time to implement….
“It’s a process, and this process will take years.”
Unfortunately, Europe does not have years. Europe is rapidly running out of time. A massive financial crisis is steamrolling right at them and they need solutions right now.
#6 Sadly, the cold, hard reality of the matter is that none of the fundamental problems that Europe is facing were fixed by this recent “agreement” as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recently noted in one of his columns….
There is no shared debt issuance, no fiscal transfers, no move to an EU Treasury, no banking licence for the ESM rescue fund, and no change in the mandate of the European Central Bank.
In short, there is no breakthrough of any kind that will convince Asian investors that this monetary union has viable governance or even a future.
Germany has kept the focus exclusively on fiscal deficits even though everybody must understand by now that this crisis was not caused by fiscal deficits (except in the case of Greece). Spain and Ireland were in surplus, and Italy had a primary surplus.
#7 Nobody wants to lend to European banks right now. Everyone knows that there are dozens of European banks in danger of failing, and nobody wants to throw any more money into those black holes. The U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have been lending them money, but a lot of European banks are already starting to run out of “acceptable forms of collateral” for those loans as one Australian news source recently explained….
“If anyone thinks things are getting better, they simply don’t understand how severe the problems are,” a London executive at a global bank said. “A major bank could fail within weeks.”
Others said many continental banks, including French, Italian and Spanish lenders, were close to running out of the acceptable forms of collateral, such as US Treasury bonds, that could be used to finance short-term loans.
Some have been forced to lend out their gold reserves to maintain access to US dollar funding.
So will the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank keep lending them money once they are out of acceptable collateral?
If not, we could start to see banks fail in rapid succession.
Charles Wyplosz, a professor of international economics at Geneva’s Graduate Institute, is absolutely certain that we are going to see some major European banks collapse….
“Banks will collapse, including possibly a number of French banks that are very exposed to Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain.”
#8 Not only does nobody want to lend money to them, major banks all over Europe are also dramatically cutting back on lending to consumers and businesses as they attempt to meet new capital-adequacy requirements by next June.
According to renowned financial journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, European banks need to reduce the amount of lending on their books by about 7 trillion dollars in order to get down to safe levels….
Europe’s banks face a $7 trillion lending contraction to bring their balance sheets in line with the US and Japan, threatening to trap the region in a credit crunch and chronic depression for a decade.
When nobody wants to lend to the banks, and when the banks severely cut back on lending to others, that is called a “credit crunch”. In such an environment, it is incredibly difficult to avoid a major recession.
#9 European banks are absolutely overloaded with “toxic assets” that they are desperate to get rid of. Just as we saw with U.S. banks back in 2008, major European banks are busy trying to unload mountains of worthless assets that have a book value of trillions of euros. Unfortunately for the banks, virtually nobody wants to buy them.
#10 European bond yields are still incredibly high even though the European Central Bank has spent over 274 billion dollars buying up European government bonds.
Up until now, the European Central Bank has been taking money out of the system (by taking deposits or by selling assets for example) whenever it injects new money into the system by buying bonds. That makes this different from the quantitative easing that the U.S. Federal Reserve has done. But at some point the European Central Bank is going to run out of ways to take money out of the system, and when that happens either the Germans will have to allow the ECB to print money out of thin air to buy bonds with or we will finally see the market determine the true value of European government bonds.
#11 Bond yields are going to become even more important in 2012, because huge mountains of European sovereign debt are scheduled to be rolled over next year. For example, Italy must roll over approximately 20 percent of its entire sovereign debt during 2012.
#12 Once the new treaty is ratified, eurozone governments will lose the power to respond to a major recession by dramatically increasing government spending. So if the governments of Europe cannot spend more money in response to the coming financial crisis, and if the ECB cannot print more money in response to the coming financial crisis, then what is going to keep the coming recession from turning into a full-blown depression?
#13 Credit rating agencies are warning that more credit downgrades may be coming in Europe. For example, Moody’s recently stated the following….
“While our central scenario remains that the euro area will be preserved without further widespread defaults, shocks likely to materialise even under this ‘positive’ scenario carry negative credit and rating implications in the coming months. And the longer the incremental approach to policy persists, the greater the likelihood of more severe scenarios, including those involving multiple defaults by euro area countries and those additionally involving exits from the euro area.”
#14 S&P has put 15 members of the eurozone (including Germany) on review for a possible credit downgrade.
#15 The stock prices of many major European banks are in the process of collapsing. If you doubt this, just check out the charts in this article.
#16 Bank runs have begun in some parts of Europe. For example, a recent article posted on Yahoo News described what has been going on in Latvia….
Latvia’s largest bank scrambled Monday to head off a run among depositors who were gripped by rumours of the bank’s imminent ruin.
Weekend rumours that Swedbank was facing legal and liquidity problems in Estonia and Sweden sent thousands of Latvians to bank machines on Sunday, with some lines reaching as many as 50 people.
The Greek banking system is literally on the verge of collapse. According to a recent Der Spiegel article, the run on Greek banks is rapidly accelerating….
He means that the outflow of funds from Greek bank accounts has been accelerating rapidly. At the start of 2010, savings and time deposits held by private households in Greece totalled €237.7 billion — by the end of 2011, they had fallen by €49 billion. Since then, the decline has been gaining momentum. Savings fell by a further €5.4 billion in September and by an estimated €8.5 billion in October — the biggest monthly outflow of funds since the start of the debt crisis in late 2009.
#17 There are already signs that European economic activisty (as well as global economic activity) is really starting to slow down. Just consider the following statistics from a recent article by Stephen Lendman….
In November, French business confidence fell for the eighth consecutive month. In October, Japanese machinery orders dropped 6.9%, following an 8.2% plunge in September.
South Africa just reported a 5.6% drop in manufacturing activity. Britain recorded a 0.7% decline. China’s October exports fell 1.7% after dropping 3.8% in September.
Korea’s exports are down three consecutive months. Singapore’s were off in September and October. Indonesia’s plunged 8.5% in October after slipping 2% in September. India’s imploded 18.3% after being flat in September.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Europe is in a massive amount of trouble.
The equation is simple….
Brutal austerity + toxic levels of government debt + rising bond yields + a lack of confidence in the financial system + banks that are massively overleveraged + a massive credit crunch = A financial implosion of historic proportions
Unless something truly dramatic happens, the economy of Europe is a dead duck.
There is no way that Europe is going to be able to substantially reduce the flow of money coming from national governments and substantially reduce the flow of money coming from the banks and still be able to avoid a major recession.
Look, I want it to be very clear that I am in no way advocating government debt in this article. It is just that under the debt-based monetary paradigm that we are all operating under, there is no way that you can dramatically reduce government spending without experiencing a whole lot of pain.
An economic “perfect storm” is developing in Europe. All of the things that need to happen for a major recession to occur are falling into place.
So does anyone out there disagree with me? Does anyone think that Europe is going to be just fine?
Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below….
What in the world is Barack Obama thinking? The United States of America is falling apart all around him, and yet he decides to take a 17 day Hawaiian vacation. Does he even understand that he is the leader of the free world? Does he even understand that this country is mired in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression? Last year, a similar Hawaiian vacation by the Obamas ending up costing more than 1 million dollars. Other than when I was in school, I don’t remember ever taking a 17 day vacation. In fact, most Americans do not even get 17 vacation days for an entire year. Yet the Obamas seem to think that part of occupying the White House is to take as many vacations as possible. It has been reported that Michelle Obama spent over 10 million dollars of U.S. taxpayer money on vacations during just one recent 12 month period alone. It would be one thing if they were taking these vacations at a time when America was thriving, but the truth is that the U.S. is facing one crisis after another right now. Our debt is now over 15 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, the U.S. government has not been operating under an approved budget for over 900 days. More Americans fell into poverty last year than ever before. More Americans are on food stamps than ever before. An average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year. According to one recent report, only 7 percent of Americans that lost their jobs during the recession have “made it back” to where they were before the recession. So perhaps Barack Obama should spend more time doing his job rather than taking extended vacations.
During this holiday season, tens of millions of American families are suffering horribly. Any sane president would realize that this is not the time to be gallivanting off to Hawaii again. The following short excerpt comes from a recent article in the Daily Mail…..
While most Americans are lucky to get a few weeks of holiday every year, it seems the country’s leader gets a little more freedom in the matter.
President Barack Obama has announced his Christmas vacation to Hawaii – for a staggering 17-day trip.
Obama, who visited the island just two weeks ago for an economic summit, will head to Honolulu on Saturday December 17 until Monday January 2.
But this is not just one isolated incident. Obama has taken a whole bunch of vacations since he moved into the White House. According to the New York Post, Barack Obama enjoyed a total of 10 separate vacations that stretched over a total of 90 vacation days during the years of 2009 and 2010.
In addition, Obama managed to find time for 29 rounds of golf during his first two years in office.
But reportedly the biggest “vacation junkie” of all in the Obama family is Michele Obama.
The First Lady is believed to have taken 42 days of holiday in the past year, including a $375,000 break in Spain and a four-day ski trip to Vail, Colorado, where she spent $2,000 a night on a suite at the Sebastian hotel.
And the first family’s nine-day stay in Martha’s Vineyard is also proving costly, with rental of the Blue Heron Farm property alone costing an estimated $50,000 a week.
The source continued: ‘Michelle also enjoys drinking expensive booze during her trips. She favours martinis with top-shelf vodka and has a taste for rich sparking wines.
‘The vacations are totally Michelle’s idea. She’s like a junkie. She can’t schedule enough getaways, and she lives from one to the next – all the while sticking it to hardworking Americans.’
During such hard economic times, how can Michelle Obama justify spending over 10 million dollars of U.S. taxpayer money on luxurious vacations?
The American people expect a president to be at the White House working night and day to solve the problems of this nation.
Sure, it would definitely be understandable to take a day or two off here and there, but the truth is that the president should be one of the hardest working people in the country.
Instead, Obama just seems to do less and less the longer that he is in the White House. In fact, there have been numerous reports that Barack Obama barely even interacts with members of his own party in Congress anymore.
Our country is literally falling apart and we have a total lack of leadership at the top.
Sadly, there does not appear to be much hope on the horizon at the moment.
Right now, Newt Gingrich is leading the race for the Republican nomination. If he wins the nomination, the American people will have a choice between two candidates that are almost identical in 2012. The sad truth is that Newt Gingrich is not a conservative, and he never will be. Rather, he is a big time establishment stooge that would keep marching America down the same road that Bush and Obama have been taking us. When you sit down and really compare the Obama agenda to the Gingrich agenda, you will quickly find that they are almost entirely identical. If the Republican Party nominates Newt Gingrich, it will be a complete and utter disgrace.
The reality is that we desperately need real leadership and real solutions. Europe is on the verge of a massive financial meltdown. If things take a wrong turn, we could easily be looking at a financial crisis even worse than the one we saw back in 2008.
Many in the mainstream media are using the word “recovery” now that the official unemployment has fallen to 8.6%, but as Mac Slavo recently pointed out, the real rate of unemployment is still up around 22 percent.
The official government numbers assume that 315,000 Americans “left the labor force” in November. At a time when our population is constantly expanding, that seems like a shaky assumption at best.
The reality, as many of you out there are experiencing, is that times are hard and millions of Americans are becoming increasingly desperate.
For example, just check out what happened in the Sacramento area recently. One church was hit by copper thieves three nights in row….
Members of a Carmichael church that had been targeted by copper thieves for two nights in a row managed to help nab the suspected thieves when the greedy pair returned for a third night.
Nobody is off limits for thieves these days. If you can believe it, people are even stealing food from food pantries now.
This country is in a massive amount of economic trouble, and we desperately need some solutions.
But perhaps we should be thankful that Obama is taking so many vacations.
After all, just about everything he has done so far has ended up making things even worse.
Perhaps it is better if he simply does nothing at all.
But at some point this country is going to need real leadership and real solutions.
So what do all of you think?
Do you think that there is any hope for this country on the horizon?
The economic crisis in Europe continues to get worse and eventually it is going to unravel into a complete economic nightmare. All over Europe, national governments have piled up debts that are completely unsustainable. But whenever they start significantly cutting government spending it results in an economic slowdown. So politicians in Europe are really caught between a rock and a hard place. They can’t keep racking up these unsustainable debts, but if they continue to cut government spending it is going to push their economies into deep recession and their populations will riot. Greece is a perfect example of this. Greece has been going down the austerity road for several years now and they are experiencing a full-blown economic depression, riots have become a way of life in that country and their national budget is still not anywhere close to balanced. Americans should pay close attention to what is going on in Europe, because this is what it looks like when a debt party ends. Most of the nations in the eurozone have just started implementing austerity, and yet unemployment in the eurozone is already the highest it has been since the euro was introduced. It has risen for 10 months in a row and is now up to 10.8 percent. Sadly, it is going to go even higher. As economies across Europe slide into recession, that is going to put even more pressure on the European financial system. Most Americans do not realize this, but the European banking system is absolutely enormous. It is nearly four times the size that the U.S. banking system is. When the European banking system crashes (and it will) it is going to reverberate around the globe. The epicenter of the next great financial crisis is going to be in Europe, and it is getting closer with each passing day.
