Afraid

Millions of women in Europe are now deathly afraid to walk outside their own homes at night, and with each passing day more news reports of absolutely horrific rapes and sexual assaults come pouring in from all over the continent. So who is to blame for this epidemic of rape? I think that the answer might surprise you, because a very famous politician in the United States is at least partially responsible. But first, let’s examine why women all over Europe are living in such fear right now. I have written previously about this rape epidemic, but since that time it has gotten even worse. At this point, this plague is even affecting small towns in the far northern portions of the continent. For example, just consider what is happening in a small town in northern Sweden known as Ostersund…

Women in a town in northern Sweden have been warned not to walk alone at night in the wake of a spike in violent assaults and attempted rapes.

Police in Östersund made the unusual move to ask women not to go out unaccompanied after dark, after reports of eight brutal attacks, some by ‘men of foreign appearance’, in just over two weeks.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, police said they ‘have never seen anything like it in Östersund’, a small town in the north of Sweden with a population of just 45,000.

Of course things were not always this way in Sweden.

At one time, Sweden had some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world, but now the number of reported rapes in Sweden has risen by more than 1,000 percent since the mid-1970s.

So what is causing this?

A massive influx of immigrants from the Middle East and other third world nations is fundamentally changing Swedish society. During 2015, Sweden brought in an additional 163,000 migrants and refugees, and that was the highest level in all of Europe per capita.

Politically-correct Swedish citizens have opened up their arms to warmly welcome their new friends, but all of this kindness has not prevented an absolutely chilling wave of sexual crime. In particular, public pools have quickly gained a reputation as places where young Swedish women are very likely to be raped or sexually assaulted. The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Ingrid Carlqvist…

In 2015, when roughly 163,000 asylum seekers came to Sweden, the problems at public pools increased exponentially. More than 35,000 young people, so-called “unaccompanied refugee children,” arrived — 93% of whom are male and claim to be 16-17 years old. To prevent complete idleness, many municipalities give them free entrance to the public pools.

During the past few months, the number of reports of sexual assaults and harassment against women at public pools has been overwhelming. Most of the “children” are from Afghanistan, widely considered among the most dangerous places in the world for women. When the daily Aftonbladet visited the country in 2013, 61-year-old Fatima told the paper what it is like to be a woman in Afghanistan: “What happens if we do not obey? Well, our husbands or sons beat us of course. We are their slaves.”

In her article, Carlqvist lists example after example of sex attacks by immigrants at public pools. This is just one of those examples…

On January 21, there were reports that the number of sexual assaults had increased dramatically at the Aquanova adventure pool in Borlänge. In 2014, one case was reported; in 2015, about 20 cases were reported. The incidents involved women having their bikinis ripped off, being groped in the water slide and sexually assaulted in the restrooms. Ulla-Karin Solum, the CEO of Aquanova, told the public broadcaster Sveriges Television that many incidents “are due to cultural clashes.”

And this kind of sexual violence is not just limited to Sweden. Wherever there has been a large influx of refugees we are seeing the same things happen.

Here is one recent example from Belgium…

HORRIFIC footage has emerged of a group of young men, including five migrants, laughing, dancing and singing in Arabic as they gang rape an unconscious 17-year-old girl.

It is believed the attack happened after the girl passed out after drinking at a party.

One of the rapists later told police: “She can’t complain. Women must obey men.”

Next, here is an example from Germany…

An Algerian man who almost killed his 25-year-old student victim shouted out ‘if Allah wills it’ in Arabic as he raped her in a darkened alley, a court has heard.

The man, identified only by his first name Rheda, is accused of following the student as she walked home from a nightclub at 5am in Hannover, Germany.

Afterwards, with his victim badly beaten, he is alleged to have climbed off her and asked her if she enjoyed it.

Finally, here is a particularly disturbing example from Austria…

An Iraqi migrant has admitted to raping a ten year old boy in a Viennese swimming pool so ferociously that the boy had to be hospitalised for his injuries. The man said he knew it was wrong but couldn’t help himself as he hadn’t had sex in months.

Police investigators have ascertained that the 20 year old man entered Austria on the 13th September, travelling into the country via the Balkans.

Because most European leaders are so politically correct, they simply cannot face the truth.

In fact, some top European politicians have resorted to blaming the victims in a desperate attempt to maintain the fiction that these immigrants are responsible citizens…

One particularly divisive issue is the extent to which officials have tended to “blame the victim”, so to speak. For instance, Cologne mayor Henriette Reker drew sharp criticism for suggesting that it was German womens’ duty to prevent assaults by keeping would-be assailants “at arm’s length.”

Then there was the now infamous case of the 17-year-old Danish girl who faced a fine from police after she allegedly used “illegal” pepper spray to deter an attacker.

Okay, I promised that I would reveal a top politician in the United States that is at least partially responsible for this epidemic of rape. So let me try to explain how I arrived at my conclusion.

Most of the immigrants that are flooding into Europe are coming from areas that have been ravaged by war. In particular, more immigrants are flooding into Europe from Syria than anywhere else.

If we go back five years ago, Syria was actually a very peaceful place. In the early portions of 2011, the Arab Spring was raging, and leaders all over the Middle East were being deposed. At that time, a decision was made by officials in the Obama administration that it would be an ideal opportunity to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria as well.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and their Sunni allies in the region were quite eager to get rid of Assad. Syria is part of “the Shiite crescent” that stretches across the Middle East, but 74 percent of all Syrians are actually Sunni. So the idea was to create a “popular uprising” that would overthrow Assad, and Syria would then be transformed into a full-fledged Sunni nation and the balance of power in the Middle East would be fundamentally altered.

This effort was spearheaded by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Huge protests were organized against Assad in Syria, and those protests rapidly turned violent. A civil war began, and members of “the coalition” poured millions upon millions of dollars into jihadist groups that were attempting to overthrow Assad. And at first the plan was working well. The “resistance” was taking lots of ground and it looked like they were going to be able to push all the way to Damascus and topple Assad.

But then Assad enlisted the help of Iran, Hezbollah, Shiite militias from Iran and most importantly the Russians.

Russian air power has completely turned the tide of the war, and now the Sunni militant groups are being routed. This is why Saudi Arabia and Turkey are in such a panic, and they are looking to the Obama administration to finish what it started.

Of course all of this has brought us to the brink of World War 3, and most Americans have absolutely no idea how we got here.

And it is this horrific conflict in Syria which Hillary Clinton played such a key role in starting that has caused the worst refugee crisis that Europe has experienced since World War 2.

So how will Hillary Clinton be rewarded for her fine work?

Well, it appears quite likely that she is going to become the next president of the United States, and that is a very, very depressing thought.

The Royal Bank of Scotland is telling clients that 2016 is going to be a “cataclysmic year” and that they should “sell everything”. This sounds like something that you might hear from The Economic Collapse Blog, but up until just recently you would have never expected to get this kind of message from one of the twenty largest banks on the entire planet. Unfortunately, this is just another indication that a major global financial crisis has begun and that we are now entering a bear market. The collective market value of companies listed on the S&P 500 has dropped by about a trillion dollars since the start of 2016, and panic is spreading like wildfire all over the globe. And of course when the Royal Bank of Scotland comes out and openly says that “investors should be afraid” that certainly is not going to help matters.

It amazes me that the Royal Bank of Scotland is essentially saying the exact same thing that I have been saying for months. Just like I have been telling my readers, RBS has observed that global markets “are flashing the same stress alerts as they did before the Lehman crisis in 2008″…

RBS has advised clients to brace for a “cataclysmic year” and a global deflationary crisis, warning that the major stock markets could fall by a fifth and oil may reach US$16 a barrel.

The bank’s credit team said markets are flashing the same stress alerts as they did before the Lehman crisis in 2008.

So what should our response be to these warning signs?

According to RBS, the logical thing to do is to “sell everything” excerpt for high quality bonds…

“Sell everything except high quality bonds,” warned Andrew Roberts in a note this week.

He said the bank’s red flags for 2016 — falling oil, volatility in China, shrinking world trade, rising debt, weak corporate loans and deflation — had all been seen in just the first week of trading.

“We think investors should be afraid,” he said.

And of course RBS is not the only big bank issuing these kinds of ominous warnings.

The biggest bank in America, J.P. Morgan Chase, is “urging investors to sell stocks on any bounce”…

J.P. Morgan Chase has turned its back on the stock market: For the first time in seven years, the investment bank is urging investors to sell stocks on any bounce.

“Our view is that the risk-reward for equities has worsened materially. In contrast to the past seven years, when we advocated using the dips as buying opportunities, we believe the regime has transitioned to one of selling any rally,” Mislav Matejka, an equity strategist at J.P. Morgan, said in a report.

Aside from technical indicators, expectations of anemic corporate earnings combined with the downward trajectory in U.S. manufacturing activity and a continued weakness in commodities are raising red flags.

Major banks have not talked like this since the great financial crisis of 2008/2009. Clearly something really big is going on. Trillions of dollars of financial wealth were wiped out around the world during the last six months of 2015, and trillions more dollars have been wiped out during the first 12 days of 2016. As I noted above, the collective market value of the S&P 500 is down by about a trillion dollars all by itself.

One of the big things driving all of this panic is the stunning collapse in the price of oil. U.S. oil was trading as low as $29.93 a barrel on Tuesday, and this was the first time that oil has traded under 30 dollars a barrel since December 2003.

Needless to say, this collapse is absolutely killing energy companies. The following comes from USA Today…

There aren’t many people who feel bad for oil companies. But the implosion in oil prices is causing a profit decline that almost invokes pity.

The companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 energy sector are expected to lose a collective $28.8 billion this calendar year, down from $95.4 billion in net income earned during the industry’s bonanza year of 2008, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from S&P Capital IQ. That’s a $124 billion swing against energy companies – and one you’re probably enjoying at the pump. The analysis includes only the 36 S&P 500 energy companies that reported net income in 2008.

If we are to avoid a major global deflationary crisis, we desperately need the price of oil to get back above 50 dollars a barrel. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be likely to happen any time soon. In fact, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan says that the price of oil is probably going to stay very low for years to come…

You’d expect at least some artificial optimism when the president of the Dallas Fed talks about oil. You’d expect some droplets of hope for that crucial industry in Texas. But when Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan spoke on Monday, there was none, not for 2016, and most likely not for 2017 either, and maybe not even for 2018.

The wide-ranging speech included a blunt section on oil, the dismal future of the price of oil, the global and US causes for its continued collapse, and what it might mean for the Texas oil industry: “more bankruptcies, mergers and restructurings….”

The oil price plunge since mid-2014, with its vicious ups and downs, was bad enough. But since the OPEC meeting in December, he said, “the overall tone in the oil and gas sector has soured, as expectations have decidedly shifted to an ‘even lower for even longer’ price outlook.”

In recent articles I have discussed so many of the other signs that indicate that there is big trouble ahead, but today I just want to quickly mention another one that has just popped up in the news.

The amount of stuff being shipped across the U.S. by rail has been dropping dramatically. The only times when we have seen similar large drops has been during previous recessions. The following comes from Bloomberg…

Railroad cargo in the U.S. dropped the most in six years in 2015, and things aren’t looking good for the new year.

“We believe rail data may be signaling a warning for the broader economy,” the recent note from Bank of America says. “Carloads have declined more than 5 percent in each of the past 11 weeks on a year-over-year basis. While one-off volume declines occur occasionally, they are generally followed by a recovery shortly thereafter. The current period of substantial and sustained weakness, including last week’s -10.1 percent decline, has not occurred since 2009.”

BofA analysts led by Ken Hoexter look at the past 30 years to see what this type of steep decline usually means for the U.S. economy. What they found wasn’t particularly encouraging: All such drops in rail carloads preceded, or were accompanied by, an economic slowdown (Note: They excluded 1996 due to an extremely harsh winter).

The “next economic downturn” is already here, and it is starting to accelerate.

Yes, the financial markets are starting to catch up with economic reality, but they still have a long, long way to go. It is going to take another 30 percent drop or so just for them to get to levels that are considered to be “normal” or “average” by historical standards.

And the markets are so fragile at this point that any sort of a major “trigger event” could cause a sudden market implosion unlike anything that we have ever seen before.

So let us hope for the best, but let us also heed the advice of RBS and get prepared for a “cataclysmic” year.

Who Is To Blame For The Rape Epidemic That Is Sweeping Across Europe?

20th Largest Bank In The World: 2016 Will Be A ‘Cataclysmic Year’ And ‘Investors Should Be Afraid’