By John Ward
‘Lagarde praised reform efforts by Italy’s government and said market confidence had improved since Rome agreed to enhanced surveillance by the IMF. She also saw progress in Spain.’ (Reuters website this morning)
Veteran Sloggers will know that I had Mme Lagarde taped as a prime example of divine idiocy in human form way back during the days when she oversaw France’s descent into unrepayable debt. Somehow – and I’d imagine DSK would very much like to know how – she clawed her way up to the IMF job. And there she sits today, a person still incapable of exponential extrapolation, saying that Italy is improving and there’s progress in Spain.
Buoyed up by Chris’s remarks, investors pulled 100bn euros from european bonds. European sales by Fiat, Italy’s largest vehicle manufacturer, tumbled 26% to 81,469 cars – the highest drop in Europe. And Spain faces an important test today with its planned auction of 12-month and 18-month treasury bills….after yields topped the 6% marker again yesterday. Entirely understandable market concerns about Spain’s position mean that the nation’s borrowing costs are now higher than they’ve been all year.
What we have here is three dead bodies, my friends, called Greece, Spain and Italy. And how are the euro-elites dealing with their disposal? Well call me unpleasant, but it looks for all the world like necrophilic anal intercourse from where I’m sitting.
My lead piece yesterday concerned the pretty unsubtle Troika attempt to ignore the citizens again in Greece after the elections.
Angela Merkel opened her campaign to win back Germany’s most populous state in May 13 elections by appealing to voters to endorse her message of austerity. She offered ‘no respite to Spain in its debt reduction schedule’.
European officials travel to Washington this week seeking a bigger global war chest to combat the debt crisis as Spain’s government battles to quell renewed market turmoil over its finances.
And she who sees only improvement and progress will meet with frantic EU officials in three days time, where it is guaranteed that crisis-fighting resources will dominate talks at the IMF’s spring jolly in Washington from April 20-22. Because everything is going so well, Lagarde has dropped her bazooka requirement from 600 to 400 bn euros (might as well be realistic). Only faraway Japan is going to bazooka her firewall-war chest….with $60bn. Washington, however, insists that Europe has all the resources it needs to do the job itself.
Some of this may look to the lay-reader like help, but in reality it is necrophilia – a last ditch attempt to ‘show’ the markets that the Troika will triumph in the end. This triumph will involve stopping debt contagion hitting US banks on Wall Street, US banks in the EU, and US banks in Asia. It will involve keeping $300 trillion of self-created debt out of the real world, in order to save the perverts who created it in the virtual world of obligations and derivatives cut every which way and then some. And it will do this by engaging in sexual congress with dead people. Not until every last ‘consumer’ has been rendered unable to consume will the next stage begin.
Do the elites around the Globe know this is unlikely to succeed as a defence strategy? I’d say Draper Osborne probably doesn’t – he pledged £10bn of our money to Frufru Lagarde yesterday – but aside from him, pretty much everyone else does. That’s why lots and lots of preparations are under way. Once again, I urge you all to simply record the facts, not dismiss this as conspiracy theory. Having shagged all the corpses but still not achieved a satisfactory level of satiation, the Masters now plan to ensure that any gobby serfs are kept well in their place.
The German Government has a ready stock of plain banknote paper it bought ahead during 2010. It has also passed EU-illegal laws keeping all ClubMed paupers from getting their hands on German welfare money.
Madrid has threatened to seize budgetary control of wayward Spanish regions as early as May if they flout deficit limits, officials said yesterday. And new laws there have been introduced to criminalise online/texting incitement to disorder.
In the UK ten days ago, Home Secretary Theresa May tried to sneak through Parliament a draconian GCHQ package allowing for blanket suveillance of all online activity. Caught at it, the Government back-tracked hastily. But they’ll be back soon enough.
And level-headed Ed in Houston, in response to The Slog’s Sunday Essay last weekend, offers this as a response:
‘ The US seems to be preparing now for anarchy. Homeland security has purchased hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets, to be used domestically. Bullet proof check point stations are being purchased to control the flow of the populations, the
UL 752 BR. And you probably heard already that the government is implementing a system to that will allow any mobile phone to be remotely disabled, necessary for the control of the citizen’s communication during the anarchy.’
UL 752 BR. And you probably heard already that the government is implementing a system to that will allow any mobile phone to be remotely disabled, necessary for the control of the citizen’s communication during the anarchy.’
Hatches are also being battened down in all the key transactional areas. Gold, as we have seen, is being capped to block off any escape route once the US stock market collapses.
As the FT reported yesterday, clearing houses and other central counterparties that handle complex securities transactions will be required to maintain enough capital and liquidity to withstand the simultaneous collapse of their two largest users under new global rules announced by securities and payments regulators.
But meanwhile, undeterred by this plunge into a potential abyss of mediaeval poverty and martial law, the drongos who caused this mess are still at it. Yesterday, Italy’s stock market regulator fined André Santos Esteves for alleged insider trading, just days before the Brazilian billionaire is to launch a high-profile initial public offering of his investment bank, Banco BTG Pactual.
I’m afraid there will always be some people in the world who simply are too feral to deregulate. In dealing with them, I suspect a better approach would be to strangulate. But no doubt wiser voices than mine will prevail.
