Oh, shit.

WW3 is now imminent, as Saudi gives permission for Israel to use their airspace to take out Iran's nuclear facilities.

Plunge Protection Team

The banksters move to stem the biggest drop ever seen in the US stock market. 1000 points in the dow. That's 10%. So it begins: the second wave of the crunch is here, and as Webster Tarpley says, it's not a depression - it's a global disintegration.

The death rattle of the dollar

H/T

History repeats

Max Keiser predicts that the financial terrorists will go after Hollywood next.
I like what he says about Coca-Cola - let's boycott it, until its stock hits zero. There is no more potent a symbol of everything that is wrong with corporatism. The triumph of marketing, psychological manipulation and imperialist muscle over local markets and culture, common sense, and health.
Maybe a Facebook campaign is in the offing?
He also points out that that the French Revolution started just following an Icelandic volcano eruption which affected Europe.
Let's sacrifice some bankers to the gods of the volcano. Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, Jamie Diamond, Hank Paulson, Timmy Geithner, get in. Gordon Brown and Merv King, you too.

A side effect is suicide

Always good to hear Gerald Celente in a healthy time slot. On the horizon: 2nd 9/11, Greatest Depression, 3rd World War. I'll put the kettle on.

Credit Anstalt over again

So, Trichet was right again, I see. He really is a treasure. Tighten your seatbealts, Europe:

[Mr Johnson] likens the crisis to Argentina's slide before default in 2001, a fiasco that led to calls for the abolition of the IMF itself. The Fund concluded in a post-mortem that it should never again throw good money after bad to prop up an unworkable structure with an overvalued exchange rate.
EU officials react with outrage to comparisons with Argentina, but as Mr Johnson says "Greece is far more indebted, is much less competitive in global markets, and needs a greater fiscal and wage adjustment".
Argentina's public debt was 62pc of GDP in 2001: Greece will top 120pc this year. Its budget deficit was 6.4pc: Greece's was 16pc last year on a cash basis. Its current account deficit was 1.7pc: Greece's was 11.2pc in 2009.

Actually, the comparison seems a little unfair on Argentina.

Greece is just "the tip of the iceberg", in the words of China's central bank. The design faults of EMU have left all Club Med trapped in debt deflation or perma-slump. Europe's banks are in turn stuck with fatal exposure. You cannot safely uncork Greece without risking a chain reaction.
This has echoes of Credit Anstalt, the Austrian bank that collapsed in June 1931, exposing the underlying rot of Europe's banks. It set off an earthquake across Germany and Central Europe. Contagion spread back into the Anglosphere, snuffing out the recovery of early 1931.
The global financial order came crashing down. The Great Depression began in earnest.

Oh. Dear.

Yet let us be honest. This is not a bail-out for Greece. It is a bail-out for European creditors that account for most of Greece's €391bn external debt (163pc of GDP). As such it is the first line of defence against greater sums at risk across Club Med. The EU rescue shifts the debacle onto taxpayers in order to prevent a systemic crisis, just like the bank bail-outs after the Lehman failure.

Absolutely - let's face it, a bailout always falls on the taxpayer. Why is that? Well, basically because the government doesn't earn anything. It takes, extorts, and taxes whilst creating nothing. In fact, they create less than nothing, a minus figure, because their business is war, ie destruction.

NB: the insufficient bail-out and subsequent rallying of Greek bonds will give the banking oligarchs another opportunity to go short from decent levels. They really do seem to be intent on creating a financial cataclysm of a kind never seen before.

Greece invented chaos

Black Friday for Greece tomorrow?

The markets turned against Greece again on Thursday, driving up its borrowing costs to record levels on doubts that the EU will provide a credible rescue.

As usual Trichet's being a cunt:

The yield on the Greek 10-year bonds eased slightly to 7.35pc after Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, said he did not expect Greece to default on its loans and that he is confident the country will solve its own budget problems

Erm, or they're guaranteed to default, JC. You wouldn't be helping anyone to accumulate a short position in euros and euro bonds would you? For example, oh I don't know... Goldman Sachs?

Buying food is throwing your money away

According to the Telegraph, UK house prices face a prolonged bear market.
Bear market? See, that's the whole problem. Houses aren't financial instruments. They're not even assets, for Christ's sake - they're places to live. What was ever wrong with renting, anyway?
I still hear the argument that renting is "throwing your money away." Who made this one up, and what were they on? I guess buying food is throwing your money away, too, right? You could have bought some tech stocks instead and got rich!
People say that mortgage payments are the same as rent, so you might as well be buying more and more of it each month, instead of none. Incorrect, for four reasons.
Firstly, mortgage payments are almost always higher than rent payments.
Secondly, as an owner you have to pay: property taxes, maintenance (repairs, utilities replacement, etc), permits, council tax, stamp duty, licences, etc.
Thirdly, you are paying interest on the mortgage to the lender.
Fourth, what if the house stops gaining value on the market? What if it falls, and you end up owing more than the house is worth, with interest rates at sky-high levels? You are screwed, and you will lose the house, and be worse off than if you had been renting all along.

It's pretty clear that real estate is due a fall of around 90% at some point. It's proven remarkably difficult to forecast the timing of the adjustments. In 2003 the Economist magazine was already calling the housing bubble the largest of all time. And then prices continued rising, doubling or even tripling for another five years.
Then they started to pop, and stimulus money arrested it.
But not for long, this time, I think. When the dam bursts, there will be a dollar crisis, followed by inflation, sky-rocketing interest rates, a flood of foreclosures, ghost towns, and nobody will be able to sell their houses anymore. It will be accompanied by the popping of the commercial real estate bubble, of course, which has also started to become apparent, as I've shown in earlier posts.
Naturally mortgage lenders will implode in the hundreds, there will be more cries for bailouts, but the government has no more money.
Then they'll take us to war. There will be riots, and the police and military will be called out to deal with those involved. Lots of deaths.
What can we do? Buy gold. Have an escape route in mind. Spread information any way you can. Get in shape.

One from the archives

Financial terrorism by the Anglo-American banking cartel is in full swing these days. The PIIGS are next, Greece first. Remember Iceland? Hannan, back in 2008:

Gordon Brown claims that the expropriation was necessary because Iceland planned to default on British Icesave accounts. How he got this impression is a mystery. Iceland's finance minister made clear in meetings with the British authorities that depositors would be paid. The Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, said in public: “We will immediately review the matter together to find a mutually satisfactory solution. We are determined to make sure that the current financial crisis does not overshadow the important and longstanding friendship that we have with the UK.”
Brown's response? To seize the UK assets, not of the bank that ran Icesave, but of a wholly unrelated bank, Kaupthing, thereby collapsing it(emphasis mine).

And as Obo shows, Ian Parker-Joseph runs with this:

Follow the money my mind keeps telling me, follow the money. Where does government money flow. It flows not only to Local Authorities, but to NGO's, to Quangos, and to the thousands of shady 'Charities' and 'Registered Companies' that NuLab have pumped taxpayers funds into.

And why has Brown gone for Nationalisation of Banks rather than just pumping in liquidity as the experts have advised?

Then on Wednesday of last week a single act added luminescence to that dust ball. The use of Terror legislation to seize the assets of foreign banks.

The questions have been asked, why? The press has been speculative, the government dismissive, the opposition parties silent.

It was that single event that triggered a thought, that misuse of terror legislation that made me ask why? When terror legislation is used, the government can claim that it was invoked in the national interest, it can suggest that for 'security' reasons, we must never know the real truth.

What was the urgency within the Cabinet Office and the Treasury that an 8 man delegation needed to visit Iceland to put the strong arm on the Icelandic government.

What is the truth here? Well we dont know, but we will ask the question:

Is it possible that government or corrupt officials have been running for the past 10 years a massive money laundering scam with taxpayers funds through NGO's, Quango's, Local Authorities, Charities and 'Registered Companies', a scam so big that the financial crisis was going to scupper and expose it, that the beneficiaries were going to lose the money or even worse get found out, or was it that receivers and auditors would be able to unravel it, and that only Nationalisation and the use of terror legislation could keep it under wraps?

30 months at most until The Big One hits...

Did someone say something about Mayans and 2012?
Dire warnings from Porter Stansberry:

The big problem we face right now is the Treasury has moved more than half of our total debt into the very short end of the yield curve. It did this to minimize interest expense. But as a result, we'll have to "roll over" roughly $4 trillion in the next 30 months. That's in addition to funding another $3 trillion or so in additional annual deficits. It's an interesting question, whether or not we can actually do this. We cannot do it if China stops buying massive quantities of Treasury bonds.

And as of today, China is a net seller of Treasury debt. If we can't fund our debts in the bond market, the Federal Reserve will be forced to monetize our deficits by buying Treasury bonds. If that happens, inflation will soar and the price of gold will double or triple almost overnight.(emphasis mine)