Well Italy is certainly doing the business for Europe and the Euro today as I suspected it might.
Italy’s other huge bank Intesa Sanpaolo just dropped 6% of it share price before trading in its shares was halted. All the European bourses are way, way down. French and German exchanges are down 2%+ while Spain and Italy are down 3% and 3.24 % respectively as of 14.16 GMT.
And the Euro is plunging against the Swiss franc again. UniCredit’s East European business is hurting now. I wonder how much is pure CDS speculation and shorting and how much is capital flight. It’s bound to be both but I wonder which is leading which?
One thing’s for sure Greece and Italy are going to make a lovely pair.
Remember the other nation (other than Italy) whose banks have exposure to banking in Hungary and the region is…yep you guessed it, Greece. So as those currencies in Hungary Romania and Bulgaria fall against the rampant Swiss Euro, the Italian and Greek banks will feel the defaults. Two thirds of the outstanding debt in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria is in Swiss Francs.
The whole financial system has turned into one giant Ponzi scheme based on the fantasy that debt can be accumulated exponentially forever. The ideological underpinning of neoliberalism has been so successful in promoting the idea that markets can and should be self-regulating it has convinced a majority that they too can find opportunity amid accelerating inequality.
And so we are trapped in the absurdity of taxpayers signing limitless IOUs to keep the system on life support by borrowing more and to pay down debts that can never be repaid.
But those in control know it can't last – which is why they are scrambling to stuff their pockets as they head for the exit.
Perhaps, as the middle-classes begin to see their opportunities receding they will stop blaming the poor, and the spell will be broken.
Nothing to worry about. Didn't you hear? The Beckhams had a baby girl…
On another note, can it be a coincidence that the years that the banks were leveraging like crazy (2000-2006) was the same time period that we had politicians fiddling their expenses and the papers paying the police and having phones hacked.
Did we all just collectively lose our morals, or could a sudden increase in money in the system have these unintended consequences?
interesting idea fitzy 103 but have a look at Will Self's article today in the Graun.
He thinks we are in a major re-alignment of culture, as print media gives way to electronic media.
We are in the interregnum and all things become possible as old cultural hegemonies break up and their replacements are established.
Somehow it connects up to your idea but nothing is very clear.
Not sure if I fully accept the Self thesis although there is something to it.
For sure there was possibly a similar interregnum when radio came along. It became a propaganda tool pdq but it was thirty years before anybody managed to monetise radio.
The whole Murdoch/hacking issue can be analyzed as simply a media war and shaping the form of the new media.
The Guardian is fighting to establish a cultural hegemony and hoping like hell something will turn up before their cash reserves dry up, in the not too distant future. Dealing a death blow to the NI mob is as much a commercial move as a political move.
The graun CANNOT keep going the way they are at the moment, not even when they get helped out fro the government for publishing propaganda. ( see the boy Hague's article, also in today's Graun)
Came across an astonishing sci-fi book the other day, by Robert Heinlein-from 1941 which is incredibly prophetic in relation to the Murdoch crisis and the issue of hacking and many other ideas.
Still trying to digest that.
.
MacPuddock
This scam is just the latest, they have been occurring every century occasionally twice as in the 18th, where were you????
Ok so you are too young to remember …..
What is happening is the music is becoming more frenetic and the chairs are disappearing. All the speculative moves in commodities are short term, kept going for a long time as they are the only possibility for profit apart from buying up cheap debt and getting paid more for it. That is what they are doing. There will be massive losers there. Pension funds will shrink again, so converting into a bond!!! is advisable, preferably in a BRIC currency if you can!
Otherwise all is good as the plan is proceeding.
Those who expect others to look out for you are going to be disappointed! All paper can be burned and that may be all it is worth!
@Fungus
"All paper can be burned and that may be all it is worth! "
Absolutely right. Even at their high levels now – Gold & Silver are the way to protect what wealth you may have (or at least a proportion of it). With silver you have the added bonus of crashing JP Morgan too (due to their huge naked short positions).
Let's all buy gold. Gold will go up in price. We'll all be richer.