Economic implosion is going according to the elite's agenda.

The economic implosion of Europe is accelerating. 

Even while the mainstream media continues to proclaim that the financial crisis in Europe has been "averted", the economic statistics that are coming out of Europe just continue to get worse. Manufacturing activity in Europe has been contracting month after month, the unemployment rate in the eurozone has hit yet another brand new record high, and the official unemployment rates in both Greece and Spain are now much higher than the peak unemployment rate in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

The economic situation in Europe is far worse than it was a year ago, and it is going to continue to get worse as austerity continues to take a huge toll on the economies of the eurozone. It would be hard to understate how bad things have gotten - particularly in southern Europe. The truth is that most of southern Europe is experiencing a full-blown economic depression right now. 

Sadly, most Americans are paying very little attention to what is going on across the Atlantic. But they should be watching, because this is what happens when nations accumulate too much debt. The United States has the biggest debt burden of all, and eventually what is happening over in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Greece is going to happen over here as well Germany Rebounds but ... 

France Economic Implosion Accelerates; Record Decrease in Service Employment in Italy A quick look at economic data from Markit shows a recovery of sorts in Germany (it will not last) and a contraction in France at the steepest rate in four years. Meanwhile, Italy saw a PMI survey-record decrease in services employment in January. A senior Cypriot official suggested late on Saturday that his government was not close to an agreement with the troika over a range of measures aimed at securing a 10-billion-euro bailout for his country. 

From 27:47 Alex explains in a great way how the masses suffer from the Stockholm syndrome:

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Look out! The ‘BRIIICS’ are coming!

The importance of the BRICS summit cannot be overestimated partly because it represents new countries beginning to take power and partly because it heralds a new world coming into being.”

Yes, BRIIICS, with three “I”s. That’s because to the countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (which have just held a summit in Durban, South Africa) will soon be added Iran and Indonesia.

Iran is a stalwart moral and political leader. It stands up against Zionism. It has huge natural resources. It is making extraordinary technological progress. It will soon be a BRIIICS member.

And so will Indonesia, which has the world’s fourth largest population, a fast developing economy (around 7% per year) and, again, huge natural resources.

Already, the present BRICS have 40% of the world’s population, 30% of its land mass, and 25% of its GDP with the latter being a sharply rising figure. Other countries, like Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan and Malaysia, are certain to join in.

Much more important, however, is the BRICS decision to set up a new development bank for long-term infrastructure. This is intended to rival, indeed, outclass, the Western-backed institutions. The underlying rationale is simple: the BRICS are determined to challenge Western political and economic dominance and, in particular, to break the dominance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which have not served the development needs of poor countries and have generally served only to put them into ever-increasing, un-repayable debt.

All of which is excellent news. The West has exploited emerging and poor countries and everywhere has been financially and militarily aggressive. Put simply, other countries are fed-up with the West: they have had enough.

The new bank, however, has more purposes than just being a development bank. American aggression, for example, is ultimately dependent upon the US dollar being the world’s reserve and main trading currency. The BRICS are going to end that by establishing a new reserve and trading currency.

Indeed, the situation can be put even more clearly. The West has long exploited and oppressed everybody that it could but now the boot, in the traditional metaphor, is on the other foot. Political power is shifting away from the West; economic power is shifting away from the West and its moral authority has almost completely disappeared (torture, assassinations, the creeping genocide of the Palestinians and the deliberate furtherance of a vicious sectarianism have seen to that).

Significantly, the BRICS are objecting to sanctions and war threats against Iran and are strongly opposed to Zionist Israel. It will not be long they declare that Israel is a pariah state.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the BRICS summit is the proposed creation of an optic fibre cable linking all five states (with relatively easy extensions to Iran and Indonesia). Indeed, it could be that the BRICS are constructing an independent global optic fibre internet system or at least an extensive one over which they will have complete control. The BRICS are intensely aware that the USA, denying the evidence of its own sixteen intelligence agencies, is pursuing a Zionist agenda against Iran which includes excluding Iran from the SWIFT international banking system and other banking transactions. The new cable should put an end to that.

The BRICS are raising the flag of independence and are telling the West that its abuse of others has gone so far that the others are going to make their own way in life. And that will really matter because more and more Non-Aligned Movement nations will be joining the BRICS in various ways which will particularly include regional, economic, financial, military and technological agreements. An example is that China and Brazil have signed a currency swap deal under which they will be using their own currencies for half of their mutual trade i.e., the US dollar will not be involved. For a while the US dollar can be expected to remain the main trading currency – until suddenly it isn’t.

Furthermore, Africa, for example, long exploited solely for its minerals and resources with no concern for the lives of the inhabitants, is simply going to turn to those who can provide the one big thing that Africa needs – industrialisation.

The importance of the BRICS summit cannot be overestimated partly because it represents new countries beginning to take power and partly because it heralds a new world coming into being.

However, a new world is not necessarily a better world and the BRICS, becoming the BRIIICS and much more, must be careful not to incorporate, without realising, assumptions and practices stemming from corrupt old Western institutions, thinking and practices. Chief of these is thinking that it does not matter if there is huge rich-poor division. This is at the heart of corrupt Western ‘trickle-down’ economics and is a complete breach of fundamental market principle, which says that producers and consumers must be the same people i.e., real productive (and therefore consuming) power must be spread to everyone in society.

Another corrupt assumption is that interest is necessary for the spreading of real productive capacity. Interest is not necessary: it is an unnecessary tax imposed by the global financial elite merely for its own benefit. The BRIIICS must ensure that the commercial banks are controlled so that they can only lend their own money (which they can then waste, if they want to, or charge interest on it). But the main money supply, for the spreading of the real economy, must stem, interest-free, from the national bank (although it may be administered by the commercial banks making only a fair administration charge).

Jalal (making a comment on the Press TV website) writes: “This is the best thing that could happen to the world. A new power that will not let the ex-colonials have the big cake to themselves as usual. This could also be the right path to finally new world order that will contribute to free human being and lead mankind towards a more balanced and harmonious world.”

Quite right, Jalal.



Prof. Rodney Shakespeare

Euro Group Head: Looting of Bank Accounts a “Template For EU”

More deposits to be plundered

 The looting of private bank accounts to cover the gambling losses of big banks is a new template for the euro zone, according to Dutch Finance Minister and President of the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers Jeroen Dijsselbloem.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem. Image: Wikimedia Commons

With savers in Cyprus set to have 40% of their wealth plundered in order to fund an EU bailout package, Dijsselbloem indicated that this new model of “bank restructuring” was set to be replicated across the continent.

“If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?’. If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders,” Dijsselbloem told Reuters.

“Uninsured deposit holders” means anyone unfortunate enough to have squirreled away more than 100,000 euros under the delusion that it wouldn’t be swiped from under their noses by EU technocrats.

His remarks helped send the euro single currency plummeting, before a spokeswoman for Dijsselbloem ludicrously attempted to re-write history and claim that he didn’t say Cyprus was a template for bank restructurings.

In reality, the minister is merely echoing what other banking chiefs have already admitted in the wake of the Cyprus crisis – that no one in Europe is safe from having their savings looted.

Hours after the announcement that Cypriot savers were set to see their deposits plundered, Joerg Kraemer, chief economist of the German Commerzbank, called for private savings accounts in Italy to be similarly plundered. “A tax rate of 15 percent on financial assets would probably be enough to push the Italian government debt to below the critical level of 100 percent of gross domestic product,” he told Handelsblatt.

As Zero Hedge reports, by calling the Cyprus looting a “bank restructuring” and not a “tax,” technocrats were able to bypass the democratic process.

“What Cyprus allowed was the effective usurpation of democracy – the only reason the Cypriot bailout “passed” (at least so far) is because it was structured as a bank restructuring, a financial system “resolution”, not a tax, and thus not in need of a parliamentary, democratic vote. Because as Cyprus also showed, votes to deprive depositors of cash, whether insured or uninsured, simply won’t fly.”

 Paul Joseph Watson

Americans buy nearly half a Billion dollars of gold and silver in January

While public officials may be ignoring the continued deterioration of our economy, job losses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people weekly, and the unprecedented demand for government emergency support services like unemployment insurance and food assistance, Americans who sense uncertainty in the air are flocking to the safety of physical resources.

Our first point of interest is a recent report from the Federal Reserve that indicates some $114 billion dollars in cash was withdrawn from the nation’s largest banks in the last thirty days. Those holding their money at bailed out financial institutions are understandably concerned because the government’s $250,000 deposit insurance guarantee program, originally implemented to restore confidence in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, expired at the end of 2012. That and the US fiscal situation has never been worse, with one Obama official recently having said the solution to the country’s woes is to simply kill the dollar.

This suggests investors and cash savers are no longer confident in the purported safety of the country’s “too-big-to-fail” institutions.

The next obvious question then is, “where did this money go?”

Part of the mystery may have been unraveled when the US Mint released its latest sales and inventory report.

According to the mint, investors purchased nearly half a billion dollars in gold and silver in the last 30 days. There was, in fact, so much money shifting into physical precious metals in January that the mint was actually forced to cease operations because they couldn’t meet demand.

A massive 7.4 million Silver Eagles were purchased from the U.S. Mint in January,considerably higher than the previous record from early 2011.

After halting Silver coin production/sales for over a week, the Mint re-opened yesterday and demand once again surged.

Having almost doubled from the first week in January, there remains two more days before the book is closed on January’s sales.

At 140,000 ounces, the Mint has also sold the most ounces of gold in January in almost three years, suggesting the rising ‘currency wars’ are stoking people’s ongoing rotation from paper-to-physical assets as their ‘wealth’ slowing loses its value.

With a Silver Eagle trading at around $31 per ounce and the gold spot price at near all time highs of $1650, the US Mint saw some $460 million dollars shift into precious metals in the month of January alone.

What’s equally as interesting, and perhaps a harbinger of the coming chaos, is that the People’s Republic of China is also shifting a large amount of its cash reserves into physical resource based investments that include agriculture, energy, and precious metals, a move that has caused confusion among experts at the United Nations.

With the political situation in this country rapidly dwindling because of government interference on all levels, a recession for 2013 already baked into the cake, and a global economy on the brink of collapse, there is one primary motivating factor driving money into gold and silver.

Uncertainty.

As we’ve seen recently with shortages in emergency food rations and supplies, firearms and magazines, and now gold and silver, Americans are no longer confident in the stability of the system as a whole, and they are diversifying their assets into physical resources that will retain value should the global financial, economic, monetary, and geo-political systems come unhinged.

Mac Slavo

Interesting:

Who Runs The World? 

Iceland President: Let the Banks Fail 
Goldman Sachs Made 400 Million Betting On Food Prices In 2012 While Hundreds Of Millions Starved

People Worldwide claim their Sovereignty [updated, thanks to Beatrix stepping down]