The British government is making urgent preparations to cope with the fallout of a possible Greek exit from the single currency, after the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, warned that Europe was “tearing itself apart”.
Reports from Athens that massive sums of money were being spirited out of the country intensified concern in London about the impact of a splintering of the eurozone on a UK economy that is stuck in double-dip recession. One estimate put the cost to the eurozone of Greece making a disorderly exit from the currency at $1tn, 5% of output.
If this screen from Bloomberg is correct, people are far dumber than even we thought, because this implies that FB will have an over $200 billion market cap at the open all else equal.
Greece’s credit rating was downgraded one level by Fitch Ratings on concerns the country won’t be able to muster the political support needed to sustain its membership in the euro area as leaders began campaigning ahead of the second national vote in six weeks.
The Spanish government has hired Goldman Sachs to carry out an independent valuation of Bankia, the ailing bank taken over by the state last week, Spanish newspaper Expansion said on Friday.
The U.S. bank will review Bankia’s and its parent company BFA’s books and determine within a month how much the state should inject to refloat the lender, which had to be rescued after its auditor, Deloitte, identified several gaps in last year’s accounts.
In summary, the highest Moodys rating for any Spanish bank as of this point is A3. But luckily the other “rumor” of a bank run at Bankia was completely untrue, at least according to Spanish economic ministry officials, so there is no need to worry: it is all under control. The Banko de Espana said so.
Complete summary downgrade grid:
Another way to visualize the bloodbath as Spain no longer has any bank rated A2 or higher:
- Backwardation in Gold And Silver (ZeroHedge, May 17, 2012):
On Monday, May 14, something happened that hasn’t happened since Dec of 2008. Two successive near-month precious metals futures contracts were in backwardation at the same time. To oversimplify, backwardation is when the price of a futures contract is lower than the price in the spot market. It should not be possible for it to happen in gold and silver.
When Ron Paul stands up in front of a crowd and explains the fictional-reserve banking system’s unreality, some listen, many shrug and bury their heads. When ZeroHedge does the same, comments are heavy but change is slow to come. But when a 12-year-old girl, in a little over five minutes can explain the total farce that is our monetary system, surely people have to listen and break free of the matrix. Victoria Grant, 12, explains how “The banks and the government have colluded to financially enslave the people of Canada,” and as CTV notes, ‘Grant lays out a brief history of the Canadian banking system, referencing obscure historical figures such as former Vancouver mayor Gerald McGeer and explaining that the Bank of Canada held primary control over government lending until the 1970′s. Starting then, she says, governments began borrowing from private banks instead at considerably higher interest rates than those available through the central bank. The result, Grant argues, is a rapidly increasing national debt. The pint-sized pundit is quick to offer a solution. “If the Canadian Government needs money, they can borrow it directly from the Bank of Canada,” she says. ” … Canadians would again prosper with real money as the foundation of our economic structure.” The truth is out there – whether it comes from Alan Simpson, Ron Paul, ZeroHedge, or a 12-year-old Canadian young lady.
As US weak hands keep piling out of gold whether to make space for the Facebook IPO tomorrow, or just to load up on paper currencies in advance of central banks printing much more, two things have happened: China is now on its way to becoming the biggest source of gold demand, surpassing India, but more importantly as of hours ago, in a truly historic move, “Okayama Metal & Machinery has become the first Japanese pension fund to make public purchases of gold, in a sign of dwindling faith in paper currencies.” Not our words: the FT‘s.
More:
Initially, the fund aims to keep about 1.5 per cent of its total assets of Y40bn ($500m) in bullion-backed exchange traded funds, according to chief investment officer Yoshisuke Kiguchi, who said he was diversifying into gold to “escape sovereign risk”.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.
The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.
Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed.
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_usoz_2.gif)
