Infinite Unknown

- Italy’s New Government Approval Rating Plummets From 43% To 34% In Three Weeks, Protests Return (ZeroHedge, May 18, 2013)

Tags: EU, Europe, Global News, Government, Italy, Protesters, Society

- Inside the Bunga Bunga room: First picture emerges of the location where Berlusconi held his infamous sex parties (Daily Mail, May 12, 2013)

Related info:

- Silvio Berlusconi sentenced to 4 years in prison after tax fraud verdict upheld (CBS News, May 8, 2013)

Tags: Global News, Italy, Politics, Sex, Silvio Berlusconi

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Description:

Nigel Farage spoke at the Sovereign Man: Offshore Tactics Workshop in Santiago, Chile, on March 30 – April 1, 2013.

More:

- Nigel Farage: Eurocrats’ Cyprus Cash Grab A Template For Future Stealing – Get Your Money Out Of The Eurozone! (Video)

- Nigel Farage – EU Parliament, April 17, 2013: ‘You Are Common Criminals’ (Video)

Tags: Angela Merkel, Banking, Collapse, Economy, EU, Europe, Germany, Global News, Government, Italy, Nigel Farage, Politics

- 20 Signs That The Next Great Economic Depression Has Already Started In Europe (Economic Collapse, April 29, 2013):

The next Great Depression is already happening – it just hasn’t reached the United States yet.  Things in Europe just continue to get worse and worse, and yet most people in the United States still don’t get it.  All the time I have people ask me when the “economic collapse” is going to happen.  Well, for ages I have been warning that the next major wave of the ongoing economic collapse would begin in Europe, and that is exactly what is happening.  In fact, both Greece and Spain already have levels of unemployment that are greater than anything the U.S. experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Pay close attention to what is happening over there, because it is coming here too.  You see, the truth is that Europe is a lot like the United States.  We are both drowning in unprecedented levels of debt, and we both have overleveraged banking systems that resemble a house of cards.  The reason why the U.S. does not look like Europe yet is because we have thrown all caution to the wind.  The Federal Reserve is printing money as if there is no tomorrow and the U.S. government is savagely destroying the future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have by stealing more than 100 million dollars from them every single hour of every single day.  We have gone “all in” on kicking the can down the road even though it means destroying the future of America.  But the alternative scares the living daylights out of our politicians.  When nations such as Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy tried to slow down the rate at which their debts were rising, the results were absolutely devastating.  A full-blown economic depression is raging across southern Europe and it is rapidly spreading into northern Europe.  Eventually it will spread to the rest of the globe as well.

The following are 20 signs that the next Great Depression has already started in Europe… Continue reading »

Tags: Bonds, Children, Collapse, Debt, Deutsche Bank, Economy, EU, Europe, Fed, Federal Reserve, GDP, Global News, Government, Great Depression, Greatest Depression, Greece, Italy, Politics, Portugal, Spain

- Political Assassination Prevented In Rome As Unemployed Man Tries To Kill Politicians, Police Shoot Out Ensues (ZeroHedge, April 28, 2013)

Tags: Crime, EU, Europe, Government, Italy, Politics

- Everyone’s Missing the Bigger Picture in the Reinhart-Rogoff Debate (ZeroHedge, April 27, 2013)

Tags: Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, EU, Europe, GDP, Global News, Government, Greece, IMF, Italy, Joseph Stiglitz, Obama administration, Politics, Quantitative Easing, U.S.

-The Entire Economy Is a Ponzi Scheme (ZeroHedge, April 13, 2013):

Bill Gross, Nouriel Roubini, Laurence Kotlikoff, Steve Keen, Michel Chossudovsky, the Wall Street Journal and many others say that our entire economy is a Ponzi scheme.

Former Reagan budget director David Stockman just agreed:

YouTube Added: 10.04.2013

So did a top Russian con artist and mathematician.

Even the New York Times’ business page asked, “Was [the] whole economy a Ponzi scheme?”

In fact – as we’ve noted for 4 years (and here and here) – the banking system is entirely insolvent. And so are most countries. The whole notion of one country bailing out another country is a farce at this point. The whole system is insolvent.

As we noted last year: Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Bill Gross, Bonds, Debt, EFSF, ESM, EU, Europe, France, Germany, Global News, Government, Greece, Italy, Joseph Stiglitz, Laurence Kotlikoff, Michel Chossudovsky, Nouriel Roubini, Obama administration, Politics, Portugal, Spain, U.S.

Hmmh.

A ton of gold is worth much more than just $6 million.

I guess we are talking about 100 kg of gold bars.

- A Ton Of Gold Bricks: What Capital Flight Looks Like In Italy (ZeroHedge, April 4, 2013):

Curious why so little has been said about cash flowing out of Italy’s banks, especially when even UniCredit’s CEO today proudly warned everyone he is all for confiscating uninsured deposits as long as “everyone else is doing it” – and no, he is not kidding, so when it does happen, nobody will be able to say they weren’t warned. Maybe it is because Italian cash is actually not leaving the country at all. Instead, real “wealth” is departing the boot-shaped nation, quietly and under the radar, as fast as it can in another form: gold. As the clip below from Bloomberg shows, a car was intercepted at the Italy-Switzerland border, with a very special cargo: numerous bars of gold weighing a whopping one ton, worth $6 million. Furthermore, one can be absolutely certain that for every car that is caught at the border with a ton of “golden” cargo, there are 99 that pass through undisturbed and undetected. Which makes perfect sense: what better way to circumvent shadow capital controls such as those virtually everywhere in Europe, than to convert one’s paper money within country A so it stays in country A, into a far more valuable, anonymous and transportable store of wealth, such as gold, and quietly move it to country B, the one where the risk of deposit confiscation is (for now at least) far less?

Oh, did we mention the confiscated product was gold: not euros, not Cypriot euros, not dollars, not palladium, not bitcoin… gold?

YouTube April 4, 2013 (Bloomberg)

Tags: Economy, Global News, Gold, Italy, Society

- CEO Of Italy’s Largest Bank Says Haircuts Of Uninsured Depositors “Acceptable”, Should Become A Template (ZeroHedge, April 4, 2013):

While the head of the ECB and his assorted kitchen sinks scramble to explain how Diesel-BOOM was horribly misunderstood when saying that depositor impairment may and will be the template for future European bank “resolution” (as should have been the case from Day 1), the CEO of Italy’s largest bank appears to have missed the memo. As Bloomberg reports, according to the chief executive Federico Ghizzoni, “uninsured deposits could be used in future bank failures provided global rulemakers agree on a common approach.” Or failing that, because if Cyprus taught us anything is that Europe will never have a common approach on anything, just use deposits as impairable liabilities, period, once the day of reckoning for Non-Performing Loans comes and these are forced to be remarked to reality, just as happened in Cyprus. One can only hope that uninsured deposits do not represent a substantial portion of the bank’s balance sheet because the CEO basically just told them they are next if when risk comes back to the Eurozone with a vengeance. Especially since as Mario Draghi was so helpful in pointing out, “there is no Plan B.”

To wit:

Cutting large deposits in failing banks, along with other liabilities such as bonds, to offset losses is acceptable as long as small savers’ funds remain protected, Ghizzoni told reporters in Vienna late yesterday. The European Union has to introduce identical rules in all of its member states and ideally those rules would be coordinated globally, he said.

In fact, to the Italian, deposit impairment is perfectly ok as long as “everyone does it” – in other words, if it does become the template the Dutch finance minister already said it is, then all is well.

Including deposits “is acceptable if it becomes a European solution,” said Ghizzoni, 57. “What we cannot accept is differentiation country by country inside the same area. I would strongly suggest to make this decision not only within Europe but within the Basel Committee, where all countries are represented. Otherwise we would open the market for arbitrage.”

Continue reading »

Tags: Banking, Economy, EU, Europe, Federico Ghizzoni, Global News, Italy, Unicredit

- Who’s Next? Italy’s Monte Paschi Admits To Billions In Deposit Outflows (ZeroHedge, March 30, 2013):

It appears, given news from Italy today, that European depositors are increasingly coming to the realization that deposits in their local bank are not ‘safe’ places to put their spare cash, but are in fact loans to extremely leveraged businesses. In a somewhat wishy-washy, ‘hide-the-truth’-like statement on Monte dei Paschi’s website, the CEO admits to, “the withdrawal of several billion in deposits.” Of course, the reasons why these depositors withdrew their capital from the oldest bank in the world will never be known though of course he blames it on “reputational damage” from their derivative cheating scandal. Apparently the fact that this happened to come about six week after said scandal and the bank’s third bailout, and that the prior two bailouts did not result in such an outflow of unsecured liabilities (at least not to the public’s knowledge), was lost on the senior management, as was lost that a far greater catalyst may have been the slightly more troubling events in Cyprus in the second half of March. Unsurprisingly, as Reuters notes, the CEO declined to give a forecast on the level of deposits at the end of the first quarter of 2013; no wonder given the bank just doubled its expectations for bad loans and the ‘Cypriot Solution’ dangling over uninsured depositor hordes.

Via Reuters,

Customers’ deposits at Italian bank Monte dei Paschi fell by “a few billion euros” … the bank said in a document posted on its web site on Saturday. Continue reading »

Tags: Banking, Collapse, Economy, EU, Europe, Global News, Italy, Monte Paschi