How banksters led Greece & Europe to ruin

Shanghai Index- 8th worst weekly decline in its history!

by Chris Kimble
image: http://blog.kimblechartingsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/joefridayshanghaideclinejune191-675x439.jpg
CLICK ON CHART TO ENLARGE Joe Friday Just The Facts… The Shanghai index has had a rough week, down 13.32%. This was the 8th worst weekly decline in the past 25-years.
Any reasons this could be happening? Below looks at the Shanghai index over the past 20 years
image: http://blog.kimblechartingsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/shagnahi52weekrateofchangeatresistancejune19-675x405.jpg
CLICK ON CHART TO ENLARGE Over the past 52 weeks, the Shanghai index was over over 130%. This huge gain was only surpassed by the rally into the 2007 top. The Shanghai index met dual resistance this week, one of them was at the top of a 20-year channel and a resistance line drawn off key lows in 2006 and 2009.

Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/shanghai-index-8th-worst-weekly-decline-in-its-history/#d0J7UDHHF5IS0sRz.99

Putin: €2bn Russia-Greece gas deal will help Athens pay its debt

A deal to jointly build an extension of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline across Greece will help Athens to settle its multibillion euro debt to international creditors, President Vladimir Putin said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
Talking to the representatives of international media at the Forum, Putin said he didn’t see any support for Greece from the EU, RIA Novosti reports.
“If the EU wants Greece to pay its debt than it should be interested in the Greek economy growing,” Putin said. “The EU should be applauding us. What’s bad about creating new jobs in Greece?” he said, commenting on Russia’s preliminary gas deal with Greece.
On Friday, Russia and Greece signed a deal to set up a joint company for the construction of the Turkish Stream pipeline across Greek territory that will supply 47 billion cubic meters of gas a year.
Moscow has repeatedly said it was ready to help Greece, if necessary, but so far Athens hasn’t asked for direct financial help.
Tsipras’s government is now locked in tough negotiations with its international creditors – the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission – over its €240 billion debt to them. The total Greek debt now stands at €316 billion, with fears mounting that the country could default without a deal with creditors and leave the Eurozone, as well as the EU.

The panic is bringing the Greek banking system to the verge of a collapse, as record amounts of deposits have been withdrawn from the accounts this week. On Thursday alone, Greek depositors withdrew an estimated €1 billion from the banks, as another round of talks with creditorsfailedto produce results.
On June 22, the EU will hold a summit in Brussels where the EU officials will make another attempt to resolve the Greek crisis. On this day Greek banks may remain closed, according to ECB Executive Board member Benoit Coeure, Reuters reported Thursday.
Source: Russia Today, 20 June 2015

“The Collateral Has Run Out” – JPM Warns ECB Will Use Greek “Nuclear Option” If No Monday Deal

Source: Zero Hedge

In Athens on Friday, the ATM lines began to formin earnest.
(via Corriere)
Although estimates vary, Kathimerini, citing Greek banking officials, puts Friday’s deposit outflow at €1.7 billion. If true, that would mark a serious step up from the estimated €1.2 billion that left the banking system on Thursday and serves to underscore just how critical the ECB’s emergency decision to lift the ELA cap by €1.8 billion truly was. “Banks expressed relief following Frankfurt’s reaction, acknowledging that Friday could have ended very differently without a new cash injection,” the Greek daily said, adding that the ECB’s expectation of “a positive outcome in Monday’s meeting”, suggests ELA could be frozen if the stalemate remains after leaders convene the ad hoc summit. Bloomberg has more on the summit:

Dorothea Lambros stood outside an HSBC branch in central Athens on Friday afternoon, an envelope stuffed with cash in one hand and a 38,000 euro ($43,000) cashier’s check in the other.
She was a few minutes too late to make her deposit at the London-based bank. She was too scared to take her life-savings back to her Greek bank. She worried it wouldn’t survive the weekend.
“I don’t know what happens on Monday,” said Lambros, a 58-year-old government employee.
Nobody does. Every shifting deadline, every last-gasp effort has built up to this: a nation that went to sleep on Friday not knowing what Monday will bring. A deal, or more brinkmanship. Shuttered banks and empty cash machines, or a few more days of euros in their pockets and drachmas in their past – – and maybe their future.

For Greeks, the fear is that Monday will be deja vu, a return to a past not that distant. Before the euro replaced the drachma in 2002, the Greeks were already a European bête noire, their currency mostly trapped inside their nation, where cash was king and checks a novelty.
Everything comes together on Monday. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, back from a visit with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, will spend his weekend coming up with a proposal to take to a Monday showdown with euro-area leaders.
A deal there is key. The bailout agreement that’s kept Greece from defaulting expires June 30. That’s the day Greece owes about 1.5 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund.
Without at least an understanding among the political chiefs, Greek banks will reach the limits of their available collateral for more ECB aid.

Indeed, JP Morgan suggests that the central bank may have already shown some leniency in terms of how it treats Greek collateral. Further, analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou and team estimate, based on offshore money market flows, that some €6 billion left Greek banks last week.
If no agreement is struck on Monday evening that paves the way for further ELA hikes, the ECB may do exactly what we warned on Monday. That is, resort to the “nuclear option” which would, as JPM puts it, make capital controls are “almost inevitable.” Here’s more:

The escalation of the Greek crisis over the past week has caused an acceleration of Greek bank deposit outflows which in turn increased the likelihood of Greece introducing capital controls as soon as next week if Monday’s Eurozone leaders’ summit on Greece brings no deal. Indeed, our proxy of Greek bank deposit outflows, i.e. the purchases of offshore money market funds by Greek citizens is pointing to a material acceleration this week vs. the previous week.

The €147m invested into offshore money market funds during the first four days of this week is equivalent to €5bn of deposit outflows based on the relationship between the two metrics during April (during April, around €155m was invested in offshore money market funds, which was accompanied by deposit outflows of around €5bn). Assuming a similar outflow pace for Friday brings the estimated deposit outflow for the full week to €6bn. In the previous week (i.e. the week commencing June 8th) around €40m was invested into offshore money market funds, which is equivalent to around €1.6bn of deposit outflows. So this week’s deposit outflows almost quadrupled relative to the previous week. Month-to-date €8bn of deposits has likely left the Greek banking system on our estimates, following €5bn in May and €5bn in April. As a result, the level of household and corporate deposits currently stands at just above €120bn. 
As mentioned above this acceleration in the pace of deposit outflows is raising the chance that the Greek government will be forced to impose restrictions on the withdrawal of deposits if no deal is reached at the Eurozone summit on Monday. This is because Greek banks’ borrowing from the ECB has moved above the €121bn maximum we had previously estimated based on available collateral (€38bn using EFSF as collateral, €8bn using government securities as collateral & €75bn using credit claims as collateral). In particular, by assuming that Greek banks operate at c €1-2bn below the ELA limit as a buffer, we estimate that their current borrowing is €125bn. This is based on the ECB raising its ELA limit to €86bn on Friday this week from €84bn on Wednesday.  

Here is the punchline: when the ECB hiked Greek ELA by €1.8 bilion in its Friday emergency meeting (an amount that was promptly soaked up by the €1,7 billion in Greek bank runs on Friday), it may have done so in breach of the Greek “borrowing base” because, according to JPM, with total ECB borrowings of €125, this means that Greece is now €4 billion above its maximum eligible collateral. The ECB surely knows this, and has breached its own borrowing base calculation for one of two reasons: because it knows the breach will be promptly limited or reversed on Monday, or there will be a deal. In other words, Greece is now officially living on borrowed time:

This €125bn of borrowing from the ECB is €4bn above our estimated maximum borrowing of €121bn, suggesting that the ECB has already showed flexibility with respect to the collateral constraints Greek banks are facing. We argued before that the ECB has the flexibility to adjust haircuts to allow Greek banks to borrow more from the Bank of Greece for a given amount of collateral. It can also start accepting government guaranteed bank bonds as collateral despite the ECB having rejected these bonds before as a source of acceptable collateral. Greek banks have been rolling over government guaranteed bank paper since March. For example Greek banks rolled over €33bn of government guaranteed bank debt over the past three months. However, we doubt the ECB will ever accept large amounts of government guaranteed bank debt, effectively of what it considers as collateral made “out of thin air”. And if no agreement is reached on Monday, then the ECB will have little reason to show further flexibility and it will likely freeze its ELA limit on Greek banks. As a result capital controls will become almost inevitable after Monday. 

All of this is now moot: as we explained previously, for the Greek banks it is now game over (really, the culmination of a 5 year process whose outcome was clear to all involved) and the only question is what brings the Greek financial system down: whether it is a liquidity implosion as a result of a bank run which one fails to see how even a “last minute deal”, or capital controls for that matter, can halt, or a slow burning solvency hit as Greek non-performing loans are now greater than those of Cyrpus were at the time when the Cypriot capital controls were imposed. As Bloomberg calculated last week, just the NPL losses are big enough now to wipe out the Big 4 Greek banks tangible capital.

JPM, for now, focuses on the liquidity aspect:

The deposit outflows from Greek banks show how dramatic the reversal of Greece’s liquidity position has been over the past six months. The €8bn that left the Greek banking system month-to-date has brought the cumulative deposit withdrawal to €44bn since last December. This €44bn has more than reversed the €14bn that had entered the Greek banking system between June 2012 and November 2014 (Figure 2). The €117bn of deposits lost cumulatively since the end of 2009 has brought the bank deposit to GDP ratio for Greece to 66%. This is well below the Eurozone average of 94%.

And with more than three-quarters of the nearly €500 billion in outstanding foreign claims on Greece concentrated among foreign official institutions, any “contagion” will come will come not from the financial impact of Grexit, but from the psychological impact as the ECB’s countless lies of “political capital” and “irreversible union” crash like the European house of cards.

Would a Greek exit make the Eurozone look “healthier” as problem countries that do not obey rules are ousted? Or would markets rather question the ability of the Eurozone to cope with a bigger problem/country in the future if they cannot deal with a small problem/country such as Greece? Would a Greek exit make the Eurozone more stable by fostering more fiscal integration and debt mutualization over time? Or would the large losses from a Greek exit rather make creditor nations even more reluctant to proceed with much needed debt mutualization and fiscal transfers in the future? Would a Greece exit, and the punishment of Syriza as an unconventional political party, reduce the popularity of euroskeptic and unconventional political forces in Europe, as Greece becomes an example for other populations to avoid? Or would a Greek exit and the punishment of a country that refused to succumb to neverending austerity rather demonstrate the lack of flexibility, solidarity and cooperation giving more ground to euroskeptic parties across Europe?

Again we see that the entire world is now wise to the game the troika is playing. This isn’t about Greece, it’s about Spain and Italy or any other “bigger” problem countries whose voters elect “euroskeptic” politicians. As a reminder, if and when the Greek problem shifts to other PIIG nations, then it will be truly a time to panic:

So much as US-Russian relations are, to quote Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “sacrificed on the altar of election campaigns”, so too are relations between Greece and its European “partners” sacrificed for political aims. In the end, the entire Greek tragicomedy comes back to the simple fact that a currency union with no fiscal union is no union at all and will likely be nearly impossible to sustain. We’ll leave you with the following quote from Alexandre Lamfalussy, BIS veteran, first President of the EMI (the ECB before the ECB existed), and the “Father of the Euro”:

“It would seem to me very strange if we did not insist on the need to make appropriate arrangements that would allow for the the gradual emergence and the full operation once the EMU is completed of a community-wide macroeconomic fiscal policy which would be the natural compliment to the common monetary policy of the community.”

Shanghai Gold Exchange Sees Offtake of About 46 Tonnes of Gold For the Week

by Jess
There were 46.15 tonnes of gold withdrawn from the Shanghai Gold Exchange in the latest week.
This chart is from the data wrangler Nick Laird at sharelynx.com.

image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUxgAXPySaIgOI5QyPQ7ddKsDbrZKj6VoQW7fILixfeEuh8vBo8w5w7toIFmmhRA-jdJyVugw5OpAApnoBIYA5DNpWAZkm549FPsaR9O6w0VhsiSpUNU25VbTVggvOv4064s4xIYParjLQ/s640/SGEDeliveries20150620.gif

Greek debt crisis is the Iraq War of finance

Guardians of financial stability are deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees

The Parthenon in Athens Photo: ALAMY

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

6:29PM BST 19 Jun 2015

1949 Comments

Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and by those who set the tone for the Western world.

The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

They want to see these rebel Klephts hanged from the columns of the Parthenon – or impaled as Ottoman forces preferred, deeming them bandits - even if they degrade their own institutions in the process.

If we want to date the moment when the Atlantic liberal order lost its authority – and when the European Project ceased to be a motivating historic force – this may well be it. In a sense, the Greek crisis is the financial equivalent of the Iraq War, totemic for the Left, and for Souverainistes on the Right, and replete with its own “sexed up” dossiers.

Does anybody dispute that the ECB – via the Bank of Greece - is actively inciting a bank run in a country where it is also the banking regulator by issuing this report on Wednesday?
It warned of an "uncontrollable crisis" if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, "an exponential rise in unemployment", and a "collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership".
The guardian of financial stability is consciously and deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state - with possible risks of pan-EMU and broader global contagion – as a negotiating tactic to force Greece to the table.

It did so days after premier Alexis Tsipras accused the creditors of "laying traps" in the negotiations and acting with a political motive. He more or less accused them of trying to destroy an elected government and bring about regime change by financial coercion.
I leave it to lawyers to decide whether this report is a prima facie violation of the ECB’s primary duty under the EU treaties. It is certainly unusual. The ECB has just had to increase emergency liquidity to the Greek banks by €1.8bn (enough to last to Monday night) to offset the damage from rising deposit flight.
In its report, the Bank of Greece claimed that failure to meet creditor demands would “most likely” lead to the country’s ejection from the European Union. Let us be clear about the meaning of this. It is not the expression of an opinion. It is tantamount to a threat by the ECB to throw the Greeks out of the EU if they resist.

^{Greece's central bank in Athens}
This is not the first time that the ECB has strayed far from its mandate. It forced the Irish state to make good the claims of junior bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank, saddling Irish taxpayers with extra debt equal to 20pc of GDP.
This was done purely in order to save the European banking system at a time when the ECB was refusing to do the job itself, betraying the primary task of a central bank to act as a lender of last resort.
It sent secret letters to the elected leaders of Spain and Italy in August 2011 demanding detailed changes to internal laws for which it had no mandate or technical competence, even meddling in neuralgic issues of labour law that had previously led to the assassination of two Italian officials by the Red Brigades.
When Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi balked, the ECB switched off bond purchases, driving 10-year yields to 7.5pc. He was forced from office in a back-room coup d’etat, albeit one legitimised by the ageing ex-Stalinist EU fanatic who then happened to be president of Italy.
Lest we forget, it parachuted in its vice-president – Lucas Papademos – to take over Greece when premier George Papandreou merely suggested that he might submit the EMU bail-out package to a referendum, a wise idea in retrospect. That makes two coups d’etat. Now Syriza fears they are angling for a third.

The creditor power structure has lost its way. The IMF is in confusion. It is enforcing a contractionary austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment - that has been discredited by its own elite research department as scientifically unsound.
The Fund’s culpability in this fiasco is by now well known. As I argued last week, its own internal documents show that the original bail-out in 2010 was designed to rescue the EMU banking system and monetary union at a time when it had no defences against contagion. Greece was sacrificed.
One should have thought that the IMF would wish to lower the political temperature, given that its own credibility and long-term survival are at stake. But no, Christine Lagarde has upped the political ante by stating that Greece will fall into arrears immediately if it misses a €1.6bn payment to the Fund on June 30.
In my view, this is a discretionary escalation. The normal procedure is to notify the IMF Board after 30 days. This period is a de facto grace period, and in a number of past cases the arrears were cleared up quietly during the interval before the matter ever reached the Board.
The IMF could have let this process run in the case of Greece. It has chosen not to do so, ostensibly on the grounds that the sums are unusually large.
Klaus Regling, head of the eurozone bail-out fund (EFSF), entered on cue to hint strongly that his organisation would trigger cross-default clauses on its Greek bonds – 45pc of the Greek package – even though there is no necessary reason why it should do so. It is an optional matter for the EFSF board.
He seems to be threatening an EFSF default, even though the Greeks themselves are not doing so, a remarkable state of affairs.
It is obvious what is happening. The creditors are acting in concert. Instead of stopping to reflect for one moment on the deeper wisdom of their strategy, they are doubling down mechanically, appearing to assume that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the twelfth hour.
Personally, I am a Burkean conservative with free market views. Ideologically, Syriza is not my cup tea. Yet we Burkeans do like democracy – and we don’t care for monetary juntas – even if it leads to the election of a radical-Left government.
As it happens, Edmund Burke would have found the plans presented to the Eurogroup last night by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to be rational, reasonable, fair, and proportionate.
They include a debt swap with ECB bonds coming due in July and August exchanged for bonds from the bail-out fund. They would have longer maturities and lower interest rates, reflecting the market borrowing cost of the creditors.
Syriza said from the outset that it was eager to work on market reforms with the OECD, the leading authority. It wants to team up with the International Labour Organisation on Scandinavian style flexi-security and labour reforms, a valid alternative to the German-style Hartz IV reforms that have impoverished the bottom fifth of German society and which no Left-wing movement can stomach.
It wished to push through a more radical overhaul of the Greek state that anything yet done under five years of Troika rule – and much has been done, to be fair.
As Mr Varoufakis told Die Zeit: “Why does a kilometer of freeway cost three times as much where we are as it does in Germany? Because we’re dealing with a system of cronyism and corruption. That’s what we have to tackle. But, instead, we’re debating pharmacy opening times."
The Troika pushed privatisation of profitable state assets at knock-down depression prices to private monopolies, to the benefit of an entrenched elite. To call that reforms invites a bitter cynicism.
The only reason that the Troika pushed this policy was in order to extract money. It was acting at a debt collector. “The reforms were a smokescreen. Whenever I tried talking about proposals, they were bored. I could see it in their body language," Mr Varoufakis told me.

^{Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister}
The truth is that the creditor power structure never even looked at the Greek proposals. They never entertained the possibility of tearing up their own stale, discredited, legalistic, fatuous Troika script.
The decision was made from the outset to demand strict enforcement of the terms agreed in the original Memorandum, which even the last conservative pro-Troika government was unable to implement - regardless of whether it makes any sense, or actually increases the chance that Germany and other lenders will recoup their money.
At best, it is bureaucratic inertia, a prime exhibit of why the EU has become unworkable, almost genetically incapable of recognising and correcting its own errors.
At worst, it is nasty, bullying, insistence on ritual capitulation for the sake of it.
We all know the argument. The EU is worried about political “moral hazard”, about what Podemos might achieve in Spain, or the eurosceptics in Italy, or the Front National in France, if Syriza is seen to buck the system and get away with it.
But do the proponents of this establishment view – and one hears it a lot – really think that Podemos can be defeated by crushing Syriza, or that they can discourage Marine Le Pen by violating the sovereignty and sensibilities of a nation?
Do they think that the EU’s ever-declining hold on the loyalty of Europe’s youth can be reversed by creating a martyr state on the Left? Do they not realize that this is their own Guatemala, the radical experiment of Jacobo Arbenz that was extinguished by the CIA in 1954, only to set off the Cuban revolution and thirty years of guerrilla warfare across Latin America? Don’t these lawyers – and yes they are almost all lawyers - ever look beyond their noses?
The Versailles victors assumed reflexively that they had the full weight of moral authority on their side when they imposed their Carthiginian settlement on a defeated Germany in 1919 and demanded the payment of debts that they themselves invented. History judged otherwise.

 

Debt Problems: America’s Striking Resemblance to Greece

by Rodney Johnson
Will they default? Won’t they?
With Greece hot in the news, debt is on a lot of people’s minds. Large creditors all over the euro zone could be facing losses. Many countries are preparing themselves for the spillover effect as this situation develops.
But big investors aside, plenty of Greek citizens could get stiffed as well… specifically, those with pensions.
In relation to GDP, at 17.5% Greece spends more than any country in the euro zone fulfilling its pension obligations. With poverty and unemployment systemic issues in Greece, pensions are the sole source of income for many families.
America is no Greece, but we do have a debt problem of our own, and like Greece, much of it is thanks to pensions.
Just as many retirees rely on the government for their paycheck… the government relies on us, the taxpayers, for the funds necessary to write those checks.
That means — you have a lot more debt than you think.
The Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) wants states to come clean about how much they really owe.
It’s doubtful it will even matter, since there’s almost no chance that better information would lead to prudent decision making. States will likely continue relying on other people to take care of their problems. By “other people,” I mean us.
The problems with state pensions are well known, and well-documented by us and other groups. Estimates show that governments must raise at least $500 billion to fund public pensions, with the problem growing as workers age and higher benefits accrue.
Years ago GASB required states to include their unfunded pension liabilities in their main financial statements instead of simply as footnotes. States — as well as cities, counties, etc. — are now acknowledging the pension problem and taking at least halting steps to fix the issue. It won’t work, but at least it’s getting some attention.
If only it stopped there. Another growing concern lies with state retiree health care, listed as Other Post Employee Benefits (OPEBs). This issue typically gets pushed aside, but the problem is just as big, with underfunding estimated at a similar $500 billion.
The GASB just ruled that states must treat these obligations the same as pensions. They can’t just shove them in the footnotes like they used to!
You might think this would settle the issue. It doesn’t. State officials brush aside retiree health care costs because they claim they can change the benefits with the stroke of a pen. Pension obligations, on the other hand, are often protected in state constitutions.
This reasoning is dangerously wrong-headed.
It is true that OPEBs are not constitutionally protected like pensions, but that doesn’t mean they will be easy to change.
Many state employees are unionized. These are not casual bystanders who will look on as one of their main benefits gets stripped away or reduced. They will fight tooth and nail, threatening to oust any politician that dares to support cutting benefits.
This fact is not lost on politicians, who might have a different trick up their sleeves.
An easy way to reduce the costs associated with OPEBs is to direct retirees to the new health exchanges.
One of the main costs associated with OPEBs is health insurance for workers that retire before they are eligible for Medicare, age 65.
Instead of carrying these former workers on their insurance rolls, states could direct the retirees to enter the new health exchanges. Given their status as retirees and likely income level at or below the median for all households, these people should qualify for subsidies when they purchase health care coverage.
This would move some of the responsibility for funding the costs of health care from the individual cities, states, and counties to the federal government.
Voila! States, cities, and counties have just found another source of support… us!
But just as with other things, this works well when one group does it, but not so much when everyone follows suit.
If all OPEB providers took this approach, the eventual outcome would hardly change. American citizens would still have to pay the cost of care for retirees.
However, the path of the payments would change dramatically. Much less would flow through cities, states, and counties, making them appear financially healthier than they are today.
Those costs would shift to the U.S. government, which tack them onto a growing list of unsustainable payments that we keep pretending will somehow all work out.
While I’ve no doubt that government will find some way to reduce many of these long-term, unpayable obligations in some form or fashion, it also seems certain that raising taxes will be part of the solution.
This is all the more reason to lower your taxable footprint.
image: http://economyandmarketscom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/rodney_sign.gif
Rodney

Ron Paul – “Our Sovereign Debt Is Unpayable, “Eventually Investors Will Lose Confidence In the Fed”

Ron Paul – “I think [the crash] is going to be much greater [than 10 percent] and it will probably go a lot lower than people say it should,I don’t think it’s going to be just a correction.”Eventually investors will lose confidence” in the Fed, and when they do, the market could witness a “very big crash.”
Paul on Bond’s – “I don’t think there’s any way to know what the [timeline] is, but after 35 years of a gigantic bull market in bonds, [the Fed] cannot reverse history and they cannot print money forever.” “Our Soverign Debt Is Unpayable”
“The Dollar Lost 90% Compared to Gold”,  “When The Panick Sets in Gold will go to $2,400.00, $3,600.”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102771518

Texas Mobilizes state Militia against U.S Federal troops, wants Fed hands off everything Texas including its Gold

 

Texas Mobilizes state Militia against U.S Federal troops, wants Fed’s hands off everything Texas including it’s Gold

Bloomberg Headlines: TEXAS DON`T TRUST NY FEDERAL RESERVE! THEY want their GOLD!

Texas wants its gold back from the Yankees, wherever they’re keeping it.
Governor Greg Abbott signed a law last week to build a depository for its 5,600 bars of the precious metal and, as he said in a statement, “repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York.”
The gold, it turns out, isn’t at the New York Fed — it’s in a rented vault in midtown Manhattan — and is worth about $650 million. Regardless, Texas aims to bring it home.
“We want to show off our strength and resilience,” said Giovanni Capriglione, the Republican lawmaker who sponsored the repatriation bill. “This is to be able to say, ‘Hey, listen, Texas is unique, it’s stable, it’s strong and we can show that by letting other states and individuals know that, yes, Texas has a billion dollars worth of gold. Does your state have a billion dollars worth of gold?’”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-19/there-s-a-pile-of-gold-in-manhattan-texas-wants-it-back-

SS

Charlotte Church and Russell Brand join protesters at End Austerity Now rally in London

An estimated 250,000 marched from the Bank of England to the Houses of Parliament to protest against Tory Government cuts. 

 

Last updated: 20 June 2015, 15:30 BST

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Hundreds of thousands of protesters marched through London to protest billions of pounds of Government cuts at an anti-austerity rally this afternoon.
Celebrities including singer Charlotte Church and comedian Russell Brand joined demonstrators as they brandished placards, blew whistles and chanted from the Bank of England to the Houses of Parliament.
Charlotte said: “I’m here today in a show of solidarity with everyone here – it is a massive turnout – everybody who thinks that austerity isn’t the only way and thinks it is essentially unethical, unfair and unnecessary.”

Diane Abbott and Charlotte Church with protesters (Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA)

Asked if she was inspired by the surge of the Scottish National Party she said “absolutely”.
The 29-year-old added: “But I think that the Scottish have been able to galvanise themselves against the Westminster elite.
“We are in one of the richest nations in the world and social inequality is unacceptable.
“I’m immensely proud to be here. I think this is a brilliant movement and it is for the common good. We are here to make a stand.”
Speakers including Labour MP and London mayoral hopeful Diane Abbott addressed the crowd in the heart of the financial district before the march, which kicked off to the sounds of drum bands.

When the crowd, which included many trade unionists and public sector workers, arrived outside Downing Street they booed and a red flare was set off.
Sian Bloor, 45, a primary school teacher from Trafford, near Manchester, warned that children “are being robbed of their childhood” because of swingeing Government cuts.
She said: “We have seen a huge impact on our work at primary school.
“I regularly bring clothes and shoes for children and biscuits for their breakfast, just so they get something to eat.

(John Stillwell/PA)

“They are being robbed of their childhood.”
Organisers said an estimated 250,000 people were on the march. There were also marches in Glasgow and Liverpool.
A spokesman for the People’s Assembly, which organised the protest, said: “It is clear this march has exceeded all expectations.
“Even the police are estimating that there are ‘several hundred thousand’ marching. Today is not the end of our campaign against austerity but the start of a mass movement prepared to take on this government.”

‘It’s time to hold physical cash,’ says one of Britain’s most senior fund managers

(Andrew Oxlade)  The manager of one of Britain’s biggest bond funds has urged investors to keep cash under the mattress.

Ian Spreadbury, who invests more than £4bn of investors’ money across a handful of bond funds for Fidelity, including the flagship Moneybuilder Income fund, is concerned that a “systemic event” could rock markets, possibly similar in magnitude to the financial crisis of 2008, which began in Britain with a run on Northern Rock.

“Systemic risk is in the system and as an investor you have to be aware of that,” he told Telegraph Money.

The best strategy to deal with this, he said, was for investors to spread their money widely into different assets, including gold and silver, as well as cash in savings accounts. But he went further, suggesting it was wise to hold some “physical cash”, an unusual suggestion from a mainstream fund manager.

His concern is that global debt – particularly mortgage debt – has been pumped up to record levels, made possible by exceptionally low interest rates that could soon end, and he is unsure how well banks could cope with the shocks that may await.

He pointed out that a saver was covered only up to £85,000 per bank under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme – which is effectively unfunded – and that the Government has said it will not rescue banks in future, hence his suggestion that some money should be held in physical cash.
He declined to predict the exact trigger but said it was more likely to happen in the next five years rather than 10. The current woes of Greece, which may crash out of the euro, already has many market watchers concerned.
Mr Spreadbury’s views are timely, aside from Greece. A growing number of professional investors (see comment, right) and commentators are expressing unease about what happens next.
The prices of nearly all assets – property, shares, bonds – have been rising for years.
House prices have risen by 26pc since the start of 2009, and by 68pc in London. The FTSE 100 is up by 75pc.
Although it feels counter-intuitive, this trend of rising prices should continue if economies remain weak, because it gives central banks licence to keep rates low and to carry on with their “quantitative easing” programmes.
Conversely, if the economy does pick up and interest rates need to rise, the act of doing so is likely to stall the economy and force them to be reduced again. Once more, demand for those mainstream assets would be rekindled and the asset boom continues.
But then there is the shock event. Daily Telegraph columnist Jeremy Warner also captured some of the concerns this week when he wrote that the trigger for an “inevitable correction” could come from “a clear blue sky – a completely unanticipated event”.
How are fund managers preparing for this gloomy possibility?
Mr Spreadbury sticks to bonds because of the remit of his funds. Within that world, he said a shock to the system would cause a flight to safety and the price of British government bonds, or gilts, would rise sharply. He also holds bonds of companies that would be most protected in times of turmoil – water companies, power network operators – and those where the bonds are secured on a solid asset, such as land or buildings.
Examples include Center Parcs and Intu, which owns shopping centres.
Marcus Brookes, another well regarded fund manager who looks after billions of pounds worth of investments, is less constrained in where he invests, because of the different remit of his funds. Schroder Multi-Manager Diversity, for example, can pick and choose between assets.
Mr Brookes said the probability of a major shock event was small but even he holds 29pc of the Diversity portfolio in cash, a huge proportion compared with most funds. This decision is due to his concern that bonds are overvalued and may fall. He aims to deliver returns of 4pc above inflation so can’t afford to put too much in assets that he believes will lose money.
“The problem is that people are struggling to work out how to diversify if QE programmes stop,” he said.
Mr Spreadbury added: “We have rock-bottom rates and QE is still going on – this is all experimental policy and means we are in uncharted territory.
“The message is diversification. Think about holding other assets. That could mean precious metals, it could mean physical currencies.”

Real Estate Mortgages Expected to Become a Nightmare

As a result of Title XIV of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another agency to complicate matters, issued a number of mortgage-related rules that are not actually voted on by Congress. They will impose far more paperwork and raise the cost of mortgages while the Dodd-Frank portion to actually reform bank trading was vacated. So we now have a new agency to comply with to get a mortgage as of August 1st, 2015 and this should help to cap the real estate rally for the average American sending prices back down.
Government is great at expanding its own powers when it takes payoffs behind the curtan to allow the same conduct that created the problem to begin with. More government jobs and pensions. It never ends.
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/mortgage-rules-at-a-glance/
The Hunt For Money Is Everywhere
“I just bought a house in TN and I had the experience of proving where the money from a Vanguard account transferred into my checking account came from. The lender would not accept the Vanguard or bank account statements. I had to go to the bank and actually get the transmittal numbers and fax that to the lender. The personnel at my bank had never experienced this request before”.
The horror stories are pouring in. It is now evident that the government requires banks to trace every penny you have before getting a mortgage. This has NOTHING to do with terrorism; it is the entire purpose of the NSA grabbing every phone call, text message, and email. They are hunting YOU. The banks act as their agents, tracking what you are doing, and reporting back with the answers
http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/33542
ND

Fear of default being overtaken by more dangerous ticking time bomb: solvency of Greece banks

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Fear of default being overtaken by more dangerous ticking time bomb: solvency of #Greece banks http://on.ft.com/1GVw6U1 

2:34 PM - 20 Jun 2015

Until this week, the big suspense surrounding Greece was whether Athens would be able to meet a €1.6bn debt repayment to the International Monetary Fund due at the end of June or go bankrupt.

But the fear of default is rapidly being overtaken by a separate — and possibly more dangerous — ticking time bomb: the solvency of Greece’s banks.

As anxious savers withdraw deposits, economists warn that Greece’s precarious lenders could collapse. During a meeting of eurogroup finance ministers on Thursday, Benoît Cœuré, a member of the European Central Bank’s board, speculated that Greek banks might not be able to open for business on Monday.

The European Central Bank has provided crucial, emergency funding to Greek banks that has sustained them in recent months. Yet as Greece’s finances continue to deteriorate, the ECB’s own rules may soon prevent it from extending further help, paving the way for a Greek exit from the eurozone.

“The fate of Greek banks hinges on political developments, which will affect both their liquidity and their solvency,” said Jonas Floriani, an analyst at KBW Research.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/265ceb78-15ae-11e5-8e6a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3dacjii8v

College For Sex: Students depending on sugar daddies to pay their tuition

(SANTA BARBARA)  NEARLY three-quarters of the graduates now leaving America’s colleges are saddled with debt. On average, they owe $35,051. By comparison, roughly half of all graduates carried debt in 1995 and it averaged less than a third as much, says Edvisors, which tracks student aid (see chart). As the cost of university has risen, so has the number of “sugar babies” who pay for it by selling companionship and sex to wealthy older men. Monthly pay for this is typically about $3,000, though some “sugar daddies” offer much more. According to SeekingArrangement, a firm based in Las Vegas, two-thirds of sugar-baby graduates have no student debt.
Students who post profiles on SeekingArrangement.com know what they want, so “it’s almost like a business partnership”, says Angela Bermudo, a spokesman for the company. The site hosts some 900,000 profiles of sugar babies enrolled in American universities, up from 458,000 two years ago.
Their ranks swelled during the recession and are still growing fast, says Brandon Wade, the site’s founder. A year ago nearly 1,200 students with an e-mail account belonging to an American university posted a profile on the site every day; the daily average has risen to about 2,000. The site has even stopped advertising online. Its ads used to pop up with search results for terms such as “student loan”.The boom is fuelled by increased acceptance of “sugaring” (dating for money), says Steven Pasternack, the owner of a Miami firm known as Sugardaddie. The company’s site gets more than 5,000 new profile uploads worldwide every day.

A quarter are students. Astute marketing helps. Sugardaddie’s pitch notes that it does not “discriminate against people’s desires”. Sugar babies are increasingly advised to negotiate not an “allowance”, but rather a certain “lifestyle” in exchange for dates. These arrangements can remain discreet. New Yorker Keith and the younger woman he met online, seeking a sugar daddy to pay for college, both tell friends that they met in a bar. His weekly $500 deposits into her bank account will cease, he says, if she becomes unavailable.
Young men keen for cash from a “sugar mama” have few prospects. The vast majority of website sign-ups willing to pay for sex are men. This is how it should be, says Allison, a 23-year-old sugar baby near New York City whose online name is Barbiewithabrain. Her college, rent and car expenses have been covered since she was 18 by monthly allowances of $5,000-10,000 from three successive sugar daddies.
Might any of this qualify as prostitution? The websites say no. A sugar daddy doesn’t want his sugar baby to leave, whereas no client of a prostitute “wants the hooker to stick around”, as SeekingArrangement puts it. This argument has prevailed in America’s courts. If a relationship exists, payment can be labelled as compensation for companionship, not sex.
States that attempt to close that loophole fail, says Scott Cunningham, an economics professor at Baylor University in Texas who has studied prostitution markets. Proposed legislation against the practice might, he says, inadvertently prohibit marriage—which could, after all, be defined as intercourse for financial support. This is why, he adds, laws target streetwalking, pimping and other practices connected with types of prostitution. Finding a man online sidesteps all that. It is telling that PayPal, faced with a lawsuit, is dropping its refusal to process payments on SeekingArrangement, Mr Wade says. He expects the discreet payment option to become available this summer.

Global Trend Forecaster Gerald Celente On $20,000 Gold: “Here’s What We’re Forecasting…”

If there’s one thing everyone can agree on in an environment where economic data has been skewed, repeatedly revised and outright manipulated, it’s that we are seeing extreme volatility throughout the global marketplace. “From Shanghai to New York”, says highly acclaimed global trend forecaster Gerald Celente,  “to stocks, bonds and oil prices, it’s swing time.”
And while most retail investors around the world continue to pump their money into propaganda-built markets that include over bloated stocks and real estate investments, those in the know are preparing for the inevitable crash because, as Celente notes, “the worst is yet to come.”
In his latest interview Celente sheds more light on a recent report that China is preparing for something very big by hedging its bets against the real possibility of a global currency crisis stemming from a collapse in the U.S. dollar. The Chinese, along with Russia and other nations, are in the midst of an unprecedented accumulation of gold in advance of a paradigm shift that is sure to uproot the entire global monetary system as we know it today.
Via King World News:

Everybody knows what’s going on. The only reason the equity markets are moving up to the levels they are, are the record amounts of cheap money being pumped into the system.
…
So, when we look at why they’re [China] buying gold… what you’re looking at is virtually every day since the New Year began, volatility has been the name of the financial market game. So you see from Shanghai to New York, to stocks, bonds and oil prices, it’s swing time, man.
…
So the markets are moving on fake news that means nothing. The facts remain the same. There has been no recovery. It’s a cover-up.
It was a cover-up from the beginning when they came out with too-big-to-fails and TARP. They threw a tarp over the big lie to keep the Ponzi scheme going.
…
One of our keynote speakers was Nomi Prins, who wrote the book All the President’s Bankers… As it would have it, two days before our conference she was a keynote speaker at the Federal Reserve.
She spoke to members of the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank. 
And I said to her, ‘Nomi what was the one thing you learned?’
She said, ‘I learned that they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have a clue. They’re in uncharted waters and they’re faking it.’

The Chinese know it. The Russians know it. And even leaders of the Federal Reserve and U.S. government know it.
In response, despite the manipulations in the prices of precious metals through paper trading markets, countries and ultra-wealthy individuals around the world are rapidly acquiring the one asset that has stood the test of time for thousands of years as a store of value and wealth.
According to Celente, when the Ponzi scheme is finally revealed to the broader public, we’ll see a massive upswing in precious metals:

Here’s what we’re forecasting…
We’re forecasting a rapid rise in gold prices as speculators and survivors place their bets on safe haven assets… whether it’s gold or silver.
Because, when this next Ponzi scheme collapses we are forecasting that you’re going to see spikes up in gold that mirror the charts that you put up there and the spikes up in all the fake money that they’ve been printing. They’re going to follow it identically.
So, is $20,000 [per ounce of gold] on the horizon?
I don’t know.
But what we’re saying is… it’s going to go beyond the level it hit at the high in 2011 and start pumping way above $2,000 an ounce.
Source: Full audio interview at King World News – Click here to view related charts

The writing is on the wall. Trillions of dollars are being printed out of thin air to keep the system afloat for just a bit longer. Eventually, confidence in the U.S. dollar will be lost on a global scale. The Chinese and Russians will pull the plug. Investors will follow.
The rush to gold as a safe haven asset will come next.

UK Readies for Massive Protest Against ‘Austerity on Steroids’

A massive and growing anti-austerity movement will take to the streets of London on Saturday, June 20, with demonstrators demanding “an alternative to austerity and to policies that only benefit those at the top.”
Tens of thousands are expected to march from the Bank of England to Parliament Square on Saturday, protesting the conservative government’s “nasty, destructive cuts to the things ordinary people care about—the [National Health Service], the welfare state, education and public services.”
Organized by The People’s Assembly—a politically unaffiliated national campaign against austerity—the demonstration comes in the wake of UK elections in early May that saw the Conservative (Tory) Party seizing the majority of Parliamentary seats and Prime Minister David Cameron sweeping back to power.
“David Cameron and George Osborne can hardly contain their enthusiasm for the torrent of cuts and privatisations they are about to unleash,” wrote the Guardian‘s Seumas Milne on Wednesday. “This is to be austerity on steroids.”
In fact, Milne warned, “indefinite austerity, which transfers wealth from public to private and poor to rich, is Osborne’s aim.”
But “there’s no necessity to put up with the attacks they’re about to launch on millions of people’s living standards, and every reason to resist them,” Milne concluded. “The austerity programme needs to be opposed in parliament, but also with industrial action, demonstrations and local campaigns. That process is already kicking off, with a national anti-austerity march in London this Saturday.”
A separate but similarly themed rally is planned for Glasgow, Scotland on Saturday. As Al Jazeera explains, the political landscape is different in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) won an overwhelming victory in May.
“The SNP’s victory was widely seen as an endorsement of nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon’s anti-austerity stance,” Al Jazeera reports, while noting that “the party also benefited from a wave of grass-roots enthusiasm whipped up during last year’s referendum on independence from the U.K.—which generated unprecedented levels of political engagement among previously apathetic sections of Scottish society.”
Stephen Boyd, the assistant secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, which represents more than 600,000 Scottish workers and is one of the main sponsors of Saturday’s event, told Al Jazeera: “We expect George Square [in central Glasgow] to be packed. The rally will reflect the significant anger in Scotland at Tory plans to widen and deepen austerity.”
He continued: “With the Tories having achieved an overall majority at Westminster, it is essential that progressive forces in Scotland work together more closely than ever before to counter this unnecessary attack on society’s most vulnerable people.”
Ahead of Saturday’s march, the People’s Assembly made the following video outlining their grievances and demands:

Source: Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams, 19 June 2015 

EU losses from anti-Russia sanctions estimated at €100 bln — Die Welt

The sanctions imposed by the European Union against Russia over its stance on the Ukraine crisis and Moscow’s countermeasures will cost Europe €100 billion and endanger over 2 million jobs, influential German daily Die Welt reported on Friday.
Die Welt released its forecast on the EU economy’s development amid deteriorating relations between the West and Russia.
Die Welt, which cited the research results of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, said that “the fall in exports, which we saw in its worst manifestation in the autumn of last year, is currently a reality. Unless the situation is reversed radically, we’ll most likely be confronted with the most pessimistic scenario.”
A total of 500,000 jobs are under the threat of liquidation in Germany now. The German economy will lose €27 billion and its GDP will contract by 1% in the coming years, according to experts’ estimates.
Italy will lose over 200,000 jobs and 0.9% of GDP while France’s losses will amount to 150,000 jobs and 0.5% of GDP.
The German paper further said the European Commission was avoiding the release of the data on the damage the EU sanctions had done to the European economy.
“Sometimes, European Parliament deputies are not aware of the European Commission’s damage report. Even the ministries of the EU member states are informed only orally about the sanctions impact. Possibly, this is done to prevent the figures from becoming the public domain and getting into the hands of Russians,” the paper said.
Russia introduced a package of counter-measures in August last year in retaliation to the sanctions imposed by the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union and Norway against Moscow over its stance on developments in neighboring Ukraine.
Russia’s counter-sanctions involve a one-year ban on food and agricultural imports from the countries that slapped sanctions against Moscow.
Source: TASS, 19 June 2015

Currency Crisis: How Much Longer Until it Hits the US?

A currency crisis is coming to the US and it’s only a matter of when, not if. Many have been warning about it for years, from politician Ron Paul to economist Peter Schiff to many other voices in the alternative media. It’s a mathematical certainty, and a question of when, not if. Recent events, within the US and abroad, are beginning to indicate that it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. No one knows exactly when; there are way more predictions that don’t come true than those that do. However, making an accurate prediction of the exact date when the currency crisis hits is not as important as getting spiritually, mentally, financially and physically prepared for it.
Currency Crisis Rather than an Economic Collapse
When I use the term currency crisis to describe what’s coming, I don’t necessarily mean an economic collapse. There was an economic collapse in 2008 when the stock market crashed and the real estate/housing bubble burst (just as other bubbles have burst in the past like the dot.com bubble), but many ordinary Americans were unaffected by that. I am saying that a currency crisis will occur and that it will affect everyone, even people living outside the US, but especially those living inside the US and holding the majority of their wealth in US dollars. By currency crisis I mean the destruction of confidence in the US dollar to the point where people and nations do not trust it anymore as a safe storage of value, and do not want to use it any longer to transact.
Watering Down the Dollar to Escape Debt
Ever since the end of World War 2, the US has enjoyed tremendous prosperity, partly due to the US dollar acting as the world’s reserve currency, and also partly due to the institution of the petrodollar, the system whereby nations must trade oil in US dollars. However, both of these are starting to break down. The US has gone from the world’s largest creditor nation to the world’s largest debtor nation. Since all this debt is denominated in US dollars, the elite cabal in charge of the US dollar, the Rothschild-Rockefeller Federal Reserve cartel, decided to do what any criminal would do: water down the debt so as to not have to pay back as much. Think about it: if you owed money in a certain currency to someone, and if you were in charge of determining the value of that currency, and if you had no scruples, wouldn’t you just make the value of that currency worth less to save yourself money?
This explains the disastrous rise in the US money supply we have witnessed in the last 10 years or less, so extreme it is without historical precedent in America. The money supply has increased exponentially since around 2006. The US national debt stands at around US$18.271 trillion; the first $8.5 trillion of debt took 216 years to accrue (from 1790 – 2006), whereas the next $8.5 trillion of debt took only 8 years to accrue (2006 – 2014). As Michael Snyder writes, the US national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913!
The big consequence of the US Government trying to escape its debts is that people begin to see all these excess dollars in circulation. They realize that each dollar is now worth less, because there are way more of them. That’s inflation. With the watering down of a currency come the inevitable watering down of confidence. And confidence has been all that has been backing the US dollar ever since 1971 when Nixon suspended the convertibility of dollars to gold, or took the US dollar off the gold standard. Once confidence is gone, it is very difficult or impossible to regain.
BRICS and a New Reserve Currency
That is why nations around the world are starting to make other arrangements. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi both tried to break away from the domination of the petrodollar in attempting to sell their oil in other denominations. Sadly, both were demonized by the elite-owned western mainstream media, had their countries invaded on false pretenses and were ultimately assassinated. However, the game has changed since then, and now a group of powerful nations known as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have begun making their own trading arrangements. China has even come out urging the IMF to consider its currency the Renminbi as the new world reserve currency, and recently founded a new international development bank in an attempt to create an alternative to the Anglo-American dominated IMF and World Bank. Even traditional American allies like Australia and Britain jumped right on board with this new bank, much to the dismay of the US.
For far too long, the US has been living in a fake, fantasy economy. The coming currency crisis represents the tipping point we are about to reach when a critical mass of people, investors and nations completely lose confidence in the dollar. At that point, the cost of financing the debt becomes too much, interest rates start to rise again, prices skyrocket, there is hyperinflation and – all of a sudden – people’s life savings are worth a portion of what they used to be worth. It’s a scary scenario but the natural, inevitable consequence of the reckless borrowing and money-printing the US Government has engaged in for the last decade or so. Remember, the US Government can declare fiat or paper money as legal tender, but it can’t legislate confidence or generate trust in it.
Official Stats Show True, Sickened State of the American Economy
Official US Government statistics paint a true picture of the state of American finances (see Stefan Molyneux’s video embedded above). More people than ever are on food stamps and welfare; the Government is fudging the figures to hide the real number of unemployed; and the Government has no real way to pay pensions and social security going into the future. When the currency crisis does hit, the dollar will either crash to zero or be severely devalued – and it could all happen in a matter of hours, not days, weeks or months. It could get ugly. When prices skyrocket, pensioners and others on a fixed income will be the worst affected, since the same amount of income will only buy a fraction of what it used to. A bank holiday may be declared to stop a run on the banks; ATMs and other ways to access cash may be shut down; there may be riots and social unrest; martial law may be declared.
Will the Currency Crisis Occur in 2015?
Will the currency crisis occur in 2015? No one knows, but if so, it might explain why the elite have scheduled Operation Jade Helm 15 for this year. In politics, nothing happens by chance, as FDR once said. See this article for more on the deeper implications and causes for concern regarding Jade Helm, but basically, it violates the centuries-old legal principle of Posse Comitatus (an Act passed in 1878) which forbids the US military from being deployed on US soil. It declares certain states as hostile – especially Texas, which just so happens to be home to a massive number of gun owners, patriots and secessionists who would fight the Federal Government to the death (Texas, by the way, just passed legislation to build its own gold depository and demanded US$1 billion of its gold back from the NY Federal Reserve!). It further blurs the distinction between the police and military. It encourages the US military to become a guard-dog and private army of the elite, able to be deployed against anyone whom the elite declare “an enemy of the State”. Is this all just a coincidence? Citizen journalists have caught copious video footage of military vehicle movements around America in the last few months. Is it just a coincidence that some of this is happening in Jade Helm states, such as California, Nevada and Texas?
We don’t know why all this is happening, but one thing’s for sure: you need to get informed and prepared. The writing is on the wall. Knowing about all these possibilities helps you connect the dots together and make better decisions from an informed state. Forewarned is forearmed. On a practical level, invest in tangible things such as food and water reserves, gold and silver, survival supplies, and real estate or farmland. Use the upcoming currency crisis and Jade Helm as a wake-up call – the fantasy economy can’t go on forever.

Makia Freeman is the editor of The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of the the global conspiracy, including info on natural health, sovereignty, and higher consciousness.

Source: Dissident Voice, 19 June 2015

Greece may make new offer to creditors while British banks slash exposure to Athens over euro fears

By Hugo Duncan for the Daily Mail and This Is Money Reporter

Greece may make new proposals to creditors in order to reach an agreement to release more bailout cash, a Greek minister said today.

The news comes as the European Central Bank yesterday extended Greece a financial lifeline in a desperate effort to prop up the country’s crippled banking system.

The ECB raised the ceiling on so-called emergency liquidity assistance, which the banks rely on to keep their doors open, by €1.8billion.

+2

Proposals: Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will probably speak with European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker by phone today ahead of Monday's meeting

‘We will try to supplement our proposal so that we get closer to a solution,’ State Minister Alekos Flabouraris tolda Greek television show. 

‘We are not going there with the old proposal. Some work is being done to see where we can converge, so that we achieve a mutually beneficial solution.’

He also said that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will probably speak with European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker by phone today to try to end the deadlock ahead of Monday’s emergency meeting between eurozone leaders.

Greece is due to repay €1.6billion (£1.1billion) to the International Monetary Fund on June 30, but earlier this week it said it didn't have the money. 

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said that Athens will not be given a ‘grace period’ if it fails to make the payment.

The country has been locked in negotiations with European leaders but it has failed to reach an agreement over the reforms requested by its creditors in return for more funds. 

The news comes as British banks slashed their exposure to Greece yesterday amid fears the country is heading for bankruptcy and expulsion from the eurozone.

+2

Figures from the Bank of England showed the UK lenders, pension funds and other financial firms had £2billion tied up in the crisis torn nation at the end of March. That was the smallest amount since records began in 2004 and down from £9.6billion a year earlier and a peak of £12.4billion in March 2008.

British banks have been pulling out of Greece in order to protect themselves from financial and economic collapse. 

Bank of England and Treasury officials are confident the UK financial system can withstand a Greek default and exit from the eurozone – but they are worried about the knock-on effect on economic confidence. Earlier this year, bank governor Mark Carney told MPs that British banks had ‘a very small direct exposure to Greece’. 

But he has raised concerns about the impact of a Grexit on economic stability in the eurozone, Britain’s biggest trading partner.

The European Central Bank yesterday extended Greece a financial lifeline in a desperate effort to prop up the country’s crippled banking system.

It is feared Greek banks might be forced to remain closed on Monday as savers withdraw cash faster than the authorities can provide support. Greeks have pulled more than £2billion out of their banks in recent days.