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Insanity Is Doing The Same Thing...
Monday December 5, 2011 Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Didn't they already do this?! 
PARIS — Under the pressure of financial crisis and with the euro currency at stake, the two key leaders of the euro zone said Monday that they would together push to remake the European Union into a more integrated political and economic federation, with tight legal restraints on how much debt national parliaments can issue.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, meeting here at the start of a crucial week that will end with a European Union summit meeting on Thursday and Friday, called for amendments to European treaties that would include centralized oversight over budgets and automatic sanctions against countries that violate firmer rules on deficits. more...
An Ounce of Prevention!
Monday December 5, 2011 "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
Many have little to no savings as retirement looms 12/4/11 -USATODAY
Many have little to no savings as retirement looms says the ant to the grasshopper. In global economy driven by cycles, capital flows, and outdated constructs based on perpetual debt-based spending who’s really the grasshopper?
For many Americans, the golden years are quickly taking on a tin-like hue.
After a vicious decade of no growth for the stock market, including two 401(k)-eating bear markets and persistently sky-high unemployment, more Americans are finding themselves in their 50s and 60s with practically no money saved for retirement.
"We were in our 30s, blinked, and now we’re our parents’ age," says Alan Tipps, a corporate jet pilot who typically earns more than $100,000 a year when he’s working. But Tipps, 52, has been laid off three times during the past four years, and says that has forced him to burn through what was in his 401(k) just to "keep the lights on" in his home in Portales, N.M. more...
Indian Givers!
Monday December 5, 2011 A friend of mine reminds me of this Thomas Jefferson quote in every email he writes.
Portugal raids pension funds to meet deficit targets. 12/2/11 -Telegraph
The cabinet agreed to transfer the assets from four of Portugal’s biggest banks to the state balance sheet.
The assets will be used to bridge a gap needed to meet the fiscal deficit target of 5.9pc of GDP set by the terms of the country’s €78bn bail-out from around 10pc in 2010.
"This measure is more than sufficient to meet the budget deficit goal in 2011," said Helder Rosalino, secretary of state for central administration, on Friday.
Portugal said it had informed the EU and IMF and assured them it would be a “one-off”. However the 2010 budget was met by shifting three pension plans from Portugal Telecom on to the public social security system. The liabilities don’t count, yet.
There have been no complaints from Eurostat but Raoul Ruperal from Open Europe said: “This can’t be seen as a future revenue stream in any way.”
Forget At Your Own Peril!
Sunday December 4, 2011 This well-written story is a perfect example of what we call BS baffles brains! The power of this story is that people are so baffled that they think that they must be missing something.
They would be right; - It's missing making the point that the Federal Reserve has no choice but to print money to keep Europe afloat!
If they do not, we (The USA) all get flushed immediately. The Fed will print until the USD is not worth the paper it's printed on. Any money that you have saved will become worthless.
The only way that you can preserve and protect and grow your savings will be to get it into Precious Metals and other tangibles.
None, however, is more portable than a cigarette-pack filled with gold coins; -a $100,000 in your shirt pocket, that stays worth $100,000! That is what money is. -Greg
Bernanke’s Forgotten Footnote
New York Sun | December 2, 2011
Mr. Bernanke earned the sobriquet “Helicopter Ben,” after Milton Friedman’s explanation that the Fed could figuratively drop money from helicopters if it had to. Now that the Fed has held the Fed Funds rate near zero for several years & has committed to keep it there at least through mid-2013, the speech has turned into a kind of playbook or checklist of all that Mr. Bernanke has done since and may yet do.
The famous footnote came in where the chairman, in the course of explaining the ways in which the Fed could inject money into the economy, asserted that that the Fed “has the authority to buy foreign government debt, as well as domestic government debt. Potentially, this class of assets offers huge scope for Fed operations, as the quantity of foreign assets eligible for purchase by the Fed is several times the stock of U.S. government debt.”
There the Fed’s own publication of the speech offers footnote 16. “The Fed,” it says, “has committed to the Congress that it will not use this power to ‘bail out’ foreign governments; hence in practice it would purchase only highly rated foreign government debt.” We wonder if anyone in Congress other than Ron Paul will remember this commitment. “Highly rated government debt” seems such a quaint concept today, nine years later, especially since the United States itself has been downgraded. And the commitment to not “bail out” foreign governments seems practically naïve given what has transpired during the crisis.
No doubt the Fed will insist that on various technical grounds joining in the coordinated move to use swap lines more aggressively does not amount to a ‘bail out’ of foreign governments. Fair enough. One could spend the rest of one’s days parsing the paltering among issuers of fiat money. But given the relationship between European governments and European banks and, for that matter, the Euro itself, it strikes us that the Fed is skating close to the line it promised Congress it wouldn’t cross. The fact is that it is becoming ever clearer by the day that the Federal Reserve is now the central bank to the world.
Preserve and Protect
Saturday December 3, 2011 Is your nest-egg is in peril?
Tens of thousands of MF Global client's holdings have been wiped out by the destruction of the company and the (mis)allocations that the company made when it shut down.
This is critical to all of us because it puts the the entire clearing system into question.
If you own equities, or any kind of fund, then you are critically affected. Should the clearing firm that records your transactions with your broker become insolvent then you will be wiped out! Yes, you can sue, (if you can afford it), but get in line behind everyone else. Perhaps, ten years from now you might get some satisfaction that you have ownership of some pre-bankruptcy equivalent of Solyndra or American Airlines shares.
The apparatus is broken. Get out of your equities now. No time for procrastinating!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Regulators investigating the collapse of MF Global have determined that the firm combined money between securities and futures accounts owned by customers, and transferred funds outside the country to at least one entity, a source said on Friday.
"The further we get into (the investigation) the more complex it is ... but we're making progress," the source said, adding that the commingling and transferring of money is making it harder for regulators to determine what money belongs where.
MF Global took futures segregated money and put it into the account for customer securities, essentially mixing futures and securities that were both owned by customers, said an official familiar with the matter.
Until now, it was believed that only customer futures accounts were affected.
The source also told Reuters that MF Global had been using customer funds for "several days if not weeks" rather than just a few days before the firm collapsed.
Regulators had previously thought the firm was using customer funds on the Thursday and Friday before it filed for bankruptcy on October 31.
CME Group, the Chicago exchange where MF Global traded, said it had reviewed the company's books a week before the bankruptcy and found no issues with the customer money.
If MF Global started improperly dipping into its customers' accounts long before the firm's collapse, the allegation would raise questions of why the regulators and auditors failed to spot such behavior.
Congress has already started asking questions about potential lapses in regulatory oversight of MF Global. The pressure on regulators would only increase if MF Global turns out to have misused customer funds over an extended period of time.
"Establishing the specifics of what happened is key to figuring out how the system failed and how to fix it going forward," Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said in a statement on Thursday. "Congress will need to keep drilling down."
MF Global collapsed in late October after the firm was forced to reveal that it had made a $6.3 billion bet on European sovereign debt.
An effort to sell the firm failed, partially due to the revelation that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money were not where they should have been.
Investigators such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have been scouring the company's books, described as messy and unorganized, for the fund shortfall that has been estimated as much as $1.2 billion.
