Fail

Ever wondered what life would be like if a country actually disappeared off the face of the planet or at least transformed into something else?

It is hard to believe that in these allegedly enlightened times this question even needs to be asked. Are there really educated adults who believe that by dropping helicopter money conjured from thin air, the central bank can actually make society wealthier? Well, yes there are. They spread this lunacy from the most respectable MSM platforms.

"...'Keynesian' economists, have sold to the public a 'quasi-doctrine' which teaches, in effect, that (in other words) 'bad money is better than good money'... a 'Keynesian' would favor the existence of a 'manipulative' state establishment of central bank and treasury which would continuously seek to achieve 'economic welfare' objectives with comparatively little regard for the long term reputation of the national currency."

Following overnight news that yet another former FIFX executive, this time Jerome Valcker, former top deputy to FIFA president Sepp Blatter, may be involved in the latest money laundering and corruption scandal, one involving a $10 million transfer of funds, which has been presented as an alleged payment of bribes over South Africa's bid to host the 2010 World Cup, moments ago the FIFA president announced he would hold an imprompty press conference. Will Blatter finally announced his resignation? Find out now.

A recent poll suggests that 58% of Syriza supporters would rather return to the Drachma than to remain in the single currency while severe austerity measures are imposed. Syriza have a 26 point lead over the next most popular party, New Democracy.

The reason why "investing" in the economy in the form of government spending always, without fail, leads to adverse results and negative returns, is because unlike the private sector, there are neither checks and balances, nor punishment if one fails at their job. Case in point, the much maligned Transportation Security Administration, aka the TSA, best known for groping women and infants at airport checkpoints is about to be even more maligned because according to an exclusive report from ABC, TSA screeners failed ailed to detect mock explosives and weapons in 95% of tests carried out by undercover agents.

China may raise the quota on a critical debt swap plan by as much as CNY1 trillion, underscoring how important its success is both in terms of kicking the can for the country's heavily-indebted local governments and in terms of jumpstarting the credit creation machine. Meanwhile, an effort to encourage ABS issuance is sputtering amid rising NPLs.

s it any wonder Marin Le Pen's Front National Party is a) leading in the polls, and b) pushing for an EU in/out referendum? Whatever it is that France (and/or Europe) is doing, is not working. Despite all the promises, French unemployment has risen practically non-stop for 4 years and just hit a new all-time record...

Perhaps the most concerning is the fact that should a “systemically important” financial entity go bust, any deposits above $250,000 located therein could be converted to equity… at which point if the company’s shares, your wealth evaporates.

Despite proclamations by Kuroda, Abe, and various other elected (and unelected) officials that the 'deflation mindset' is gone from Japan, it appears one segment of the population is keenly aware of the ongoing deflationary market for one staple item. Just as we warned was occurring in America, it appears the cost of blow-jobs has gone from just-plain-cheap to "well, why not?" As one intrepid reporter ventured into the Otsuka red-light district of Toshima Ward discovered, the fee for an oral session at a “pink salon” starts as low as 2,000 yen ($16!).

The “inconsequential” war certainly and drastically changed America, of that there is no doubt. Whether for the good, or bad, you’ll have to decide for yourself. On the positive side, the war did cement American independence. It proved that to defeat America on its home ground, a very, very large army, and a great commitment to prolonged and bloody war, was going to be needed. On the negative side; the war left the country with constitutional revisionism, centralized power, protectionism, mercantilism, expansionism, blind patriotism, and militarism. That decentralist small-government thingy conceived by the Founding Fathers didn’t last very long, did it? One must wonder “War, what is it good for? Was it all worth it?”

Just days after David Cameron's "I promise a referendum" victory in the British elections, which JPMorgan warns now looks likely to happen as early as 2016, France's far-right National Front party has called for an in/out referendum on the EU at the same time as the UK holds its vote. As EUObserver reports, Florian Philippot, an MEP and the party’s deputy head wrote to French President Francois Hollande this week, "the time has come to ask everybody in Europe Yes or No - if they want sovereignty to decide on their own future."

There are many things going on in the Greece vs Institutions+Germany negotiations, and many more on the fringe of the talks, with opinions being vented left and right, not least of all in the media, often driven more by a particular agenda than by facts or know-how. What most fail to acknowledge is to what extent the position of the creditor institutions is powered by economic religion...

Those men who wrote our Constitution made it perfectly intelligible to anyone who cared to read it. They also left some flexibility in its articles to ensure that as time passed and circumstances changed the document would remain viable as the indispensable protector of the republic they created and of the liberty of citizens. In recent decades, however, Americans have been treated to an endless stream of politicians, academics, lawyers, and pundits who describe the opaqueness of the Founder’s Constitution and the need for “experts” to decipher or infer what the document means. But their words are lies, there are no such things as universal values. There is only one value common to all men in all times and that is the universal lust for gaining and exercising arbitrary power, and that power is exactly what the Jacobin/Neocon crowd is after.

Following yesterday's surprise DOJ indictment in which 14 FIFA affiliates were perp-walked out of Zurich's swankiest hotel just days ahead of Sepp Blatter's re-election, one person was quite displeased with this latest US intervention on the international arena: Russian president Vladimir Putin who accused the United States of meddling outside its jurisdiction by arresting officials from FIFA, further hinting that it was part of an attempt to take the 2018 World Cup away from his country.