Italy

"Do you think Europe should forgive your debt, check box 'Yes' or 'No'." "No" means a lot of pain now and recovery later. "Yes" means less pain now but no hope of recovery ever. Choose wisely...

BACKGROUND

The referendum on Sunday will likely have a significant impact on the prospects of Greece reaching a new bailout agreement and the immediate future of the governing Syriza party. Following the expiration of the second bailout and the missed IMF repayment on 30th June, Greece has had to impose capital controls while negotiations between the country and its creditors have been put on hold until after the referendum. Eurozone officials have indicated that a “No” vote would likely mean a Greek exit from the currency union although the Greek government sees the vote as only pertaining to the terms of a bailout programme.

Earlier this week the embattled Greeks delivered still more body blows to the rotten regime of Keynesian central banking and the crony capitalist bailout state to which it is conjoined. By defaulting on its IMF loan, walking away from the troika bailout program and taking control of its insolvent domestic banking system, Alexis Tsipras and his band of political outlaws have shattered a giant illusion.

Having bounced midweek on 'hope' of a deal and 'faith' in Draghi's containment, European stock markets are tumbling back to the post-Greferendum lows of Tuesday. Italy and Spain are now down 5.5 to 6% and as the European close nears - and the realization thanks to The IMF that the vote is a simple Yes/No to debt haircuts - stocks are being sold and volatility is picking up. Bond spreads are leaking higher but it is clear that what Draghi really 'contained' was EURUSD which remains only marginally lower on the week.

The Greece impasse set to culminate on Sunday continues to have a massive impact on at least one stock market, unfortunately it is the wrong one, located on a continent which is mostly irrelevant to the future of the Greek people (unless that whole AIIB bailout does take place of course). We are, of course, talking about China which as noted earlier, started off horribly, plunging over 7% with over 1000 stocks hitting 10% limit down, then in the afternoon session mysteriously recovering all losses and even trading slightly higher on the day, before the late selling returned once more, and the Shanghai Composite plunged to close down 5.8%: an unimaginable 20% total roundtrip move!

... at this very moment, politicians from Spain's Podemos to Italy Five Star movement are drafting memos demanding that the IMF evaluate their own debt sustainability. Or rather unsustainability.

"Greece is being 'hit', there's no doubt about it," exclaims John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, noting that "[Indebted countries] become servants to what I call the corporatocracy ... today we have a global empire, and it's not an American empire. It's not a national empire... It's a corporate empire, and the big corporations rule."

According to a report prepared prior to capital controls and the banking sector meltdown, any deal that included creditor concessions on fiscal reforms would mean Greece's debt load would have to be written down.

If it was Greece's intention to crush the Chinese stock market instead of Europe's, well - it succeeded.  Because despite the PBOC and politburo throwing everything but QE at the stock market, China stocks closed down sharply on Thursday after another wild trading day as investors shrugged off regulators' intensified efforts to put a floor under the sliding market, by cutting trading fees and easing margin rules, which has now crashed 25% in about two weeks wiping out $2.5 trillion of the peak $10 trillion in Chinese stock market cap as of June 14. This ultimately resulted with the Shanghai Composite closing under 4000 for the first time since April.

"...won’t a successful Greece show others that — much as many young people who cannot afford to pay their rent return home — they, too, can return to the way things used to be?..."

Simply put -  Europe can't 'afford' anything positive to come of Greece...

So much going on that by the time an article is prepared, everything has changed and it has to be scarpped. But, in any event, here is an attempt to summarize all that has happened in another turbulent overnight session.

The EU is blowing up itself by trying to exert far too much influence on the very member nations that made its existence possible. Brussels is a blind city. It will take a lot of pain, and probably even the very wars the EU was originally founded to prevent, to figuratively burn it to the ground.

"...anyone who knows mathematics can see that the United States is on the verge of collapse because its debt has gone exponential, but no European (never mind American) politician can state the obvious, no matter how obvious it is. American officials and politicians are definitely puppets, controlled by corporate lobbyists and shady oligarchs. But here's a shocker: these are also puppets - controlled by the simple imperatives of profitability and wealth preservation, respectively. In fact, it's puppets all the way down. And what's at the bottom is a giant, ever-expanding, financial black hole."

What has really been going on in Europe over the past 5 years, if the debt load kept creeping higher, and yet little money was actually making its way to the broader population? The answer is simple: abuse of taxpayer funding, also known as fraud and corruption. As Italy's TheLocal reports, the EU anti-fraud office, Italy currently has 61 open investigations into fraud involving EU funds. This means Italy has the second highest number of investigations in the EU, ranking just below Greece's neighbor to the north, Bulgaria.

Is it just election fever, or is Argentina serious about reclaiming the Falklands Islands?