Portugal

Similar to the US banks who funded home owners that shouldn’t have received mortgages and made a fortune doing so – at least initially, the Germans funded the periphery nations in an effort to drive output growth domestically. However, financing a large portion of ones’ customer purchases is a high risk endeavour. And the Germans are in the midst of this hard lesson.

What is on display more brightly and clearly than ever, though, is the utter fakery of international banking. The players have lost faith in their own shenanigans. They simply go through the motions now awaiting the political fallout, which is to say the revolt of the people who can still do arithmetic. The old refrain, “your check is in the mail” may not be so reassuring to folks who haven’t eaten for three days. Personally, I would expect the gasoline bombs to be flying around Syntagma Square before the middle of the week.

The new Greek deal is "absolutely impossible, totally non-viable and toxic …[they were] the kind of proposals you present to another side when you don’t want an agreement." Speaking with The New Statesman, former Greek FinMin Yanis Varoufakis blasts Wolfgang Schaeuble's position which will lead to "a humanitarian crisis" for Greece and warns, regarding this latest creditors' proposal, "if anything it will be worse [for the Greeks]." His conclusion is succinct, "we were set up...," Merkel and Schäuble’s control over the Eurogroup is absolute, and that the group itself is beyond the law.

There is democratic capitalism, and there is fascist capitalism. What we have today is fascist capitalism; and the following will explain how it works, using as an example the case of Greece. Simply out - The whole system is a money-funnel, from the public, to the aristocracy.

Facing abject humiliation at the hands of the German finance ministry, Alexis Tsipras arrived at Sunday’s Eurosummit a broken man. Still, the PM did his best to fight the good fight, debating both the IMF's role in the third Greek program and the treatment of the country's debt with German Chancellor Merkel late Sunday evening in Brussels. 

This weekend's events in Europe have clarified who is really running the show across the 'union'. Hans-Werner Sinn, Chairman of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, vehemnt euroskeptic, and head of the so-called 'five wise men' advising the German government and specifically Angela Merkel, confirmed his call from 2012 for a "temporary grexit from the euro." The right wing economist previously explained "Greece and Portugal have to become 30-40% less expensive to be competitive again. This is being attempted through excessive austerity measures within the euro zone, but it won't work. It will drive these countries to the brink of civil war before it succeeds. Temporary exits would very quickly stabilize these countries, create new jobs and free the population from the yoke of the euro." Anyone positioning for more centrist union-supporting rhetoric, hope is no longer a strategy as the hardest conservatives are now in charge.

Former Goldmanite George Jabbour thinks Greece should take legal action against Goldman for the bank's role in helping the country hide its debt. We can only hope that if Greece does indeed decide to take Mr. Jabbour up on his offer to help clawback some of the half billion euros the bank reportedly pocketed from the deal, that the discovery process will help shed some light on whether the man now in charge of the ECB personally oversaw and endorsed the perpetuation of the Greek lie.  

Every nation has a right to defend itself against attack – financial attack just as overt military attack. That is an essential element in the principle of self-determination. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and other debtor countries have been under the same mode of attack that was waged by the IMF and its austerity doctrine that bankrupted Latin America from the 1970s onward. International law needs to be updated to recognize that finance has become the modern-day mode of warfare. Its objectives are the same: acquisition of land, raw materials and monopolies. A byproduct of this warfare has been to make today’s financial network so dysfunctional that nations need a financial Clean Slate.

It's officially Groundhog day... and month... and year... and so on.

When you shred democracy and the central tenants of a legal system in order to benefit the very few, it’s only a matter of time before the whole system collapses.

The Shanghai Composite Index had dropped as much as 3.8% to a 4 month low before the news that the cops were going to arrest anyone who was caught "maliciously shorting stocks", when everything suddenly took off, and the SHCOMP closed  a "Dramamine required" 5.8% higher, the biggest daily increase since March 2009! Stocks around the globe followed, with US equity futures wiping out much of yesterday's losses and up 1% at last check.

We all know one thing that Greece, Cyprus, and Puerto Rico have in common – severe financial problems. There is something else that they have in common – a high proportion of their energy use is from oil. Most people don’t understand that our world economy runs on cheap energy.

Today's market battle will be between those (central banks) "hoping" that a Greek deal over the weekend is finally imminent (which on one hand looks possible after a major backpeddling by Tsipras - who may never have wanted to win the Greferendum in the first place - yesterday in Brussels and today during his speech in the Euro Parliament, but on the other will be a nearly impossible sell to Greece as any deal terms will be far harsher than the deal offered by the Troika 2 weeks ago and will have no debt reduction), and those who finally noticed that the Chinese central planners have effectively lost control.

No, this is not a line at an Athens ATM. It is a soup kitchen in Porto, Portugal...