Prophets Of Doom:

12 Shocking Quotes From Insiders About The

Horrific Economic Crisis That Is Almost Here

We are getting so close to a financial collapse in Europe that you can almost hear the debt bubbles popping.

All across the western world, governments and major banks are rapidly becoming insolvent.

So far, the powers that be are keeping all of the balls in the air by throwing around lots of bailout money. But now the political will for more bailouts is drying up and the number of troubled entities seems to grow by the day.

Right now the western world is facing a debt crisis that is absolutely unprecedented in world history.

Europe has had a tremendously difficult time just trying to keep Greece afloat, and several much larger European countries are now on the verge of a major financial crisis. In addition, there is a growing number of very large financial institutions all over the western world that are also rapidly approaching a day of reckoning.

The global financial system is a sea or red ink, and when we get to the point where there are hundreds of ships going under how is it going to be possible to bail all of them out?

The quotes that you are about to read show that quite a few top financial and political insiders know that things cannot hold together much longer and that a horrific economic crisis is coming. We built the global financial system on a foundation of debt, leverage and risk and now this house of cards that we have created is about to come tumbling down.

A lot of people in politics and in the financial world know what is about to happen. Once in a while they will even be quite candid about it with the media.

As I have written about previously, Europe is on the verge of a financial collapse. If things go really badly, things could totally fall apart in a few weeks. But more likely it will be a few more months until the juggling act ends.

Right now, the banking system in Europe is coming apart at the seams. Because the global financial system is so interconnected today, when major European banks start to fail it is going to have a cascading effect across the United States and Asia as well.

The financial crisis of 2008 plunged us into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

The next financial crisis could potentially hit the world even harder.

The following are 12 shocking quotes from insiders that are warning about the horrific economic crisis that is almost here....

#1 George Soros: "Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation."

#2 PIMCO CEO Mohammed El-Erian: "These are all signs of an institutional run on French banks. If it persists, the banks would have no choice but to delever their balance sheets in a very drastic and disorderly fashion. Retail depositors would get edgy and be tempted to follow trading and institutional clients through the exit doors. Europe would thus be thrown into a full-blown banking crisis that aggravates the sovereign debt trap, renders certain another economic recession, and significantly worsens the outlook for the global economy."

#3 Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, global head of securities services at UniCredit SpA (Italy's largest bank): "The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits."

#4 Stefan Homburg, the head of Germany's Institute for Public Finance: "The euro is nearing its ugly end. A collapse of monetary union now appears unavoidable."

#5 EU Parliament Member Nigel Farage: "I think the worst in the financial system is yet to come, a possible cataclysm and if that happens the gold price could go (higher) to a number that we simply cannot, at this moment, even imagine."

#6 Carl Weinberg, the chief economist at High Frequency Economics: "At this point, our base case is that Greece will default within weeks."

#7 Goldman Sachs strategist Alan Brazil: "Solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. In the US, Treasury debt growth financed the US consumer but has not had enough of an impact on job growth. Can the US continue to depreciate the world’s base currency?"

#8 International Labour Organization director general Juan Somavia recently stated that total unemployment could "increase by some 20m to a total of 40m in G20 countries" by the end of 2012.

#9 Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackerman: "It is an open secret that numerous European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking book at market levels."

#10 Alastair Newton, a strategist for Nomura Securities in London: "We believe that we are just about to enter a critical period for the eurozone and that the threat of some sort of break-up between now and year-end is greater than it has been at any time since the start of the crisis"

#11 Ann Barnhardt, head of Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc.: "It's over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch. And if you think that this collapse is going to play out without one hell of a big hot war, you are sadly, sadly mistaken."

#12 Lakshman Achuthan of ECRI: "When I call a recession...that means that process is starting to feed on itself, which means that you can yell and scream and you can write a big check, but it's not going to stop."

*****

In my opinion, the epicenter of the "next wave" of the financial collapse is going to be in Europe. But that does not mean that the United States is going to be okay. The reality is that the United States never recovered from the last recession and there are already a lot of signs that we are getting ready to enter another major recession. A major financial collapse in Europe would just accelerate our plunge into a new economic crisis.

If you want to read something that will really freak you out, you should check out what Dr. Philippa Malmgren is saying. Dr. Philippa Malmgren is the President and founder of Principalis Asset Management. She is also a former member of the Bush economic team. You can find her bio right here.

Malmgren is claiming that Germany is seriously considering bringing back the Deutschmark. In fact, she claims that Germany is very busy printing new currency up. In a list of things that we could see happen over the next few months, she included the following....

"The Germans announce they are re-introducing the Deutschmark. They have already ordered the new currency and asked that the printers hurry up."

This is quite a claim for someone to be making. You would think that someone that used to work in the White House would not make such a claim unless it was based on something solid.

If Germany did decide to leave the euro, you would see an implosion of the euro that would be truly historic.

But as I have written about previously, it should not surprise anyone that theend of the euro is being talked about because the euro simply does not work.

The only way that the euro would have had a chance of working is if all of the governments using the euro would have kept debt levels very low.

Unfortunately, the financial systems of the western world are designed to push governments into high levels of debt.

The truth is that the euro was doomed from the very beginning.

Now we are approaching a day of reckoning. We have been living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, but the bubble is ending. There are several ways that the powers that be could handle this, but all of them will lead to greater financial instability.

In the end, we will see that the debt-fueled prosperity that the western world has been enjoying for decades was just an illusion.

Debt is a very cruel master. It will almost always bring more pain and suffering than you anticipated.

It is easy to get into debt, but it can be very difficult to get out of debt.

There is no way that the western world can unwind this debt spiral easily.

The only way that another massive economic crisis can be put off for even a little while would be for the powers that be to "kick the can down the road" a little farther by creating even more debt.

But in the end, you can never solve a debt problem with more debt.

The next several years are going to be an incredibly clear illustration of why debt is bad.

When the dominoes start to fall, we are going to witness a financial avalanche which is going to destroy the finances of millions of people.

You might want to try to get out of the way while you still can.

NATO Threatens to Open Fire at Kosovo Barricades

Saturday, 01 October 2011 07:53

'Violence has flared again in Northern Kosovo after NATO troops brutally dispersed a crowd of Serbian protesters at a makeshift roadblock, firing live ammunition at peaceful demonstrators, and have now established an armed presence in the area.

Over 100 KFOR troops arrived at the scene on Friday and forced the Serbs to leave the then-intact barricade, threatening the use of lethal force. KFOR said they would shoot anyone who failed to comply. They also ordered journalists to leave the immediate area. NATO’s force in Kosovo has said it will shoot to kill anyone who crosses a barricaded area near the disputed checkpoint on Serbia's border with Kosovo, reports RT’s Aleksey Yaroshevsky.'

Read more: NATO Threatens to Open Fire at Kosovo Barricades

The Most Moronic TV News Journalist Ever? Gold is 'Backed by Nothing' While Dollars are Backed by Government!

Saturday, 01 October 2011 07:32

The Wheels Are Falling Off The Eurozone Bus

Saturday, 01 October 2011 08:02

'It was just a few days ago that Alessio Rastani stunned the world when he told the BBC that everyone in the world will lose everything within 12 months. He also said governments were stupid and run nothing. Goldman Sachs runs the world. He became an overnight YouTube sensation.

Then I heard of massive short position bets that the S and P Stock Index will tank by October 20th. Are bets this size indicative of insider knowledge sort of like the CIA and the Israelis shorting two airlines stocks just before 911?

And on the same day I read this: the head of UniCredit global securities, and former Chairman of the Hungarian stock exchange, Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, said the euro is beyond dead. The imminent Greek default will cause a 10.0 magnitude economic earthquake and welcome to the Apocalypse though that last phrase was translated from the Hungarian by a native speaker of Bulgarian.'

Read more: The Wheels Are Falling Off The Eurozone Bus

Libya: David Cameron’s 2 Billion Pound Nightmare

Posted on 30. Sep, 2011 by Susan Lindauer i

[Translate]

By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Does this child have any future? Who is responsible?

What do you get when a wannabe imperialist invents a war to get out of trouble at home, straying into deep waters that he neither controls nor understands, getting embroiled in an internecine tribal conflict that spins out of control? The answer to this question is the place where the UK’s David Cameron finds himself now: a 2-bn. pound nightmare.

Not so many months ago, we had David Cameron and William Hague declaring that the Libya Question was “not about removing Gaddafi” and that all it would take would be an immediate ceasefire from the Libyan Armed Forces. Not so many months ago we had David Cameron and William Hague declaring that the war would cost in the region of 200 million pounds, that there would be no NATO boots on the ground and that NATO would not arm the “rebels”.

What they did not tell us was that the French and Americans had been planning this imperialist little adventure for years–

What they did not tell us was that the rebel flags had been ordered well in advance from a British company–

What they did not tell us was that the entire operation was indeed to remove Colonel Gaddafi, not because he posed any threat to his “rebels” (after all, what do you do when tens of thousands of marauding thugs armed with machine guns take to the streets, decapitating Negroes, chanting racist slogans, promising to ethnically cleanse Libya of Negroes, torching government buildings, raping and killing women and children and destroying public and private property?)

They knew that the decision “to go in” had been taken long before the rebels strafed their own position to blame Colonel Gaddafi. They knew that their own media had been spreading lies about the Libyan Air Force bombing civilians – the one bombing civilians is NATO.

We saw the British reaction in draconian measures – when a few hundred bored schoolkids ran amok in August. One wonders whether Cameron would simply have given up and walked away from Number Ten Downing Street if they had been armed, or if someone had done to his youth what he did to Libya’s.

What they did not tell us was that this entire charade is about removing Colonel Gaddafi from power because his humanitarian and developmental projects in Africa and his plan to launch a gold-based currency, the Gold Dinar, would be too costly for selfish western interests.

What Cameron and Hague did not tell you is that their forces are to spend seven times more of the British tax-payers’ money than they originally admitted – nearly two billion, or two thousand million or 2,000,000,000 pounds… on what?

I will tell you.

* They have strafed the Libyan water supply (war crime) to “break the back of the population”

* They have targeted the electricity grid (war crime)

* They have targeted private homes (war crime)

* They have taken out civilian structures with military equipment (war crime)

* They have murdered children (war crime, and they did not even apologise)

* They have targeted civilians (war crime).

* They then held a conference in Paris to divide up Libya’s assets.

What they have also not told you is that the Libyan Armed Forces are largely intact.

What they have not told you is that parts of Tripoli still fly the Green Flag (symbol of the Jamahiriya, the democratic government which Muammar al-Qathafi advises). What they do not tell you is that there are still green Marches in Benghazi.

What they do not tell you is that Mahmoud Jibril dare not enter Tripoli.

They do not tell you where Jalil (the number 2) came from.

They do not tell you the background of the TNC.

They do not tell you the tribes have voted for Gaddafi.

They do not tell you that the crack desert fighters.the Tuareg, who decide who crosses the desert and who does not, have sided with Muammar Gaddafi against the TNC.

They do not tell you that the Loyalists in Libya include the hearts and minds of the Libyan population whether or not they are taking up arms against the terrorists.

The NATO special forces and this scourge have frightened many into cowering in their homes – but this does not spell support, even tacitly.

They do not tell you they indeed have NATO boots on the ground, breaching UNSC resolutions. They have indeed armed the “rebels” (another breach of UNSC resolutions), and they have indeed employed mercenaries – hundreds of thousands of them (a huge breach of UNSC resolutions).

They have not told you that NATO and its terrorists have suffered defeat after defeat in recent weeks, are unable to enter Bani Walid, are unable to enter Sirte and the only tactic that remains open is by carpet-bombing any areas of resistance, including homes, hospitals and schools to bomb the terrorists in.

Is that noble? It is a war crime.

It is an act of terrorism and David Cameron and William Hague, along with their French friend Sarkozy and that American in the White House, are using YOUR hard-earned money to perpetrate this outrage, which is sure to cost the UK thousands of jobs as retaliatory measures kick in across Africa.

Sorry Mr. Templeton, we do not have any money for your mother’s cancer treatment, I am afraid she will have to die; sorry Mr. Johnson, there is no more funding for your son’s leukaemia treatment, we do have palliative care, do you know what that is? And as for your now hospital wing, new school, new clinic, a raspberry in your faces as Cameron and Hague stick the middle finger to their own people.

How long does David Cameron think the British population will accept it all with their heads bowed, like a sickening herd of sheep?

The British People will tell you…

Saturday, October 01, 2011

US, Saudis Pressuring Jordan to Accept Hamas

The plot thickens.

DEBKAfile is reporting that the United States and Saudi Arabia are pressuring Jordan's monarch to allow Hamas to move its headquarters from Syria's capital, Damascus, to Amman, capital of the Hashemite Kingdom (which controls all of historic Palestine east of the Jordan River and a restive Arab population that is basically half Beduin and half Palestinian). Click here to read the exclusive report from Israel.

Hamas, formerly designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, is, of course, the main Palestinian offshoot of the transnational, Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based organization that spawned Al Qaeda and the Islamist terrorist group that assassinated Egypt's secular, pro-American, peace-making President Anwar Sadat. The Muslim Brotherhood is now trying to take power in Egypt, following the Obama administration-assisted ouster of Sadat's successor, the pro-American, peace-preserving President Hosni Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood was also responsible for several failed assassination attempts against Sadat's secular, semi-socialist, Soviet-backed predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was both am immensely popular pan-Arab leader and a Third World icon.

Hamas Hates the Monarchy

Hamas hates the Jordanian monarchy. The Islamist opposition in Jordan is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Impressively bridging Islam's great theological divide and traditional Arab-Persian rivalry, Hamas is strongly supported by Shiite Islamist Iran (whose pro-American, modernizing monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown by forces led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with a helping hand from the catastrophic Carter administration).

The Obama administration is attempting to engage (appease and align with) the Muslim Brotherhood. U.S. backing for the group dates to the 1950s. The Eisenhower administration secretly supported the Brotherhood against Nasser.

According to DEBKAfile, the administration and the dysfunctional Saudi royals aim to weaken Iran's influence over Hamas by transferring its base of operations from Iran's secular ally--which is threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood--to Jordan.

More immediately, DEBKAfile reports that intended move is also meant to punish the secular leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, for seeking United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state against the wishes of the Obama administration, and to pressure him into returning to the negotiating table with Israel.

Hamas and the PA are bitter rivals. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip; the PA, portions of the disputed West Bank territories.

A Long History

Foreign Confidential™ analysts believe that the alleged, secret U.S.-Saudi push to relocate Hamas HQ should be seen in the context of decades of covert and overt U.S. support for rightwing, political Islam, or Islamism, and overlapping state Islam.

All important Islamist groups have been used as tools or weapons by Islamic states. The Taliban was actually created by Pakistan with the support of Saudi Arabia, an Islamic state that is also an absolute monarchy (with no human or civil rights). The Taliban merged with state Islam by taking over Afghanistan in the aftermath of the covert, pro-Islamist, U.S. intervention in the Afghan-Soviet war. It's only a matter of time before another merger takes place.

Hezbollah, bursting at the seams with Iranian-supplied missiles capable of leveling Tel Aviv and Haifa, is another group that has basically become a government, having effectively taken over Israel's northern Arab neighbor, Lebanon.

Gaza, under Hamas rule, has become a de facto Islamist/Islamic state--with missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

With the support of the Obama administration, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey will soon become Islamic states of one sort or another. Turkey, a full NATO member, is already ruled by an "Islamist-inspired" regime that is being hailed by the Obama administration as a model "Islamic democracy." (To be fair to Obama, Washington's betrayal of Turkey's military, traditional guardian of the country's secular system, began under the Bush administration.)

Turkey is also pursuing an imperialist foreign policy--with tacit U.S. support. The Obama administration, as previously reported, welcomes the rise of a neo-Ottoman empire as a counter to nuclear-arming Iran.

The administration doesn't even oppose state Islam in Iran. Mere reform of the Islamic Republic system of government is what Obama and his advisors have in mind for Iran--not revolution.

Should a Palestinian state comprising the disputed West Bank lands and Gaza and a closed, connecting land corridor ever come into being, the new nation will most likely be dominated by Hamas--meaning, more state Islam.

Bin Laden's Big Mistakes?

In light of the above, it could be argued that the world's most notorious Islamist leader, the recently eliminated Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, made two big mistakes: he turned against his main Islamic state sponsor, Saudi Arabia, and he went too far--literally and figuratively--in attacking the U.S. It's one thing to attack a U.S. Navy ship or a U.S. embassy, and another thing, entirely, to slaughter 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil. Had he stuck with the proven model of other Islamist terrorist groups--a Marine barracks bombing here, a hijacking there, kidnappings, torture, and suicide blasts everywhere, etc.--Al Qaeda and the Taliban would probably still be running Afghanistan.

Who knows? Had he never attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and instead limited his terrorism to internationally acceptable Hamas/Hezbollah/Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps levels of mass murder and mayhem, Bin Laden might very well have been allowed to visit New York in order to address the U.N. General Assembly--and Columbia University.

POSTSCRIPT: There is no end to Middle Eastern intrigue--and irony. In the late 1970s and early '80s, Saudi Arabia and Jordan's King Hussein, the father of the country's current King Abdullah II, covertly aided a Muslim Brotherhood campaign of terrorism and violence in Soviet-supported Syria in an effort to topple the regime of the country's dictator, Hafez al-Assad, father of Syria's present, beleaguered despot, Bashar al-Assad. Hafez ultimately crushed the Islamist uprising, killing thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members in the Syrian city of Hama. (Bashar is basically repeating this history.) It is widely believed that the U.S. and Israel also used Lebanese allies to indirectly back the failed Muslim Brotherhood insurrection. Jerusalem, like Washington, in those days mistakenly believed that it could ride the Islamist tiger without being consumed by it. The U.S. sought to use Islamism as a Cold War sword against the Soviet Union and its allies; Israel saw the movement as a useful counterweight to the secular, nationalist PLO, which was also allied with Moscow.

Bringing the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch into the Jordanian capital could lead to the overthrow of the monarchy and an end to Jordan's peace pact with Israel (just as the looming Islamist/MB takeover of Egypt threatens to end its treaty with the Jewish State). Israel would be confronted by a new nightmare--namely, the emergence of an irredentist, Islamist enemy east of the Jordan River.

But replacement of the Jordanian monarchy by an Islamist regime that would also be seen as Palestinian--i.e. an East Bank Palestinian state led by Hamas--could have an unintended consequence for its supporters--namely, diminished international support for the establishment of yet another Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. Logically, the governments in Amman and Jerusalem should long ago have agreed on the disposition and administration of the formerly Jordanian-controlled, contested West Bank lands that Israel captured during its defensive Six-Day War of June 1967 (when King Hussein made the mistake of joining Egypt and Syria in an attempt to annihilate the Jewish State).

In short, the region may be backward; but it isn't dull.

Copyright © 2011 Foreign Confidential™

# posted by Confidential Reporter @ 4:57 AM links to this post

Greedy City - by Richard... Saturday, October 01, 2011

Greedy City - by Richard... Saturday, October 01, 2011

As we struggle to meet the ever-increasing demands of City Hall bureaucrats, the councillors who should be keeping a grip on the spending are themselves living it up to the tune of £1.8 million paid out in wages and allowances - a three percent rise on last year.

More than 35 councillors claimed more than £20,000 each and, of those, ten took home more than £30,000. Two councillors claimed more than £40,000 and the highest earner was Labour Councillor Ian Greenwood (Lab, Little Horton), who as leader of the Council was paid a total of £49,414.

This is the man who presides over the Council Tax Fraud, ripping off the poorest and most vulnerable tax payers in the City by illegally inflating fees for late payment of local taxes.

If, of course, the councillors did provide a check on the Council (and some are certainly trying), they might be worth their payments in a city with a half-million population – bigger than some countries.

But Greenwood's hands-off approach to official theft has catapulted the City to the top of the league on the "Greed Index" (above), based on what different councils are charging. Sending out nearly five times as many summonses as the lowest council, it also charges on average seven times the rate of the cheapest.

Bradford is thus capitalising on the hardship of the many, exploiting them as a business opportunity to yield in excess of £3.2 million a year, giving the council a comfortable surplus with which to pay their councillors and have six-figure sums left over for their chief officers' salaries and pensions.

And while the Labour leadership is silent on the issue, so too is Councillor Anne Hawkesworth (Con, Ilkley). But then, as leader of the Tory group for a year from May 2010, she is the second-highest beneficiary of the council rip-off, claiming a total of £42,107.

Not a single penny of this, though, was ever democratically mandated. The taxpayers were never asked if they wanted paid councillors, much less chief officers on six-figure salaries. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that nearly one in six households withhold their taxes until they receive a court order forcing them to pay.

With local democracy having all but broken down, such resistance is all that is left to us … for the moment. As the rip-off continues, though, many are taking the view that this is not enough. The "Greedy City" is on notice.

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The power to decide - by Richard...

A revealing piece is to be found in the Bournemouth Daily Echo, retailing news of a plea by Dorset Fire Service for more money.

There is nothing unusual in that, you might feel, except that, despairing of a free hand at the till, county fire chief Darran Gunter is appealing over the heads of the politicians, making an appeal directly to the public. He is asking people to support "a small rise in Council Tax" to offset an expected reduction in the central government support grant.

What is revealing though is that that, having exhausted all other options for more money, the beleaguered fire chief turns as a last resort to the people themselves. This might thus have the elements of Referism, except that the public is only being given the option of shelling out more more money.

However, there was a time when such an option was given to a limited number of people, as an experiment and, in the interest of equity, it is about time it was repeated. If we are deemed by our masters as worth consulting when they want more money, then the other way around should also apply. We must take the power to decide how much we pay them in the first place.