Read the friggin shit i am going to post, this just came on the wires
They have kicked the can just a little further down the road. But a little further down the road the Eurozone will be kicking the bucket. Bankruptcy and sovereign debt default is inevitable. Debt restructuring is just another ‘beautiful lie’ for bankruptcy! The Gold Report interviews Roger Wiegand of Trader Tracks’ :
…in this exclusive interview. Roger says the euro at $1.20 is the “line in the sand where big trouble will start. . .and that’s dangerously close.” …
The Gold Report: You put a rather provocative quotation in a recent Trader Tracks. It says: “The destruction of a currency does not follow a straight, predictable course. . .like a cancer, the disease breaks out anew because inflation cannot be cured through monetary and fiscal measures alone; it requires a fundamental change in social and political attitudes and this change usually does not occur until complete monetary chaos forces a change.” The quotation credit reads, “G. Carl Wiegand, ‘The Great Inflation: Germany,’ 1923.” … What do you think of Carl Wiegand’s observation in light of the euro’s troubles and what’s happening in the European Union now?
….
RW: I think the statement was very appropriate for what’s going on in Europe today. We’ve been doing a lot of writing on this lately, and based on latest information Germany has become the engine of Europe. Its share of the huge Euroland rescue package will come to between $154 billion and $185 billion in loan guarantees. It’s going to be mostly German money and savings that was going to have to do it—their credit.
Chopper Ben (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke), Timmy the G (Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner) and the New York banksters turned up the heat and the German Parliament approved that ridiculous package in mid-May, contrary to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s urging lawmakers to reject the whole deal. They think they can blunder through to help the euro. They cannot. Germany goes down with the rest. I think the German people are very angry about this. They don’t want to be Europe’s paymaster.
I said back in 2003 that Euroland (i.e., the European Union); the European Central Bank and the euro would fail. Now it’s coming true. It’s in writing, seven years ago. I said that because I thought it was ridiculous idea for a group of countries with major cultural differences and languages, disparate economies that don’t match up at all, with their abilities to buy and sell and obtain credit being so different. There was no way to achieve parity to reach a point where they could participate as equal members. Germany is expected to save all its neighbors and it cannot.
TGR: Do you expect to see the return of guilders and schillings, pesetas, francs and marks as one outcome from all of this?
RW: Yep. Absolutely. It won’t happen overnight. It would be too much of a big changeover at once. There may be a “mini-euro,” a higher-quality currency probably established by Germany, running alongside the current euro. I contend that Germany will be the first to bail out of the European Union and abandon the euro. I have said numerous times that the German mark probably would come back, run in parallel with the euro, and eventually the euro would just be cancelled out as a currency in Germany and they would use the old marks.
TGR: And then other former European currencies might follow?
RW: They very well could. The survivors who still remain in the European Central Bank with the euro may, in fact, try to keep it together. But without the German credit, and with all the problems they’re going to face, I really don’t understand how it can keep going. The debt is just overwhelming. Basically, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece are pretty much broke; they have no hope of paying their debt. To my understanding, Spain’s debts are 24 times larger than Greece’s. That’s a pretty big mountain to climb. So yes, I suspect that what would happen is if Germany drops out and they go back to their own old currency, the rest of the countries will, too.
TGR: Despite the vote in the German parliament, do you project that Greece and potentially Spain and Portugal will ultimately default on their sovereign debts?
RW: I think they will. There’s no way Greece can pay anything back. They have nothing going for them. They have a tourism industry, but very little manufacturing. I saw a comment the other day that said Greece hadn’t balanced a budget since 1893 or 1898. How in the world they managed that is beyond me.
TGR: So, suppose Greece defaults. And then assume, with Spain and Portugal teetering on the edge, the euro then plummets dramatically unless they start to inflate their way out of it. At what point does everyone abandon the euro and move to safer currencies? Say the U.S. dollar?
RW: There are two big numbers to watch. First would be the euro at $1.20, and that’s dangerously close. Everybody considers $1.20 the line in the sand where big trouble will start; it’s a major, major support number. The other number would be when the euro is at parity with the U.S. dollar, which would be 20 points lower. Keep in mind that one point with the euro is $1,250 the same as the Swiss franc, in currency trading. So, those are the key numbers.
TGR: What happens if the euro goes below that $1.20?
RW: Everything starts coming apart. Keep in mind, too, the euro and the U.S. dollar are supposedly the two reserve currencies of the world, with the U.S. dollar being dominant at about 80% to 85% of all reserves. The euro has a much smaller position, but it is a pretty big deal. Not all of the European population lives in Euroland, of course, and the Swiss and the Brits (the UK) still use francs and sterling—but also remember that Europe has 850 million people in contrast to 330 million in the U.S.
The Swiss franc, incidentally, trades almost point-for-point with the euro because Eurolanders surround the Swiss. The Swiss don’t want a large disparity between the two currencies to mess up export/import, in comparing prices, and in a variety of domestic things.
….
TGR: You’ve also said you expect major market mayhem before the end of July. Could you describe more specifically what you see, and tell us why?
RW: I am not alone in my forecast. Many others are saying the same thing. Stocks are up about 80% from March of 2009. It’s gotten very peaky. The markets have normal technical shifts. The Lehman meltdown in 2008 hit the market so hard that for 30 to 60 days, nothing seemed to behave normally on the trading cycles and calendar. I expected it to self-correct, but it has not. That period just fell off the trading calendar. Consequently, the old “sell in May and go away” shifted to July.
Our next short-term call is that the big funds will have pushed the market up, sold into strength, taken their profits and be out of the way by Memorial Day weekend. Then the selling begins. It will continue at a very heavy rate probably for one to two months. Six negative events are converging this month and next. First is housing. We can expect another three to five years of falling prices. Some Alt-A loans—not subprime but those based on slightly blemished credits—are going to fail and foreclose. One report said there will be two million of these.
Number two: commercial real estate has hit the wall. Vacancies are climbing. A few months ago, General Growth Properties, the owner of 158 malls, filed for bankruptcy for about $28 billion. That’s in a breakup in court right now. Good shopping centers in the U.S. are in trouble. I have never seen a big mall close, but some people have told me they have seen two of them. That’s a major event in my view. So, commercial real estate, REITs, and the life insurance companies that gave them all the money will take a big hit as related group.
TGR: A lot of shoes dropping here.
RW: We’re just at number three, the auto business. The only thing that propped it up was all the free cash from the government, “cash for clunkers” and some of the other programs. The spring auto sales that will be reported after Memorial Day won’t be good.
The next hit’s coming when the banks have to report about what’s happening with credit cards on their financial statements. Look for $40 billion in credit card debt to be written off in June and July. That’s not my forecast; I think it may have come from prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney. That’s number four.
That brings us to number five. Remember the TARP plan, which bailed out the big New York banks? All these banks have done was to gather in cash from the taxpayers, rearrange the balance sheets—the deck chairs on the Titanic—and then march forward saying everything was super duper. And it’s not. I saw Meredith Whitney on a TV show a couple of weeks ago, saying that the bad loans they’re still holding are four times worse than what got them in trouble the last time. That does not bode well.
And finally, number six was the big surprise—what’s going on in Euroland.
TGR: Yikes. Harmonic convergence turned upside down.
RW: Yes. Arch Crawford—publisher of Crawford Perspectives and Wall Street’s best-known astrologer, according to Barron’s—has mentioned the date of July 26. He said it’s the worst day astrologically and technologically that he can see on charts in 10,000 years. I asked him at a conference how bad that was and he said, “It’s so bad I can’t imagine what could happen”—you know, World War III, Iran invasion, complete systemic economic crash, or whatever. I am not of the view that something like that will happen, although it could. We don’t know. I just think we’ll have a long, slow sink in the mud, and this is going to be a very hard recession-depression that will continue for another three to five years. So, it’s going to be tough, but keep in mind the fact that in the 1930s, as bad as it was, three out of four people still had a job—so 75% were employed.
They have kicked the can just a little further down the road. But a little further down the road the Eurozone will be kicking the bucket. Bankruptcy and sovereign debt default is inevitable. Debt restructuring is just another ‘beautiful lie’ for bankruptcy! The Gold Report interviews Roger Wiegand of Trader Tracks’ :
…in this exclusive interview. Roger says the euro at $1.20 is the “line in the sand where big trouble will start. . .and that’s dangerously close.” …
The Gold Report: You put a rather provocative quotation in a recent Trader Tracks. It says: “The destruction of a currency does not follow a straight, predictable course. . .like a cancer, the disease breaks out anew because inflation cannot be cured through monetary and fiscal measures alone; it requires a fundamental change in social and political attitudes and this change usually does not occur until complete monetary chaos forces a change.” The quotation credit reads, “G. Carl Wiegand, ‘The Great Inflation: Germany,’ 1923.” … What do you think of Carl Wiegand’s observation in light of the euro’s troubles and what’s happening in the European Union now?
….
RW: I think the statement was very appropriate for what’s going on in Europe today. We’ve been doing a lot of writing on this lately, and based on latest information Germany has become the engine of Europe. Its share of the huge Euroland rescue package will come to between $154 billion and $185 billion in loan guarantees. It’s going to be mostly German money and savings that was going to have to do it—their credit.
Chopper Ben (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke), Timmy the G (Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner) and the New York banksters turned up the heat and the German Parliament approved that ridiculous package in mid-May, contrary to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s urging lawmakers to reject the whole deal. They think they can blunder through to help the euro. They cannot. Germany goes down with the rest. I think the German people are very angry about this. They don’t want to be Europe’s paymaster.
I said back in 2003 that Euroland (i.e., the European Union); the European Central Bank and the euro would fail. Now it’s coming true. It’s in writing, seven years ago. I said that because I thought it was ridiculous idea for a group of countries with major cultural differences and languages, disparate economies that don’t match up at all, with their abilities to buy and sell and obtain credit being so different. There was no way to achieve parity to reach a point where they could participate as equal members. Germany is expected to save all its neighbors and it cannot.
TGR: Do you expect to see the return of guilders and schillings, pesetas, francs and marks as one outcome from all of this?
RW: Yep. Absolutely. It won’t happen overnight. It would be too much of a big changeover at once. There may be a “mini-euro,” a higher-quality currency probably established by Germany, running alongside the current euro. I contend that Germany will be the first to bail out of the European Union and abandon the euro. I have said numerous times that the German mark probably would come back, run in parallel with the euro, and eventually the euro would just be cancelled out as a currency in Germany and they would use the old marks.
TGR: And then other former European currencies might follow?
RW: They very well could. The survivors who still remain in the European Central Bank with the euro may, in fact, try to keep it together. But without the German credit, and with all the problems they’re going to face, I really don’t understand how it can keep going. The debt is just overwhelming. Basically, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece are pretty much broke; they have no hope of paying their debt. To my understanding, Spain’s debts are 24 times larger than Greece’s. That’s a pretty big mountain to climb. So yes, I suspect that what would happen is if Germany drops out and they go back to their own old currency, the rest of the countries will, too.
TGR: Despite the vote in the German parliament, do you project that Greece and potentially Spain and Portugal will ultimately default on their sovereign debts?
RW: I think they will. There’s no way Greece can pay anything back. They have nothing going for them. They have a tourism industry, but very little manufacturing. I saw a comment the other day that said Greece hadn’t balanced a budget since 1893 or 1898. How in the world they managed that is beyond me.
TGR: So, suppose Greece defaults. And then assume, with Spain and Portugal teetering on the edge, the euro then plummets dramatically unless they start to inflate their way out of it. At what point does everyone abandon the euro and move to safer currencies? Say the U.S. dollar?
RW: There are two big numbers to watch. First would be the euro at $1.20, and that’s dangerously close. Everybody considers $1.20 the line in the sand where big trouble will start; it’s a major, major support number. The other number would be when the euro is at parity with the U.S. dollar, which would be 20 points lower. Keep in mind that one point with the euro is $1,250 the same as the Swiss franc, in currency trading. So, those are the key numbers.
TGR: What happens if the euro goes below that $1.20?
RW: Everything starts coming apart. Keep in mind, too, the euro and the U.S. dollar are supposedly the two reserve currencies of the world, with the U.S. dollar being dominant at about 80% to 85% of all reserves. The euro has a much smaller position, but it is a pretty big deal. Not all of the European population lives in Euroland, of course, and the Swiss and the Brits (the UK) still use francs and sterling—but also remember that Europe has 850 million people in contrast to 330 million in the U.S.
The Swiss franc, incidentally, trades almost point-for-point with the euro because Eurolanders surround the Swiss. The Swiss don’t want a large disparity between the two currencies to mess up export/import, in comparing prices, and in a variety of domestic things.
….
TGR: You’ve also said you expect major market mayhem before the end of July. Could you describe more specifically what you see, and tell us why?
RW: I am not alone in my forecast. Many others are saying the same thing. Stocks are up about 80% from March of 2009. It’s gotten very peaky. The markets have normal technical shifts. The Lehman meltdown in 2008 hit the market so hard that for 30 to 60 days, nothing seemed to behave normally on the trading cycles and calendar. I expected it to self-correct, but it has not. That period just fell off the trading calendar. Consequently, the old “sell in May and go away” shifted to July.
Our next short-term call is that the big funds will have pushed the market up, sold into strength, taken their profits and be out of the way by Memorial Day weekend. Then the selling begins. It will continue at a very heavy rate probably for one to two months. Six negative events are converging this month and next. First is housing. We can expect another three to five years of falling prices. Some Alt-A loans—not subprime but those based on slightly blemished credits—are going to fail and foreclose. One report said there will be two million of these.
Number two: commercial real estate has hit the wall. Vacancies are climbing. A few months ago, General Growth Properties, the owner of 158 malls, filed for bankruptcy for about $28 billion. That’s in a breakup in court right now. Good shopping centers in the U.S. are in trouble. I have never seen a big mall close, but some people have told me they have seen two of them. That’s a major event in my view. So, commercial real estate, REITs, and the life insurance companies that gave them all the money will take a big hit as related group.
TGR: A lot of shoes dropping here.
RW: We’re just at number three, the auto business. The only thing that propped it up was all the free cash from the government, “cash for clunkers” and some of the other programs. The spring auto sales that will be reported after Memorial Day won’t be good.
The next hit’s coming when the banks have to report about what’s happening with credit cards on their financial statements. Look for $40 billion in credit card debt to be written off in June and July. That’s not my forecast; I think it may have come from prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney. That’s number four.
That brings us to number five. Remember the TARP plan, which bailed out the big New York banks? All these banks have done was to gather in cash from the taxpayers, rearrange the balance sheets—the deck chairs on the Titanic—and then march forward saying everything was super duper. And it’s not. I saw Meredith Whitney on a TV show a couple of weeks ago, saying that the bad loans they’re still holding are four times worse than what got them in trouble the last time. That does not bode well.
And finally, number six was the big surprise—what’s going on in Euroland.
TGR: Yikes. Harmonic convergence turned upside down.
RW: Yes. Arch Crawford—publisher of Crawford Perspectives and Wall Street’s best-known astrologer, according to Barron’s—has mentioned the date of July 26. He said it’s the worst day astrologically and technologically that he can see on charts in 10,000 years. I asked him at a conference how bad that was and he said, “It’s so bad I can’t imagine what could happen”—you know, World War III, Iran invasion, complete systemic economic crash, or whatever. I am not of the view that something like that will happen, although it could. We don’t know. I just think we’ll have a long, slow sink in the mud, and this is going to be a very hard recession-depression that will continue for another three to five years. So, it’s going to be tough, but keep in mind the fact that in the 1930s, as bad as it was, three out of four people still had a job—so 75% were employed.
