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A Quadrillion Yen And Counting – The Japanese Debt Bomb Could Set Off Global Panic At Any Moment
How much is 1,000,000,000,000,000 yen worth? Well, a quadrillion yen is worth approximately 10.5 trillion dollars. It is an amount of money that is larger than the “the economies of Germany, France and the U.K. combined“. It is such an astounding amount of debt that it is hard to even get your mind around it. The government debt to GDP ratio in Japan will reach 247 percent this year, and the Japanese currently spend about 50 percent of all central government tax revenue on debt service. Realistically, there are only two ways out of this overwhelming debt trap for the Japanese. Either they default or they try to inflate the debt away. At this point, the Japanese have chosen to try to inflate the debt away. They have initiated the greatest quantitative easing experiment that a major industrialized nation has attempted since the days of the Weimar Republic. Over the next two years, the Bank of Japan plans to zap 60 trillion yen into existence out of thin air and use it to buy Read more…
S&P Downgrades Greece to ‘Selective Default’
Greece’s credit ratings were cut to “Selective Default” by Standard & Poor’s after it negotiated the biggest sovereign debt restructuring in history.
S&P dropped Greece’s rating from CC, two levels above default, after the government added clauses to its debt designed to mop up investors unwilling to take part in the exchange, the New York-based company said in a statement Monday.
The downgrade follows a reduction last week by Fitch Ratings to C, while Moody’s Investors Service has said it will cut the nation to its lowest rating. Greece published the formal offer document last week for its agreement to exchange bonds for new securities, with investors taking a Read more…
The United Nations Wants To Crash The World Economy In Order To Save The Environment
The United Nations says that the earth is in great danger and that the way you and I are living is the problem. In a shocking new report entitled, “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing” the UN declares that the entire way that we currently approach economics needs to be changed. Instead of focusing on things like “economic growth”, the UN is encouraging nations all over the world to start basing measurements of economic success on the goal of achieving “sustainable development”. But there is a huge problem with that. The UN says that what we are doing right now is “unsustainable” by definition, and the major industrialized nations of the western world are the biggest culprits. According to the UN, since we are the ones that create the most carbon emissions and the most pollution, we are the ones that should make the biggest sacrifices. In addition, since we have the most money, we should also be willing to finance the transition of the developing world to a “sustainable development” economy as well. As you will see detailed in the rest of this article, the United Nations basically wants to crash the world economy in order to save the environment. Considering the fact that the U.S. and Europe are in the midst of a horrible economic crisis and are Read more…
Why Debt Crises Destroy Banks
After the U.S. downgrade by S&P, many pundits simply guffawed that the downgrade was a sideshow—a simple distraction from the true issues of debt and default. And that’s true to a certain extent—but if people actually think the downgrade is an issue—it may actually become one. A nation’s debt and the state of its banking system are intimately related. When there is a problem in one, you can be pretty sure there is a problem in the other. Any old notion of a “risk-free” government bond has quickly been laid to rest.
In the wake of Standard & Poor’s downgrade, the stability of other “AAA” sovereigns like the United Kingdom and France has been called into question. This, of course, has repercussions in the financial markets, where countries may suddenly find that their costs have gone skyward.
France, with the worst financial Read more…
Europe Is On The Verge Of Collapsing
Photo by Dieter Heinemann
The scale of impact is unpredictable, but potentially worse than that of the recent toxic assets crisis. The European bloc is the second largest economy, the first trade partner of China, the largest importer of Russian energy and the first buyer of high quality raw materials (it still holds the Hilton quota, the world’s most expensive meat quota).
All over the world European debt holders and many states maintain their reserves in euros. China, for example, has one-fourth of its reserves in such currency and holds a large amount of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish debt bonds….
Without debt restructuring involving important debt amount reductions and extended maturities, Greece will not be able to meet her commitments, just like the rest of Europe’s debt-overhung Europe’s periphery economies – Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, and the effects would certainly contaminate the rest of Europe including the region’s strongest economies.
The illusion of dampening the fire by deferring debt maturities is just that – a chimera. Unless public and private bondholders’ debts are reduced and longer maturities granted, default and meltdown are Read more…
US stocks plunge, Dow falls more than 500 points
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 4.3 percent Thursday, its worst one-day drop in more than two years, as global markets melted down over fears of another world economic downturn.
The Dow was down 512.76 points to 11,383.68; the broader S&P 500 lost 4.8 percent to 1,200.07, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite plunged 5.1 percent to 2,556.39.
More turmoil over sovereign debt problems in Europe and feeble US economic data are stoking “fear that the economy is heading for a double-dip recession,” said Peter Cardillo of Rockwell Global Capital.
“The market is pricing that in,” he said.
Markets worldwide were on edge over fiscal weakness in Italy and Spain and the eurozone’s ability to contain more crisis, as the two countries’ borrowing costs surged in recent days.
Meanwhile the US Labor Department reported that weekly claims for unemployment benefits remained at a high 400,000 last week, as business and government layoffs persisted while new job creation remained sluggish.
All of the Dow’s 30 blue-chip stocks were hit by the sell-off, but losses were most pronounced in the basic materials sectors, energy and financial companies.
The Imminent $2.5 Trillion Debt Ceiling Hike Will Unleash A Gold Price Surge To $1,950 And Higher
Two weeks ago we presented a chart that shows the uncanny correlation between the debt ceiling and the price of gold. Now that we know the final amount of the next debt ceiling hike, somewhere in the $2.5 trillion ballpark, it allows us to extrapolate where gold will end up as a result of the debt ceiling hike which will likely be voted into law at 7pm PDT. A simple correlation rule of thumb allows us to predict that gold will be at $1,950 by the end of the year if it simply retains it close correlation to the debt ceiling. Should Bernanke announce that he will additionally need to monetize some or all of this incremental debt amount, we anticipate that gold will be well over $2,000 by the end of the year, courtesy of yet another round of accelerated dollar debasement, which also means that real gains in US stocks will be negated courtesy of the devaluation of the currency in which they are priced. The same, however, does not apply for gold, which with every passing day is priced in nothing but itself.
The Bloomberg chart of the day first presented on July 20.
US debt crisis: US House passes debt bill
As the House of Representatives passed a last minute bill to raise the US borrowing limit while cutting spending by $2.4 trillion, Left-wingers felt betrayed by the White House, saying the price paid to win Republican support had been much too high.
The legislation is due to be approved by the Senate on Tuesday, just hours before the US was due default on its obligations for the first time in its history.
It was approved by 269 votes to 161 votes as both discontented liberals and Tea Party Republicans who wanted even more spending cuts voted against.
Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat, said: “This deal is a sugar-coated Satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see.”
Another, Cedric Richmond from New Orleans, said he feared it would have a “devastating impact” on working and middle class families, whom Read more…
What happens if the U.S. defaults?
Blank U.S. Treasury cheques are run through a printer at the U.S. Treasury printing facility July 18 in Philadelphia.The first payments that stand to be affected if the U.S. government defaults on Aug. 2 would be some $23 billion US in Social Security benefit cheques. (William Thomas Cain/Getty)How a default would unfold immediately appears relatively straightforward. It’s the reaction that no one can predict, because it’s never happened before.
The first move will be made by the U.S. Federal Reserve. The Fed is the Treasury Department’s bank, handling government cheques and lending to banks which borrow using U.S. Treasury debt as collateral.
One day — the U.S. government has estimated it will be Aug. 2 — the Fed will serve notice on the government that its account at the Fed will be in overdraft by the end of the day, in violation of the Federal Reserve Act.
On Aug. 3, some Read more…
A visualization of the US Debt
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