"As the euro brushes $1.50 against the dollar, it is already too late to stop the Eurozone hurtling into a full-fledged economic and political crisis. We now have to start asking whether the EU itself will survive in its current form. It takes eighteen months or so for the full effects of currency changes to feed through, so the damage will snowball late next year and beyond into 2009...

A new political order will soon take hold in much of Europe, bringing in a new wave of prickly national populists... Will Mr. Sarkozy (of France) and his allies resort to 1970s-style exchange controls to stem the rise of the euro?... The effects of such a move on the City of London would be catastrophic - and trigger the certain withdrawal of Britain from the EU."

-- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, London Telegraph

"Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves..."

"The risk of a worldwide banking crisis -- one that is particularly damaging to mortgages, private equity, hedge funds and the banks themselves -- is higher than it was a month ago, and the storm is rising... The global banking system now faces the risk of a general flight towards cash and liquid 'level one' assets on a scale that has not been seen since the early 1930s. Already British banks are showing signs of near panic." -- William Rees-Mogg, London Times

"There are concerns that a $75bn (£37bn) rescue operation put together by US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to stabilise the sub-prime market is intended to mask the scale of the crisis. "This rescue has back-fired," said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas. "The central banks don't want anything to do with it. There is a fear that the big four US banks are trying to hide their debts," he said...

Outgoing IMF chief Rodrigo Rato warned yesterday that the adjustment may be brutal: "An abrupt fall in the dollar could either be triggered by, or itself trigger, a loss of confidence in dollar assets."

When you are running the biggest confidence game in the world, a "loss of confidence" is the last thing you want to see -- before you skip town with the sucker's money.

See: Telegraph article (2007-10)

"Planned legislation that would place the majority share of all listed firms in the hands of indigenous blacks will lead to a fall in foreign investment and worsen Zimbabwe's economic woes, business leaders warned on Monday... Multi-national firms that may be affected by the policy, first unveiled in June, include Barclays Bank, Bindura Nickel Corporation and mining giant Rio Zim."

-- IOL article (2007-09)

Now that the comrades have demonstrated their success with "land reform" and "price controls", they are ready to move on to bigger and better things. Note that "Rio Zim" is "Rio Tinto Zimbabwe Ltd.", a British Rothschild operation.

"The future for troubled [U.K.] bank Northern Rock was looking increasingly desperate last night after it emerged that customers had withdrawn more than £2 billion in savings since Friday... Massive queues have snaked around branches of the bank, such as this one on Edinburgh's Castle Street on Saturday, as panicked customers flocked to withdraw their savings."

-- Scotsman article (2007-09)

The next step will be a government ban on "hoarding" cash.

"Mortgages on non-owner occupied properties in Nevada accounted for 32% of prime mortgage defaults as of June 30 as well as for 24% of subprime loan defaults, the Mortgage Bankers Association said... "Defaults are on the rise in most parts of the country, but it should be recognized that it is not always the case of a homeowner losing his or her home," said Doug Duncan, the MBA's chief economist. Rather, it's "often the case of an investor gambling on a continued increase in home values and losing that gamble."

Regardless of political pressure, there should be NO taxpayer bailouts for the speculators who created this mess. That includes the house flippers that bid up the prices, the lax mortgage lenders that fueled the speculation, and the hedge fund investors that bought up the debt. It also includes the people who took out 2nd and 3rd mortgage loans (at inflated prices) to buy luxury cars and pay off their credit cards. It even includes the would-be "homeowners" who thought they could have a $400,000 dream house on a $40,000 salary with no money down, and didn't bother to read the fine print in their ARM contracts!

See: Market Watch article (2007-08)

"Zimbabwe's inflation rate could hit 100,000 per cent by the end of the year, the International Monetary Fund predicted yesterday. The forecast came as the country introduced its latest banknote: for 200,000 dollars, just enough to buy a small bag of onions... It won't be enough for a bag of rice, currently selling under the counter at about Z$230,000 per kg."

See: Scotsman article (2007-07)

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here's the story of the Florida real estate frenzy of the mid 1920s, which was quickly followed by runaway stock speculation, the Crash of '29 and the Great Depression.

"One man who had sold acreage early in 1925 for twelve dollars an acre...cursed himself for his stupidity when it was resold later in the year for seventeen dollars, and then thirty dollars, and finally sixty dollars an acre. [He] was surprised a year or two afterward to find that the entire series of subsequent purchases was in default, that he could not recover the money still due him, and that his only redress was to take his land back again."

"Dead subdivisions line the highway, their pompous names half-obliterated on crumbling stucco gates. Lonely white-way lights stand guard over miles of cement sidewalks, where grass and palmetto take the place of homes that were to be .... Whole sections of outlying subdivisions are composed of unoccupied houses, past which one speeds on broad thoroughfares as if traversing a city in the grip of death."

See: Home Sweet Florida

"To a large extent, the housing bubble has concealed the systematic destruction of America's industrial and manufacturing base. Low interest rates have lulled the public to sleep while millions of high-paying jobs have been outsourced. The rise in housing prices has created the illusion of prosperity but, in truth, we are only selling houses to each other and are not making anything that the rest of the world wants. The $11 trillion dollars that was pumped into the real estate market is probably the greatest waste of capital investment in the nations' history. It hasn't produced a single asset that will add to our collective wealth or industrial competitiveness. It's been a total bust."

-- Mike Whitney article

"The Bank for International Settlements, the world's most prestigious financial body, has warned that years of loose monetary policy has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than generally understood. "Virtually nobody foresaw the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the crises which affected Japan and Southeast Asia in the early and late 1990s. In fact, each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a 'new era' had arrived."

See: Telegraph article (2007-06)