Physical Gold Withdrawals from the Shanghai Gold Exchange and The New Silk Road Jesse

I would add to government accumulation the likelihood that as incomes rise in the East there will also be increased demand from households. There already is. 

In the West, physical gold is mostly bling, with much of the saving in gold held largely in derivates as financial saving. And, as Jesse observes, the "paper gold" — "digital gold" really — is an issue owing to hypothecation and re-hypothecation.

In the East physical gold doubles as ornament and real saving. In addition, in Hindu India physical gold serves as a temple token. Some of the great temples have enormous stores of gold.

With global turmoil extending to the money system governments, especially in the East, and rising incomes there, with people traditionally desiring to hold physical gold, physical gold is being accumulated in that part of the world more than others.

While the gold bugs may be over the top in their assessments, demand for physical gold seems to be strong, it seems to me, for some of these reasons.

I don't want to get into the controversy over whether gold is "money," but a whole lot of people treat it as "money," and central banks have traditionally dealt in it and vault gold is considered the foundational real reserve. So, while there are many technical reasons for not considering gold to be "money," there are also a lot of practical reasons that many people do view it as "money." 

More precisely, physical gold is the historical numéraire, along with silver as secondary and copper third. For example, in the Bretton Woods system, the value of the dollar was fixed by a conversion rate into gold. Gold ceased to be the de jure numeraire when Nixon ended international settlement in gold, but many still view gold as the de facto numéraire.

Economists don't put much emphasis on the monetary significance of gold – with silver and copper now being chiefly industrial commodities, especially copper. However, conventional economists still tend to assume a gold standard and they reason "as if" on a gold standard. 

The financial world is much more focused on precious metals as not only commodities but "an asset class" that serves as a saving vehicle that can be the basis for derivatives. Thus, this asset class includes both the physical metal as real saving and derivatives based on it as financial saving.

If one wishes to integrate economics and finance, then the gold becomes important as a bridge concept.

Jesse's Café Américain
Physical Gold Withdrawals from the Shanghai Gold Exchange and The New Silk Road

Jesse

Mark Hulbert — This still looks like just a stock-market correction, not something worse

The stock market’s recent correction has been more abrupt than you’d expect if the market were in the early stages of a major decline.

I say that because one of the hallmarks of a major market top is that the bear market than ensues is relatively mild at the beginning, only building up a head of steam over several months. Corrections, in contrast, tend to be far sharper and more precipitous.

1. For what it's worth, I tend to agree with this position in that the fundamentals of the US economy are strong and improving, although contrary data can be cited. The conditions that would need to be in place for a bear market don't appear to be on the horizon yet, since "money" is flowing into the economy through both deficit spending, liberal bank lending, as well as wage increases. 

One would think that the concern might be inflationary pressure, both inflation is still moderate. Positive data about the US economy is resulting in the Fed increasing the policy rate as a part of its reaction function, in addition to normalizing after having employed special operations to address the crisis. Both of increasing the policy rate and selling government securities from inventory have a stimulative effect, which is something that the "pros" don't seem to realize since they don't understand MMT and MMT based financial analysis. Markets seem to have concluded that the Fed is "taking away the punchbowl" and are pouting by sending a signal by increasing liquidity preference and reducing risk. Crowd behavior takes over from there in an atmosphere of uncertainty and increasing fear that trumps greed.

2. On the other hand, the world situation looks poor and declining, suggesting that this pullback could mark the second leg down in the ongoing global financial crisis, since underlying issues were not addressed. Or, the world could even be headed toward war, at least a trade war along with wider sanctions that would apply even to second-parties as a matter of economic warfare against perceived adversaries and competitors of the US. Anyway, dark thoughts and dire predictions are rife, stoking fear and uncertainty.

I don't want to minimize the threat that the world is presently under, but am simply pointing out that given the facts, the discounting seems to be excessive. But given the volatility of the geopolitical situation, things could change quickly in unforeseen ways. That is a reason for the high level of uncertainty that is sparking fear. Taking this into account is not being irrational. But overreacting to it is somewhat irrational in the sense of negative emotion overshadowing reason and data.

Conclusion: It looks to me like the markets are excessively discounting the latter scenarios, owing to the fear resulting from uncertainty about the future of the world economy, while seeming to ignore the positivity regarding the American economy that the former indicates based on empirics. Markets have shrugged off this sort of thing previously but are not doing so now. There are two sides to every trade, and only time will tell who is right.

MarketWatch
Mark Hulbert: This still looks like just a stock-market correction, not something worse

William K. Black — Bank Whistleblowers United Told DOJ to use 4506-T as Kryptonite v Banksters

Sheriff Bill at his best. Long and detailed analysis of liar's loans.

New Economic Perspectives
Bank Whistleblowers United Told DOJ to use 4506-T as Kryptonite v Banksters
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Bill Black — Mankiw Whiffs on “Learning the Right Lessons from the Financial Crisis

So how does Mankiw answer the question he raises in his first sentence: “What caused the financial crisis of 2008?” He does not answer it. He not even explain why he does not answer his own question.

New Economic Perspectives
Mankiw Whiffs on “Learning the Right Lessons from the Financial Crisis”
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Michael Emmett Brady — J M Keynes on the Enemies of Capitalism: The Internal, Endogenous Threat to the Macro Economy from Wall Street Stock Market Speculators and Rentiers

Abstract

J M Keynes carefully read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) before he was 28. Of extreme importance to Keynes was Smith’s categorization of a group of upper income class citizens, whose speculative and financial interactions with the private banking industry created a very severe danger to the society as a whole, as being projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals. Keynes’s description of Smith’s projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals in the General Theory, as well as Keynes’s extremely important, early 1937 papers in the Eugenics Review and Quarterly Journal of Economics, is that Smith’s projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals are Keynes’s Wall Street speculators and rentiers. It is the speculators and rentiers who are mainly responsible for the problems of inflation and deflation in the macro economy. Keynes realized that this destructive, casino-gambling type behavior that is so damaging to the macro economy is facilitated and financed by the “…forces of banking and finance”.

Keynes’s Chapter Twelve analysis on pages 147-162 in the General Theory of the speculative dangers resulting from the financial behavior of Wall Street speculators and rentiers is identical to Smith’s pages 114-115, 279-341 discussions in the Wealth of Nations of the dangers from projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals.

Both Smith’s and Keynes’s analysis complements each other. Both Smith and Keynes could have given the exact, same, vastly superior analysis and policy advice to government officials facing the 2007-2009 Great Recession that would have been greatly superior to the type of very poor policy analysis provided by DSGE macroeconomists in the period 2006-2010.

Both Smith and Keynes explicitly point out and analyze the malign impacts(see Kennedy, 2008) on the macro economy perpetrated by either Smithian projectors, imprudent risk takers, or prodigals or Keynesian speculators and rentiers. The role of government is to impose constraints on these categories of upper income class members so as to prevent them from harming the sober people by proactive laws, rules, and regulations.

The obvious reason that DSGE macro models failed so egregiously is that there are no variables in their models representing the impacts of these types of decision makers on the macro economy over time. The reason for this misspecification modeling error by DSGE proponents is that they accept Bentham’s critique of Smith that there are no such individuals in the economy as Smith’s projectors, imprudent risk takers, or prodigals.

SSRN
J M Keynes on the Enemies of Capitalism: The Internal, Endogenous Threat to the Macro Economy from Wall Street Stock Market Speculators and Rentiers
Michael Emmett Brady, California State University, Dominguez Hills
Written: May 18, 2018

Robert Skidelsky — How [Conventional] Economics Survived the Economic Crisis

How did conventional economics survive the crisis? Handwaving.

Criticism of Paul Krugman and New Keynesian economics, which is based on "rational behavior and market equilibrium as a baseline" (Krugman).

Skidelsky concludes, "Macroeconomics still needs to come up with a big new idea." 

I would rephrase that as "a new big idea." Theories are based on a "big idea" that constitutes the architecture of the framework. Rationality and equilibrium isn't it.

Project Syndicate
How [Conventional] Economics Survived the Economic CrisisRobert Skidelsky | Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, member of the British House of Lords, and author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes

Gwynn Guilford — House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers

A new explanation of the financial crisis arguing that the proximate cause was not sub-prime but flippers that caught when the music stopped, and the lenders that were funding them. The sub-prime borrowers were a knock-on effect of loose lending.

The grim tale of America’s “subprime mortgage crisis” delivers one of those stinging moral slaps that Americans seem to favor in their histories. Poor people were reckless and stupid, banks got greedy. Layer in some Wall Street dark arts, and there you have it: a global financial crisis.

Dark arts notwithstanding, that’s not what really happened, though.

Mounting evidence suggests that the notion that the 2007 crash happened because people with shoddy credit borrowed to buy houses they couldn’t afford is just plain wrong. The latest comes in a new NBER working paper arguing that it was wealthy or middle-class house-flipping speculators who blew up the bubble to cataclysmic proportions, and then wrecked local housing markets when they defaulted en masse.

Quartz

House flippers triggered the US housing market crash, not poor subprime borrowers

Gwynn Guilford

Pam Martens and Russ Martens — Corporate Media Continues to Pump Out Fake News on Wall Street Crash of 2008

When there is an epic financial crash in the U.S. that collapses century old Wall Street institutions and brings about the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, one would think that the root causes would be chiseled in stone by now. But when it comes to the 2008 crash, expensive corporate media real estate is happy to allow bogus theories to go unchallenged by editors.

What is happening ever so subtly over time is that the unprecedented greed, corruption and unrestrained manufacture of fraudulent securities by iconic brands on Wall Street that actually caused the crash are getting a gentle rewrite. The insidious danger of this is that Wall Street is never reformed or adequately regulated – that it remains a skulking financial monster with its unseen tentacles wrapped tightly around every economic artery of American life, retaining its ever present strangulation potential....

This is what public relations and advertising are about. There is no accountability for putting out false narratives. In fact, "consumer capitalism" is based on duping the rubes.

Wall Street On Parade
Corporate Media Continues to Pump Out Fake News on Wall Street Crash of 2008
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Mark Thoma — The Great Recession: A Macroeconomic Earthquake

Larry Christiano on why the Great Recession happened, why it lasted so long, why it wasn't foreseen, and how it’s changing macroeconomic theory (the excerpt below is about the last of these, how it's changing theory)….

More like a macroeconomic brain fart.
They still don't get that a financial crisis that was foreseeable led to contagion in the real economy when liquidity dried up and banks as the primary suppler of funding to the private sector stopped lending. The government did not act quickly enough to halt the contagion and then failed to accommodate the increased liquidity preference of the private sector with sufficient federal spending. Instead, the initial stimulus was too little, too late, and then it was replaced by "expansionary fiscal austerity" to stimulate "business confidence."

The reaction of the Fed was initially to add liquidity, but it was too late to prevent the financial crisis from spilling into the economy. The Fed's next step was to add funding to the economy by increasing liquidity further was misguided because it was based on a false analysis of money creation based on the so-called money multiplier. 

The low rate policy to discourage saving and spur  investment was ineffective owing to greatly increased liquidity preference and tighter credit conditions. Moreover, QE deprived the private sector of funds that it would have received from interest payments on government securities, further enforcing the fiscal austerity imposed by Congress.

The financial crisis was initially produced by a criminogenic environment in finance that regulators permitted to develop, which had been predicted by previous work of Minsky, Kindleberger, Akerlof, Shiller, Black, and others. The FBI had warned of it in December, 2004.

Mortgage fraud was the proximate cause of the crisis but the most significant factor was the designer financial products based on derivatives that resulted in increased systemic risk rather than spreading risk as advertised.

The financial crisis led to a credit crisis that spread quickly through the economy. Most people in positions or authority and responsibility did not understand what was happening and were therefore powerless in addressing it.

Diagnosis: moronism. 

Treatment prescription: replace the morons with people who know what they are doing.

Economist's View
The Great Recession: A Macroeconomic Earthquake

Mark Thoma | Professor of Economics, University of Oregon 

Michael Hudson — Innocuous Proclaimations

This is a transcript from Meet the Renegades with economist Michael Hudson and interviewer Ross Ashcroft.

MH: If you’re teaching economics, you should begin with the relationship between finance and the economy – between the buildup of debt and the ability to pay. That should be the starting point if you realize that the problem of our time is how can society cope with the debt buildup that has occurred.

Since "money" is a credit-debt relationship, money creation results in the creation of either bank credits in deposit accounts and corresponding debts in loan accounts or in tax credits issued by government with no corresponding debt in the private sector.

The law of reflux states that money created flows back to the creator.

Repayment of bank loans extinguishes the bank credits that were created by crediting deposit accounts. These credits are extinguished the loan is reaped and the corresponding deposit accounts are debited.

Use of tax credits to pay tax obligation or other obligations to the currency issuer extinguishes those credits as the tax credits flow back to government.

The total flow of credit issuance and extinguishment constitutes the money supply available to non-government. That flow is held as various stocks in the interim.

Note that the public debt is non-government net financial wealth and the debt is cancelled with tax collection.  When government runs fiscal deficits they increase non-government net financial wealth since there is no corresponding debt in non-government. A currency issuing government can always generate more tax credits than flow back through taxes in order to increase the net financial assets of non-government to meet saving desire.

Therefore, the issue is never public debt in the case of government that is sovereign in its currency and doesn't borrow in currencies it doesn't issue or promise to convert its currency to real assets like gold or silver at a fixed rate.

Governments that either don't issue their own currency, such as US states, or governments that limit their currency sovereignty voluntarily like the nations of the EZ or countries that peg like China, are constrained financially.

Debt deflation pertains to privately issued credit. Debt deflation occurs when borrowers are unable to repay loans and the demand for money rises faster than money creation. Then a financial crisis occurs that spreads to the real economy as demand contracts. Recession sets in. If the situation is not addressed by increasing money flow, then the recession can develop into a debt deflationary depression.

There are also several paragraphs on economic rent.

This was the basic classical economics of Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. They all looked at what the landlords got – and what banks got – as socially unnecessary overhead. The economy could function technologically without a landlord class, without a banking class.

Economic rent is socially unnecessary costs imposed by those in positions of power whose power enable them to do so. "Socially necessary" costs are the costs of factors of production, chiefly cost of labor in terms of labor time multiplied by labor power based on knowledge in skill in work performance in excess of unskilled "brute" labor. Those in positions of power are able to extract more from the economic process than they actually contribute, owing to unearned reward based ownership of means of production and financial resources rather than productive economic contribution. This is financial and economic "rent" that is "socially unnecessary since the same output of production could be obtained in the absence of it.

Hudson is claiming that neoclassical is anti-classical economics in that it denies the role that economic power and economic rent play in modern monetary production economies because neoclassical economics is based on the assumption of a barter economy, where money is neutral and doesn't affect the economic process. In this view, everyone receives their just deserts based on marginal productivity.

Note that Michale Hudson is assuming quite a bit of knowledge of finance, economics, and history economics in these remarks on money and rent. It is a broad brush cursory treatment of two of the most controversial concepts in economics.

Michael Hudson

Innocuous Proclaimations

Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

See also

Orwellian doublespeak.

Michael Hudson
Golden Tongues

Sharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson

FRBNY Liberty Street Economics Blog — Crisis Chronicles

FRBNY Liberty Street Economics Blog — Crisis Chronicles

Crisis Chronicles: The Panic of 1819—America’s First Great Economic Crisis

Crisis Chronicles: The Panic of 1825 and the Most Fantastic Financial Swindle of All Time

Crisis Chronicles: The Man on the Twenty-Dollar Bill and the Panic of 1837

Crisis Chronicles–The California Gold Rush and the Gold Standard

Crisis Chronicles: Railway Mania, the Hungry Forties, and the Commercial Crisis of 1847

Crisis Chronicles: Defensive Suspension and the Panic of 1857

Crisis Chronicles: The Cotton Famine of 1862-63 and the U.S. One-Dollar Note

Crisis Chronicles: The Gold Panic of 1869, America’s First Black Friday

Crisis Chronicles: Gold, Deflation, and the Panic of 1893 Liberty Street Economics

The Final Crisis Chronicle: The Panic of 1907 and the Birth of the Fed Liberty Street Economics

Brad DeLong — Misdiagnosis of 2008 and the Fed

Alan Greenspan revisited.

WCEG — The Equitablog
Misdiagnosis of 2008 and the Fed: Inflation Targeting Was Not the Problem. An Unwillingness to Vaporize Asset Values Was Not the Problem…
Brad DeLong

Jeff Madrick — Why the Deeply Held Ideas of the Nation’s Most Elite Economists Were Direct Causes of Extreme Inequality

Remember in 2009 when everyone was dodging blame for the financial crisis? Depending on who you asked, it was the bankers, the federal regulators, Fannie Mae, fraudster mortgage companies, the ratings agencies and the sub-prime borrowers themselves. The favorite claim of excuse makers was that no single group was to blame — it was a cluster-f*** as one journalist friend put it.

If everyone did it, no one could be held accountable. But it wasn’t true. Bankers and regulators were the major creators of the crisis, for their neglect and single-minded self-aggrandizement that often involved bending the rules.

But let me single out one group that avoided blame and deserved plenty of it: mainstream economists. The deeply held ideas of the nation’s most elite economists from the Right and the Left were direct causes of the crisis, justifying perverse behavior on Wall Street and in Washington, and careless and ignorant behavior at the Federal Open Market Committee of the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.

These ideas did a lot of harm along the way — in particular, they were responsible for slower than necessary economic growth that resulted in higher unemployment and inequality.…

Evonomics

Why the Deeply Held Ideas of the Nation’s Most Elite Economists Were Direct Causes of Extreme Inequality

Jeff Madrick

Alex Christoforou — More EU Trouble. Deutsche Bank Chief Economist Wants €150 Billion Bailout For EU Banks

Systemic risk.

Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, fired shots at Germany’s financial EU hegemony when, during a joint news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, said:

“If this non-performing loan problem is worth one, the question of derivatives at other banks, at big banks, is worth one hundred. This is the ratio: one to one hundred.”

Renzi was referring to the massive, trillions of derivatives Deutsche Bank is carrying on its books. According to Renzi, Italy may have issues, but “other” European banks have much bigger problems.…

The Duran
More EU Trouble. Deutsche Bank Chief Economist Wants €150 Billion Bailout For EU Banks
Alex Christoforou

EU Bankster Contagion — Chris Hedges interviews Michael Hudson

Summary: Great Britain’s decision to leave the EU presages a global financial meltdown that could resemble the 1930s. Banks will demand massive bailouts. We will be forced, if the banks are bailed out again, to endure harsher austerity and a prolonged depression.

Michale Hudson
EU Bankster Contagion
Chris Hedges interviews Michael Hudson

Bill Mitchell — The BIS adds to the financial turbulence and should be disbanded

In 2014, it was apparent that the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had made itself part of the ideological wall that was blocking any reasonable recovery from the GFC. I wrote about that in this blog – The BIS remain part of the problem. I was already concerned in 2013 (see this blog – Since when did the BIS become the Neo-liberal Ministry of Misinformation?). Things haven’t improved and the latest statements from the Bank in the BIS Quarterly Review (March 6, 2016) – Uneasy calm gives way to turbulence – demonstrates two things that are now obvious. First, that the neo-liberal Groupthink that created the crisis in the first place, and, which has prolonged the malaise continues to dominate the leading international financial institutions. Second, not only are these institutions (and I include the OECD, the IMF, to BIS, among this group) impeding return to prosperity as a result of their continued adherence to failed macroeconomics, but worse, their patterned behaviour actually introduces new instabilities that ferment further crises. Someone should be held accountable for the instability these organisations cause, which, ultimately leads to higher rates of unemployment and increased poverty rates.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The BIS adds to the financial turbulence and should be disbanded
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

See also Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, Volumes 1-8 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966, Chapter 7, page 324

"The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

This is an extract from a section running several pages that lays out the basis behind the thinking that led to contemproary central banking.

system failure — The European industry of sell-off public property

Just like Michael Hudson predicted.

the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens
The European industry of sell-off public property

system failure due to insufficient evolution?

T. Sabri Öncü — Has the Crash of the Global Financial Markets Begun?

Second leg down now in progress?

Let me now throw in some terminology. Marxian “over-accumulation,” “overproduction,” and “underconsumption” crises theories, Keynesian theory of “lack of aggregate demand,” “financial instability hypothesis” of Minsky, “debt deflation theory of depressions” by Irving Fisher, Steve Keen’s “excessive private debts,” Michael Hudson’s “debts that cannot be paid will not be,” and the like. No matter which theory you use to look at the picture, your conclusion will be the same.

Historically and psychologically, conflict increases with adversity. Economic contraction coupled with current geopolitical conditions is "concerning."

Naked Capitalism
Has the Crash of the Global Financial Markets Begun?
T. Sabri Öncü (sabri.oncu@gmail.com), a financial economist based in Istanbul, Turkey. Original article published on February 13, 2016 in the Indian Journal Economic and Political Weekly

Wolf Richter — Italy’s Banking Crisis Spirals Elegantly out of Control

The EZ crisis is moving to Spain and Italy.

Italy, the Eurozone’s third largest economy, is in a full-blown banking crisis. Four small banks were rescued late last year. The big ones are teetering. Their stocks have crashed. They’re saddled with non-performing loans (defined as in default or approaching default). We’re not sure that the full extent of these NPLs is even known.

Wolf Street
Italy’s Banking Crisis Spirals Elegantly out of Control
Wolf Richter

Spain’s two biggest bankruptcies ever, Bankia (2011-2012) and Abengoa (2015-?), share one thing in common: their auditor.

In both cases, the New York-based big-four firm Deloitte was responsible for making sure the financial statements fairly represent the financial position and performance of the companies, and that they conform to the accounting standards. Turns out, the accounts were as crooked as they come.

Both companies ran aground. Investors in the US and Spain got bilked. The US government got stiffed. And now it seems the auditor may actually end up paying a hefty price for having “seriously” infringed Spain’s account auditing laws.

Deloitte About to Pay for its Spanish Sins?
Don Quijones

Previously posted about Spain

Prelude to a Nightmare (Feb 5)
Don Quijones

Yves Smith — Eurobanks: The Probable Point of Failure as Systemic Stress Rises

As all major financial markets – stocks, currencies, commodities, and bonds – continue to be highly volatile and risk averse, investors’ mood, and even that of real economy players, is getting nervous and gloomy. Both the masters of the universe at Davos and corporate CEOs have an uncharacteristically subdued outlook for the upcoming year.…

What should trouble commentators and analysts most, and this is implicit in the market upheaval, is that the officialdom, most importantly central bankers, who have developed the bad tendency to assign themselves the role of economic first responders (when they would in cases have been better served to sit on their hands and force governments to step to the plate to do more spending) have no idea what to do now.…

Deflation is the worst possible place to be in an economy with heavy debt levels. Economists have managed to forget the most basic lesson of the Great Depression, and tell themselves the bizarre story that putting money even more on sale will lead people to borrow and spend. Earth to central bankers: they won’t if they are worried about their future. What is needed is more demand, which means more fiscal spending and better incomes for workers, which means more labor bargaining power. Yet orthodox policymakers are deeply allergic to both ideas.…

Naked Capitalism
Eurobanks: The Probable Point of Failure as Systemic Stress Rises
Yves Smith