Is “Austerity” Responsible for the Crisis in Europe?

by Martin Masse

Most European economies have been in recession, or close to it, since the beginning of 2012. Unemployment rates are reaching record highs. Meanwhile, a debate has been raging about the deleterious effects of “austerity” measures. Various heads of government, finance ministers, and European Union officials have declared that austerity has gone too far and is preventing a recovery.
Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman are seeing this as unassailable proof that stimulus policies adopted when the financial crisis started in 2008-09 should never have been reversed and replaced by austerity measures, notwithstanding the explosion of public debt that they entailed.
In the Keynesian view, when idle resources are left unused by the private sector, governments should put them to work. They should stop worrying about budget deficits and start spending again.

This Gold Bug Ain't for Turning!

by Bill Bonner

Whoa! This is getting interesting...
Gold crashing on Monday. Slight recovery yesterday. Stocks crashed on Monday too. Now surging.
What happened to gold? No one knows. There were reports of a 124.4 ton sell order from an investment bank on Friday morning. But from whom? Why? Nobody knows.
From Bloomberg:

The CME's Comex unit is making it more expensive for speculators to trade after gold fell the most in 33 years today, dropping to the lowest since February 2011, after prices entered a bear market last week. Silver, also in a bear market, slumped 11% today and extended the year's loss to 23%.

In the financial markets, we spend most of our time waiting for something to happen. When years go by and nothing happens, we assume that nothing will ever happen. When it does happen, we are totally surprised.
Is something happening now? A major change of direction? Is another shoe dropping?
All Downhill for Gold?
A consensus is forming that the gold market has reversed direction. The bull market of the last 14 years has finally ended. It's all downhill from here, say the mainstream pundits.
But if that is true, what else will have to be true? The last bull market in gold ended when the Fed dramatically changed course.

Jim Rogers: Never In History Has This Been Seen

by jimrogers1.blogspot.it




"I don't trust the data from any government, including the U.S., Jim Rogers said. "We know that governments lie to us. Everybody's printing money, but it cannot go on. This is all artificial." Rogers, who for years has been an outspoken critic of the Feds policies of "Quantitative Easing" says all the money printing is creating false hope that we are in the middle of some kind of super bull market. But in reality, he says, "we're living in a fool's paradise."

For Everyone Shocked By What Just Happened... And Why This Is Just The Beginning

Today, lots of people woke up in shock and horror to what happened in Cyprus: a forced capital reallocation mandated by political elites under the guise of an "equity investment" in insolvent banks, which is really code for a "coercive, mandatory wealth tax." If less concerned about political correctness, one could say that what just happened was daylight robbery from savers to banks and the status quo. These same people may be even more shocked to learn that today's Cypriot "resolution" is merely the first of many such coercive interventions into personal wealth, first in Europe, and then everywhere else.

Jim Rogers 'Don't Sell your Gold and Silver Coins'

James Rickards: Global Monetary System Headed for Collapse

By Dan Weil

The world currency system is riding down the road to catastrophe, says James Rickards, senior managing director of Tangent Capital Partners.

The world already has entered a currency war that began in 2010 on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s massive easing program, he tells Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Since then, plenty of nations have joined in, including Brazil, Switzerland and Japan, says Rickards, author of “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crises.”

“All major central banks are easing,” he says. “Eventually so much money will be printed that this will lead to inflation. The endgame is collapse of the international monetary system — sometime sooner than later.”