Today we see the "Big Crisis = Big Change" theme:
Are Russia and China hoarding massive amounts of gold because they plan to kill the petrodollar? Since the 1970s, the U.S. dollar has been the currency that the international community has used to trade oil around the globe. This has created an overwhelming demand for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt. But what happens when the rest of the globe starts rejecting the increasingly unstable U.S. dollar and figures out that gold can be used as a currency in international trade? The truth is that it doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure that out. Demand for the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt would fall off the map and there would be a rush into gold unlike anything we have ever seen before. So are Russia and China accumulating unprecedented amounts of gold right now because they eventually plan to cut the legs out from under the petrodollar and they want to gobble up huge stockpiles of gold before the cat is out of the bag? Of course they will never admit this publicly, but there are rumblings out there that this is exactly what is happening.
Well, for a long time both nations have expressed displeasure with the fact that the U.S. dollar is the de facto currency of the world. Leaders from both nations have suggested the possibility of adopting a new global reserve currency, but up to this point no real contenders have emerged to dethrone the U.S. dollar.
So for now, the U.S. dollar reigns supreme in international trade. Sadly, even though most Americans greatly benefit from the petrodollar, most of them do not even know what it is. For those that do not fully understand the petrodollar, the following is a good explanation of the petrodollar from a recent article by Christopher Doran...
Russia and China have a tremendous amount of leverage when it comes to energy. What if they got together with a bunch of oil producing nations in the Middle East and decided to set up a system where oil is traded for gold? Would not much of the rest of the world go along with such a system?
Of course if that happened the U.S. financial system would crash. We would no longer be able to export our inflation to the rest of the globe and prices would rise dramatically. Demand for U.S. government debt would go through the floor and interest rates on that debt and on everything else in our economy would skyrocket. Economic activity would grind to a standstill and the financial markets would collapse.
And that would just be for starters.
Most Americans simply don't understand that Russia and China have the power to collapse the U.S. economy by going to a gold for oil system. All they have to do is pull the trigger.
Now that major corruption scandals are breaking out regarding key EU figures, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for the EU political class to continue to convince the markets that the “everything is OK.”
Indeed, it's time that we get really honest about things and state that Europe is done. Finished.
The powers that be over there are rapidly losing control of the system. Spain's banking system is collapsing at a rate worse than that of the Asian nations during the Asian Contagion of the late '90s. Italy's bonds are imploding. Germany is finding its economy teetering on the edge of a cliff. And France is seeing auto sales and apartment deals collapse at a rate just as bad as that of 2008.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The debt contagion has now spread to Spain, Italy, and even France: all three of them are countries too big to be bailed out.
Which means... it's the End Game. No matter what, the defaults are coming and the Euro will implode.
This is the reality for Europe. The whole system will be going down, it's only a matter of time. And when it does collapse, it's going to make Lehman Brothers look like a joke.
I know the markets have yet to fully realize this...the S&P 500 is approaching its all-time highs. But back in late 2007, the last time the markets were at this level... did stocks get what was coming then too? Nope. And by the time stocks "got it" things moved VERY quickly.
So if you have not already taken steps to prepare for systemic failure, you NEED to do so NOW. We're literally at most a few months, and very likely just a few weeks from Europe's banks imploding, potentially taking down the financial system with them. Think I'm joking? The Fed is pumping hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars into EU banks right now trying to stop this from happening.
An amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, according to a NASA study.
The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites which is part of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or GRACE. Researchers found freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of its total stored freshwater, the second fastest loss of groundwater storage loss after India.
About 60 percent of the loss resulted from pumping underground reservoirs for ground water, including 1,000 wells in Iraq, and another fifth was due to impacts of the drought including declining snow packs and soil drying up. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the decline, the study found.
“This rate of water loss is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents,” the authors wrote in the study, noting the declines were most obvious after a drought.
Moscow is continuing its export of military hardware to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, state arms exporter Rosonboronexport director Anatoly Isaikin confirmed Wednesday.
“We are continuing to carry out our obligations on contracts for thedelivery of military hardware,” Isaikin told reporters at a news conference in Moscow, adding there were no attack weapons among the hardware, such as helicopters or planes.
“We are continuing to carry out our obligations on contracts for thedelivery of military hardware,” Isaikin told reporters at a news conference in Moscow, adding there were no attack weapons among the hardware, such as helicopters or planes.
As early as Wednesday, President Obama could issue an executive order granting the federal government expansive and unprecedented power over one of the few remaining outposts of uncensored information — the Internet.
The Wall Street Journal reports that unnamed White House officials disclosed that the order will indeed be issued Wednesday and that it “would create a federal-government led group to work with the private sector to create and implement voluntary standards for companies running critical infrastructure. It would also take additional measures to improve information sharing and bolster cybersecurity through current regulatory authorities.”
Voluntary is a word — like so many others — that doesn’t have the same meaning in Washington, D.C., as it does in the rest of the country.
Given the the federal government’s penchant for vague language, however, it is likely that despite the denial of compulsory cooperation with the government there will be a loophole just large enough to force through a requirement of corporate cooperation with the intelligence agencies of the Obama administration.
According to information obtained by The New American, the executive order will resemble in almost every detail a cybersecurity bill that will be introduced to Congress on Wednesday.
That bill, as reported by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), will empower the “National Security Agency (NSA) and the military to collect your private internet records.” All in the name of national security, of course.
The measure that will be offered in the House of Representatives on Wednesday will be nothing less than a resurrection of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), that was passed by the House in April of last year.
According to The Hill, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Representative Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) will re-introduce an unamended CISPA this week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
That bill, H.R. 3523, established an exemption to all privacy laws allowing companies to transmit private user/subscriber information with other companies and with the government for the purpose of protecting cybersecurity. In exchange for their compliance with the “voluntary” delivery of users’ private data to the NSA and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal government will shield participating companies for any liability stemming from challenges to the government’s use of the electronic communication of its customers.
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