Tag: EU

Diversity in Sweden: Sixth Night

Apparently the real Swedes are getting tired of the violent antics of the paper ones:

Rioting spread to several Swedish towns on Friday night as police
stepped up arrests during a sixth night of unrest and far-right
vigilantes chased non-whites in southern Stockholm. In Linköping,
central southern Sweden, police responded to 120 incidents as cars,
caravans and two schools were set alight. At one point a blazing truck
was rolled into a building, which caught fire.

In Orebro, 120km west of Stockholm, police were stoned after cars and a
school were torched. In Uppsalla, north of Stockholm, there was minor
violence.

At this point, it should be obvious that my prediction of Anders Breivik being a harbinger of things to come was, at the very least, considerably less outlandish than many believed it to be at the time.  Nor are we seeing any sort of backlash in the form of more political support for the multicultural parties across Europe.

And if the police are stupid enough to play quisling and take the side of the immigrants, as they apparently are doing in Stockholm, then they’ll have to go too:

The number of police officers on the streets is simply staggering. The police appear to have focused all their resources on stopping the Swedes, Fredrik Becklin, spokesman for the nationalist youth organization Nordisk Ungdom (Nordic Youth), said Friday night. “It makes me sick to see the police clamp down on us Swedes with full force and without warning, using nightsticks and tear gas, while they don’t do a damn thing about the immigrants. We are only trying to help maintain order, while the immigrants set cars and buildings on fire,” said a young man who wished to remain anonymous.

Goldman Sachs opposes UK independence

In related news, Rapey McRaperson announced that he is opposed to women carrying handguns and pepper spray, saying that it would be a “loss/loss scenario”:

Kevin Daly, part of the investment bank’s economic team, has concluded that a
British departure from the EU would result in a “loss/loss scenario” in
which both the UK and the rest of the bloc would be damaged.
But in a note to investors, Mr Daly added that Goldman does not expect an
in/out referendum because the Tories first need to win an outright majority
and, the bank reckons, “at this stage, this doesn’t appear likely”.
Mr Daly said a UK exit would “come with a significant economic cost to the UK”
because it is “highly integrated” with the EU. The economist noted that
trade with the other 26 members of the EU accounts for 16pc of UK GDP.

He dismissed those who argue that Britain could negotiate a trade deal with
the EU once it had left. “Given the size and importance of the UK economy,
it is unlikely that the UK could negotiate the same access to the EU single
market that Switzerland and Norway have achieved,” he said.

Goldman isn’t even trying to make sense of its pro-EU position here.  Britain not only sends billions of pounds into the Brussels sinkhole every year, but has nonsensical and tremendously wasteful regulatory regimes imposed upon it, to say nothing of millions of unwanted economic migrants.  And when has being bigger and more important ever made it HARDER for a nation to pursue what it wants in negotiation?

The British vote for independence

UKIP is  slashing away at Tory support in the local elections, largely due to David Cameron’s treacherous refusal to hold the referendum he promised on the European Union:

Ukip has seen 117 councillors elected, of which 110 are gains,
with 4 councils to declare. It has 634 second place candidates and only 32
candidates polling under 10 per cent, according to a Ukip spokesman. 

Now that UKIP has won more than a quarter of the vote, the two major parties, and more importantly, the BBC, can no longer get away with pretending all the British people who are not interested in serfdom to the Lords of Brussels are “fruitcakes, loonies and closet
racists”.

One hopes that having been betrayed by Cameron once, the British people will not be foolish enough to fall for the blandishments of the stealth Europhile as he vows to “work really hard” to win back their vote by promising them the same referendum he already promised and denied them.


There is no point in supporting the Conservative Party in the UK, because there is nothing left to conserve. All the various political issues are secondary to the primary one of national independence, which makes UKIP the only reliable party and the only one worth supporting.

Stolen gold in Cyprus

They took the credit money.  Now the EU is going after the real money as well:

First they purloin the savings and bank deposits in Laiki and the Bank of Cyprus, including the working funds of the University of Cyprus, and thousands of small firms hanging on by their fingertips.

Then they seize three quarters of the country’s gold reserves, making it ever harder for Cyprus to extricate itself from EMU at a later date.

The people of Cyprus first learned about this from a Reuters leak of the working documents for the Eurogroup meeting on Friday.

It is tucked away in clause 29. “Sale of excess gold reserves: The Cypriot authorities have committed to sell the excess amount of gold reserves owned by the Republic. This is estimated to generate one-off revenues to the state of €400m via an extraordinary payout of central bank profits.”

This seemed to catch the central bank by surprise. Officials said they knew nothing about it. So who in fact made this decision?

Pay no mind to the crashing gold prices, down more than $200 in less than a week. Look at what the elite financial institutions are doing, which is to say, getting their hands on as much of the so-called “barbarous relic” as they can manage.  At this point, Portugal, Italy, and any other EU member state has to be thinking about exiting the Euro before the Eurofascists can attempt to seize their gold.

UPDATE: At Goldman Sachs, a vice-president calls his clients: “Panic! Sell! Sell! Run to the safety of cash! Sell now! Sell it all!”  (hangs up, calls gold desk)  “Yeah, pick up another 10,000 ounces.”

The anti-democratic disaster

Helmut Kohl admits what was always obvious:

Helmut Kohl has admitted that he ‘acted like a dictator’ to bring the euro into Germany to replace the beloved D-Mark. Germany’s longest-serving postwar chancellor said that he would have lost any popular vote on the euro by ‘an overwhelming majority’. He said in an interview conducted in 2002 – but only just now published – : ‘I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany. We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro. That’s quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three.’

It never ceases to amaze me that those who fetishize the so-called “right to vote” have absolutely no interest in when various politicians, in Europe and the USA, render all voting entirely irrelevant.

If you believe that women should have the right to vote, how can you possibly oppose referendums on the Euro and EU membership?  How can you possibly oppose the right of sovereign US States to secede?  What is the point of supporting a right that you don’t actually get to use on any substantial issues?

RIP Margaret Thatcher

The Iron Lady is dead at 87:

Baroness Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minster, has died after suffering a stroke at the age of 87. Her children Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness had died peacefully following a stroke this morning.

I had the privilege of meeting her once. In my youth, I considered her a great and courageous leader of a nation in decline. I now consider her to be one of history’s tragic figures, who through naïvety and an inclination to take words at face value, betrayed the country she loved and sold its sovereignty for nothing more than empty economic promises. In light of how the European Common Market has finally revealed itself to be the fascistic, anti-democratic union the skeptics always believed it would become, one will read few sadder words in an autobiography of a world leader than these:

“We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were
apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held
to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary
to our interests.”
– Lady Margaret Thatcher, “The Downing Street Years”

Dr. Sean Gabb, a UK libertarian, has more on Thatcher’s legacy, which is considerably different than you will likely glean from the conservative paeans you will be seeing in the Republican media today.

This should go over well

More news out of Cyprus:

With banks confiscating up to 80 percent of uninsured
deposits over 100,000 euros ($130,000) and the country facing a deep
economic crisis, Cyprus has forgiven loans to politicians and companies
while others are generally being required to pay in full, media reports
said, setting off fury on the island country. The Greek newspaper Ethnos and the website 24h.com.cy said that
loans to Members of Parliament from the three major political parties
and other officials in the public administration from the Bank of Cyprus
and Cyprus Popular Bank (Laiki) will be written down or off.

Not a bad deal.  The correct conclusion by the average Cypriot, I would imagine, is that there is no reason they should not insist on all of their debts being written off as well.

UPDATE: Forget Spain and Italy. CANADA could be next:

As part of the 2013 budget in Canada, the Minister of Finance tabled the Economic Action Plan 2013 which included the newest buzzword ‘bail-in’.

Source: budget.gc.ca/…/… Page 145
“The Government proposes to implement a “bail-in” regime for systemically important banks. This regime will be designed to ensure that, in the unlikely event that a systemically important bank depletes its capital, the bank can be recapitalized and returned to viability through the very rapid conversion of certain bank liabilities into regulatory capital. This will reduce risks for taxpayers. The Government will consult stakeholders on how best to implement a bail-in regime in Canada. Implementation timelines will allow for a smooth transition for affected institutions, investors and other market participants.”

Cyprus: curiouser and curiouser

First, one of the EU’s finance ministers suggested that the bank raids are not going to end with Cyprus.

Savers in the eurozone could see their bank accounts raided in the struggle to shore up the single currency, a senior EU official warned last night. The Cyprus rescue package – under which bank customers will have a chunk of their cash seized to bail out troubled lenders – could become a template for dealing with other creaking banking systems, Jeroen Dijsselbloem suggested. The remarks from the head of the eurozone’s finance ministers contradicted days of assurances that the Cyprus bank deposit raid was a ‘one off’.

Second, it appears that the news of the big 40% cash grab from uninsured depositors, (those with over EUR 100k in the bank), may be more than a little misleading, which may account for the strange silence from Russia over the last few days.  Zerohedge notes a Reuters report and postulates that the hot money which is supposedly the focus of the heist may already be well off the island.

As it turns out, these same oligrachs may have used the one week hiatus period of total chaos in the banking system to transfer the bulk of the cash they had deposited with one of the two main Cypriot banks, in the process making the whole punitive point of collapsing the Cyprus financial system entirely moot.

From Reuters: “While ordinary Cypriots queued at ATM machines to withdraw a few hundred euros as credit card transactions stopped, other depositors used an array of techniques to access their money.”

No one knows exactly how much money has left Cyprus’ banks, or where it has gone. The two banks at the centre of the crisis – Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki, and Bank of Cyprus – have units in London which remained open throughout the week and placed no limits on withdrawals. Bank of Cyprus also owns 80 percent of Russia’s Uniastrum Bank, which put no restrictions on withdrawals in Russia. Russians were among Cypriot banks’ largest depositors.

So while one could not withdraw from Bank of Cyprus or Laiki, one could withdraw without limitations from subsidiary and OpCo banks, and other affiliates?

In other words, the idea that the situation has somehow been successfully resolved is not only ludicrous from a structural perspective- at most it would amount to one more round of successful can-kicking – but may not even be the case with regards to postponing the inevitable crisis and crackup.

Cyprus: bank heist round 2

This time, sans the Cypriot parliament as EU plays its usual card of asserting “if you jokers can’t vote the way we tell you, we’ll just declare that voting is unnecessary“:

So having learned that Parliament would not approve a deposit levy in the name of a “tax”, and that the government was deeply opposed to forcing citizens and other depositors in its banks to bear losses without the bondholders being wiped out first as one would expect in the capital structure, Germany, the ECB and rest of the EuroThieves did something innovative.

They simply ignored Parliament and came up with a scheme that didn’t require a vote. We’ll see how this works out for them.

This, incidentally, is exactly what happened here with GM.  It was blatantly unlawful to protect the UAW’s pension fund, which had no senior standing while trashing senior bondholders.  The government did not care and did it anyway — and the courts permitted it.

This has been the repeated means by which you are stolen from.  When you enter into an investment, whether you make a deposit in a bank or buy a bond or something else, you are buying into a capital structure in a given place with a given and declared level of both risk and potential reward.  You price that risk and your willingness to enter into the transaction with the full understanding of where you are in that capital structure.

When that is unilaterally changed retroactively you are being stolen from. 

Period.

One can’t help but notice this is an even worse deal for the Russians than the one that had them announcing their new permanent Mediterranean fleet, and it doesn’t have the support of either the Cypriot people or their parliament. I wouldn’t get too excited and start going long the euro; contra the financial spin this situation is far from resolved.

The Euro has failed

So much for the idea that the EU and its euro would lead to more economic freedom rather than less.  Time finally ran out on what was always a vast con. Cyprus passes a law installing capital controls, thus prohibiting money transfers out of the country:

While it is unknown if the Cypriot parliament will agree to, and enact into law, the Troika-demanded deposit haircuts, after the shocking vote of mutiny against Merkel earlier this week that saw not one politician vote for the Europe suggested deposit tax levy (and even the ruling party abstained), a vote which will once more take place tomorrow, moments ago Cyprus became the first Eurozone country to officially implement governmental capital controls into legislation. At this point it had no choice: whatever happens with the deposit haircut, or with everything else, it is now inevitable that the local Cypriots will do all they can to pull as much money from domestic banking system as possible following the complete loss of faith and trust in banks, which is why the government had no choice but to intervene with its own “controls.” Sadly, this marks a milestone in the development of the Eurozone – it’s all downhill, and accelerating, from here.

Nor is the banking debacle limited to Cyprus any longer, as Spain has announced its intention to steal from Spanish depositors:  “the Spanish Minister of Finance & Public Administration announced this week a tax or bank levy (probably 0.2%) to be imposed on bank deposits, without details on which deposits will be affected or timing.”

It is time for the disastrous Euro experiment to end.  Now.  Bring back the Deutsche Mark.  Bring back the Franc.  Bring back the Lira.  The Euro has failed.

UPDATE: The news out of Cyprus just keeps getting better.

“According to the rapidly shifting plan, depositors with
the biggest local bank, Bank of Cyprus, may see losses up to 25%…. Cyprus’ second largest bank, Cyprus Popular Bank, aka Laiki bank, where it appears the bulk of Russian cash is stored, will fare far, far worse with
deposit haircuts up to a stunning 70% on the table, and that is after
capital controls ease enough to allow for the deposit withdrawals!”