Goodbye Sweden

Reblogged from http://swedenreport.org/

June 2, 2015 Economy, Immigration, Politics Economy, Immigration, Politics

  
This is the last post on this blog. I am leaving Sweden for good shortly, and will no longer be following its descent from what was once the third most prosperous country in the world. Frankly, it’s just too damn depressing. 

I was born and raised in Sweden, which leaves a cultural mark even though I moved to USA in the 1990s and have spent the better part of my adult life as an American. Coming back for a few years has been a shocking experience.

When I was a child, Sweden was a dull yet very safe place to live. Yes, there was a heavy blanket of socialism and collectivist values covering everything, but there was a core of pragmatism beneath the redness. The intention and goal was always to benefit the citizens, even though they went about things in a backwards manner. 
 
Prime minister Löfven 
Today, it’s as if the inmates are running the asylum. The politicians are participating in a chicken race of “goodness” where everybody tries to one-up each other in caring for the citizens of OTHER countries while Swedish retirees, school children, handicapped and other vulnerable categories of people are thorougly ignored. Violence is exploding. Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. 
But what makes me the most pessimistic about Sweden’s future is how the social fabric itself has been undermined. 

Now, to be clear, it is my opinion that modest immigration is healthy for society and beneficial for trade, cultural development and so forth. Protectionism as a concept is counter-productive, while free trade and the ability for skilled labor to go where they’re in demand is beneficial for everyone.
Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. 26,8% of the population is now foreign-born or with at least one foreign-born parent, and the national census bureau estimates that some 150 000 per year will arrive to the country of just 9,8 million residents.

There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse. 

It’s like someone having read that a cup of green tea per day is healthy, so they make it a policy to chug four gallons per day, every day. It’s a good thing overdone to the extreme until it becomes toxic.
Then you have the Swedish school system. There really is no nice way to put it; it’s a complete disaster. The minister of education is a man-boy who spends his time making Youtube-videos showing heart-signs with his hands to boost school results, while university-level students can’t read and comprehend the course literature. 
   Education minister Gustav Fridolin
Since there is a delay in the changes in the school system, it is only in recent years the full impact of the knowledge-averse “progressive” school system is starting to be felt. Hard facts are largely irrelevant; the important thing is to sit in a group and discuss things until a consensus is reached. But with no hard facts to base the conclusions on, it becomes an exercise in futility because it’s all random assumptions and opinions. As a university-level history student (!) was quoted as saying in newspaper Svenska Dagbladet the other day: “Why would all these dates matter? Who cares in what order things happened?”

That’s not exactly fertile soil for creating the researchers and engineers of the future.
Financially, Sweden is an oddity in that it never had its real estate correction when Lehman Bros went belly-up and the housing market everywhere in the West crashed. Sweden just kept steaming ahead, which means housing is ridiculously overinflated. In Stockholm, the real estate prices increased 19% and in Gothenburg 24% in the last 12 months alone — from an already sky-high level. 
   Tear-down abandoned house from 1932 with small, unremarkable lot in the outskirts of Stockholm. Current bid: 7,5 million SEK, or close to $900,000.

As a result, personal debt of the Swedish population is at an all-time high. To keep all this afloat the normal mortgage interest rates are at 2% with central bank Riksbanken at -0,25%, and yet a significant portion of the borrowers are hanging by a thread. If and when foreign banks and investors decide it’s time to turn their backs on Sweden (as happened in the early 1990s) there’s going to be a lot of pain.

Then you have the financial obligations going forward. Like much of the western world, there is a demographic change where fewer tax-paying adults are to support a glut of retirees. What makes it especially dire for Sweden is that in addition to the old Swedes, there’s also a ton of elderly immigrants that are granted “family visas” based on younger relatives having been granted asylum. They’ve never paid a dime in taxes, yet enter the system with full benefits from day one. In theory, this would be made up for by the younger relatives working and paying taxes. Sadly, this is not the case; while ethnical Swedes have a 82% employment rate, immigrants only have 57% with non-Europeans coming in at just 51%.

If Sweden was a person, it’d be like the guy with three mortgages, seven maxed-out credit cards and four collection agencies chasing him that just signed a lease for a brand new BMW X6. Simply put, there’s a lot of red ink in the future; it just hasn’t been fully realized yet.

Finally, there’s the sorry state of the Swedish defense. After decades of constant slashing of the defense budget, the extent of Swedish ambition is to stall an invader for a week in a limited area. This with war raging in Europe, Russian missiles pointed at Sweden in Kaliningrad, and Russian submarines and bomber jets openly thumbing their nose at Sweden as they intrude on Swedish territory on a regular basis. The power vacuum in Scandinavia is so tangible you can almost hear a sucking sound as you fly over it. This, too, will require massive investments when the penny finally drops amongst Swedish politicians.

So while I can’t claim to be any kind of authority on macroeconomics or social predictive models, I see red lights across the board. 
In some ways, I’d compare the country to a farm. Previously, Sweden acted like a sensible farmer and planted wheat here, carrots there, potatoes over there et cetera, by implementing free schooling, sound infrastructure investments, state-financed research and so forth. A few decades later, they reaped the rewards and climbed the prosperity ladder.

In the late 1960s, this pragmatic line was abandoned as leftist idealist Olof Palme took over. But there was plenty to harvest from previous years, so Sweden continued to be the land of milk and honey for a good long while. Then things started drying up, and the process has been one of gradual erosion and decline since the 1990s. 

The famous Swedish health care system is a good example. 120 000 hospital beds in the late 1960s became 20 000 today. Cancer patients are put on waiting lists for months. Entire emergency wards shut down for summer. The crumbling Swedish railroad system is another symptom I examined in-depth last year. The aforementioned defense that now consist of about three fat generals and a rusty rifle (bullets withheld for budgetary reasons).

A sensible farmer would see the problems for what they are and hurry to plant new seeds, so as to return to bountiful harvests of wheat, carrots, potatoes etc. Instead, the Swedish politicians goes by dogma and plants what they think SHOULD grow. So they plant M & Ms, hot dogs and pretzels. The results won’t be fully evident for a few years yet, but as the last reserves of the old harvests are depleted, things will get… Interesting.

From what I can see, there simply is no plausible scenario where these social tensions and future financial committments will not lead to a downward spiral of hardship and strife. I hope I’m wrong. I really do, because I have friends and family I care about that will remain here to see it all play out. 
But I won’t. I’ll be back in the US being mad at Obama for being a lying scumbag. Every country has its problems. USA has its corrupt yokel in office, just as Sweden has Stefan Löfven. 

I’d like to thank you for having followed this blog and your many insightful comments. It’s been a wild ride at times with heated debates, but it’s been fun — even when I got hatemail from both left-wingers and right-wingers over the same article. :)

So thank you, and good luck whereever you are.
  

Sequestration, world commerce, and the coming antichrist economy

 Reblogged from Elizabeth Prata´s the-end-time.blogspot.com

 

If there is such a thing as a 'reverse miracle' the global economy these last five years is it. In 2008 when the global crash startled the world and the housing bubble imploded, and jobs went away, it seemed that the house of cards that is world finance and commerce would collapse. It didn't. And all these five years, it hasn't. This defies logic, tradition, and all economic principles.

 

 

 

(Above, A crowd gathers at New York City's Federal Hall opposite the Stock Exchange at the news of the crash - 1929 AP / Wide World Photos Time - 75 Years)
  

Or does it?

What has to change is our perception of what an economic crash is. If you live in America like I do, we have a notion that economic crashes suddenly occur, like the October Wall Street stock market crash of 1929. We often think of the crash happening in October and then immediately of the lines outside banks to get disappearing deposits and right away the Okies traveling away from the Dust bowl states. But it all unfolded much more slowly than that.

Oct 10, 2008, Source

But what most people do not know is that the 1929 crash was similar to the 2008 crash in that it was but one marker of an ailing, upside down economy. Bankers and Brokers didn't realize the depth and extent of the crash and that it would spark a 10-year Depression.

Time Magazine reported on the 1929 October crash, "As the story goes, the opening bell was never heard on Black Tuesday because the shouts of "Sell! Sell! Sell!" drowned it out. In the first thirty minutes, 3 million shares changed hands and with them, another $2 million disappeared into thin air. Phone lines clogged. The volume of Western Union telegrams traveling across the country tripled. The ticker tape ran so far behind the actual transactions that some traders simply let it run out. Trades happened so quickly that although people knew they were losing money, they didn't know how much."

And that is what we remember of the most devastating and terror-ridden moment in America's financial and economic history. But the crash continued-

As a matter of fact, the Market recovered on October 30, regaining 12% of losses. Time reported, "In total, $25 billion — some $319 billion in today's dollars — was lost in the 1929 crash. Stocks continued to fall over subsequent weeks, finally bottoming out on November 13, 1929. The market recovered for a few months and then slid again, gliding swiftly and steadily with the rest of the country into the Great Depression. Companies incurred huge layoffs, unemployment skyrocketed, wages plummeted and the economy went into a tailspin. While World War II helped pull the country out of a Depression by the early 1940s, the stock market wouldn't recover to its pre-crash numbers until 1954."

After the crash of 1929 it wasn't until 1932-1933 that the economy hit rock bottom. This timeline has the facts about why 1933 was the worst year of the Depression for the common man. So you can easily see that the crash was not a one-day event but took years to unfold, rebound and for the stock market to recover..

Like 1929, the 2008 economic crash followed a speculative boom. The era was so speculative and the attitude was so optimistic, that the entire era is called The Roaring Twenties. The era was dynamic, vibrant, creative, and was undergirded by sustained economic prosperity. This attitude was not prevalent just in America, but also Europe. France's name for the era was The Crazy Years. Britain called it the Golden Twenties.

The president of the Chase National Bank said at the time of the crash, "We are reaping the natural fruit of the orgy of speculation in which millions of people have indulged. It was inevitable, because of the tremendous increase in the number of stockholders in recent years, that the number of sellers would be greater than ever when the boom ended and selling took the place of buying." (Wikipedia)

Economist Albert Scardino said in 1987, "The panic of October 1929 has come to serve as a symbol of the economic contraction that gripped the world during the next decade."

As an aside, when economists say "contraction", I think of the contraction of a woman in labor. (Matthew 24:8).

The same conditions that sparked the crash of 1929, wild speculation and bloated spending, sparked the 2008 crash, but like the unfolding Depression of the 1930, it unfolds slowly. The crash is actually a long period of decline, not a one-day event. We have been 'crashing' since October 2008. We are in a crash right now. Let's take a look at the present-day facts.

Wal-Mart is undergoing a silent sales disaster. The Daily Beast reports, Wal-Mart customers have disappeared, will they take the economy with them?
"Where are all the customers?" asks an internal Walmart email published by Bloomberg last week. "And where's their money?" Another email states "In case you haven't seen a sales report these days, February [month to date] sales are a total disaster . . . the worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company." Brad Plumer notes that Walmart sales are often a bellwether for the rest of the economy. Should we be freaking out?"

Yes. Yes we should.

Why? The higher payroll tax kicked in this January. Higher payroll taxes mean less money for consumers and less money for consumers means, well, they spend less. The Economic Collapse blog says "The Big Dogs of Wall Street are starting to get very nervous".

And according to a CNN article, corporate insiders are now selling nine times more of their own shares than they are buying...  These corporate insiders have one word for investors: sell. Insiders were nine times more likely to sell shares of their companies than buy new ones last week, according to the Vickers Weekly Insider report by Argus Research. We wonder why corporate bigwigs like Google's Eric Schmidt is selling nearly half of his stock in the company.

The crashing economy is seen not just in consumer spending, stocks, and retail, but in government. The United States has not passed a budget in years. Heritage reports, "The House and Senate have not agreed on a budget resolution since April 29, 2009 (though the House has passed budgets the past two years). If current trends continue, the end of the 113th Congress will mark five straight years without a congressional budget. ... The temporary tax policies of recent years, the debt ceiling debacle of 2011, and the short-term “solution” of last year’s fiscal cliff have only worsened the budgetary dysfunction. Congress now faces across-the-board spending cuts (sequestration) on March 1, another deadline March 27 for funding government operations, and another debt ceiling vote in May. Halfway into the fiscal year, major budget decisions remain in flux. These incoherent practices have yielded no entitlement reform—indispensable for getting deficits and debt under control—but they have produced a $618 billion tax increase."

Caption- Some of the 6,000 men who queued up for jobs offered by a New York employment agency - 1930 (135 found jobs; by 1932 almost 30% of the American workforce was unemployed) Corbis / Bettmann - UPI

Pentagon informs Congress of plans to furlough 800K civilian workers
"The Pentagon notified Congress on Wednesday it will be furloughing its civilian workforce of 800,000 employees if sequestration goes into effect March 1."

Sequestration defined: "Under sequestration, an amount of money equal to the difference between the cap set in the Budget Resolution and the amount actually appropriated is "sequestered" by the Treasury and not handed over to the agencies to which it was originally appropriated by Congress."

As we already know, there is trouble everywhere. The UK lost its credit rating yesterday. Forbes reported,  "Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the sovereign credit rating of the U.K. on Friday, stripping its coveted triple-A status one notch to AA1. The agency blamed U.K.’s rising debt levels, adding that there was “a deterioration in the shock-absorption capacity of the government’s balance sheet, which is unlikely to reverse before 2016.” Forbes asks the $64 question, 'Is the US next?'

Imagine what the loss of pay for 800,000 workers would do to our economy, already staggered by loss of jobs and cash flow. In other words, under sequestration, all money flow comes to a forced halt and during a depression voluntary money flow comes to a halt. Like retail spending--

CBS News reports, "The entire economy is headed for trouble in just eight days -- when massive across-the-board cuts in the federal budget are scheduled to kick in automatically. The cuts were designed to be so deep and harmful, that they would force the president and Congress to find a better way. But they haven't. Just for example, there would be $46 billion cut from the Defense Department and benefit cuts for 4.7 million long-term unemployed."

Retail is failing, and this is a marker of the crash.

Best Buy is forecasting 200 to 250 store closings
Sears Holding Corp. forecast store closings: Kmart 175 to 225, Sears 100 to 125
J.C. Penney, forecast store closings: 300 to 350
Office Depot, forecast store closings: 125 to 150
Barnes & Noble, forecast store closings: 190 to 240, per company comments
Gamestop, forecast store closings: 500 to 600
OfficeMax, forecast store closings: 150 to 175
RadioShack, forecast store closings: 450 to 550

In addition to closings, we hear about layoffs.

Blockbuster recently announced that this year they will be closing about 300 stores and eliminating about 3,000 jobs. Toy manufacturer Hasbro recently announced that they will be shrinking their workforce by about 10 percent. And we already heard about the Walmart email that said February was the worst month, ever.

So what does this all mean? It means God is doing a work! Did you know that the bible has a lot to say about finances and economy? There are verses which instruct us on personal level and on a national level. For example, Proverbs 22:16 says,

"Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth, or gives to the rich, will only come to poverty." The NLT makes it even clearer. "A person who gets ahead by oppressing the poor or by showering gifts on the rich will end in poverty." Tell that to the Occupy Wall Street people...

But now I am going to contradict myself. The Great Depression seems to have begun in October 1929 and the stock market did not recover until 1954. These things take a long time to set up, to occur and to recover from. They are long cycles. (Kondratiev wave). The one exception to the slow cycle of up and  down will be the Tribulation. Why? It will be a time like no other before or since, (Matthew 24:21).

In my opinion, the fact that the global merging of all national economies into one economic force (Revelation 13:16-17) under the management of one man, (Revelation 13:5-8), bespeaks that something massive has to have happened for the people to accept such dramatic moves. And it has to happen fast, because the Tribulation is only 7 years, and since Revelation is mostly chronological, by the time Revelation 13 occurs, it is midway through the entire period. We read in Revelation 13:5 that authority is given to the antichrist for 42 months (3.5 years).

There will be an economy in the Tribulation, it will be vigorous and will trade in all the usual things like flour (Revelation 6:6) but there will also be a trade for luxuries (Revelation 18). There will be people rich enough to buy these luxuries. So much so, that the merchants selling them become incredibly wealthy.

WHAT will have happened that will reduce the world into an entire economic and financial restructuring within just 3.5 years? (first half of the Tribulation). Something terrible and dramatic. It only takes three and a half years for the global economy to be turned completely upside down, restructured and by the time the antichrist comes along, for the world to accept his proposal of a one world government- and enact it!

Of course, the beginning of the events that would cause the acceptance of the one world economy may begin prior to the Tribulation, but given the last five years of slow decline (despite warnings of the 'fiscal cliff) I don't think so. Personally I believe it will be one or more of the following that will cause the final and/or sudden economic collapse:

1. The rapture. If enough consumers who hold withhold their money from retail circulation could cause panic in Walmart execs during just one month, what will the sudden removal of all the Christians' economic input cause the world economy?

2. War. And not just any war- but nuclear war and/or EMP. The coming wars of Isaiah 17, Isaiah 19, Psalm 83 and Ezekiel 38-39 may not occur just in the Tribulation. There is nothing about the prophecy that says these wars have to happen during the 7 years of judgment (except by the very end of the Ezekiel 38-39 Gog/Magog war the Tribulation will have begun, because the Jews are brought back to covenant with God, (Ez 39:7) and the world knows that God is judging the world. (Ez 38:16, 23). Those prophesied wars contain intimations that they will be nuclear. I wrote about that last week. With war often comes...disease.

3. Disease outbreak. The 1918-20 Spanish flu pandemic was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic which infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—1 to 3 percent of the world's population at the time—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. (source). Most of the deaths in the US took place within only 9 months. The sudden removal of human capital, either through death or illness from which they later recovered, was dramatic. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that a pandemic similar to the 1918 flu would decrease annual U.S. GDP levels by 5% if it happened in today's economy. There were mandatory closings of schools, churches, theatres, and places of public assemblage toward the end of the year in 1918. The entertainment industry was hit hardest.

For example, legal gambling in the US is a 90Billion dollar industry. Factor in other entertainment such as cable, internet, film, music etc and you have a trillion dollar industry. An outbreak of disease could put a severe dent on all that, just as it did in 1918. As a matter of fact, officials are worried about an outbreak of tuberculosis in LA. And yesterday it's reported that a Long Island teen died of a mysterious illness while on a school trip to Disneyland

4. All of the above. All these events could happen simultaneously or nearly so. It is not possible to go through the removal of millions in the blink of an eye, and/or war, and/or pestilential outbreak on a global scale and not have other segments of the global infrastructure such as economy be impacted too.

5. Other. God is creative. I do not know what else He may have planned that will cause the world's economy to fail or at least come to the point where the population of the planet accepts an entire restructuring. Who expected the 9.0 quake and tsunami in Japan? Who expected the Pope to resign? Who thought Obama would be re-elected for another 4 years? Who thought that a massive sinkhole in Bayou Corne or a BP multi-month oil breach would occur?

We Christians can look forward to the rapture and will escape all these things. We see the rapture in Revelation 4. The Church is seen in Heaven in Revelation 5. The wrath begins in Revelation 6. No matter how close the wrath is, the rapture is closer!

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The Biggest Financial Scandal In History?

The Biggest Financial Scandal In History?

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com

We always knew that the financial markets were rigged, but this is getting ridiculous. It is now being alleged that 20 major banks have been systematically fixing global interest rates for years. Barclays has already been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for manipulating Libor (the London Inter Bank Offered Rate). But Barclays says that a whole bunch of other banks were doing this too. This is shaping up to be the biggest financial scandal in history, and criminal investigations have been launched on both sides of the Atlantic. What those investigations are likely to uncover could shake the financial markets to their very core. In the end, this scandal could absolutely devastate confidence in the global financial system and it could potentially bring down a number of major global banks. We have never seen anything quite like this before.

 What Is Libor?
As mentioned before, Libor is the London Inter Bank Offered Rate. A recent Washington Post article contained a pretty good explanation of what that means....

In the simplest terms, LIBOR is the average interest rate which banks in London are charging each other for borrowing. It’s calculated by Thomson Reuters — the parent company of the Reuters news agency — for the British Banking Association (BBA), a trade association of banks and financial services companies.

Why Does Libor Matter?
If you have a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card, then there is a very good chance that Libor has affected your personal finances. Libor has been a factor in the pricing of hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans, securities and assets. The following is from a recent article by Maureen Farrell....

These traders influenced the pricing of the London Interbank Offered Rate or Libor, a benchmark that dictates the pricing of up to $800 trillion of securities (yes trillion)

$800 trillion?
That is a number that is hard to even imagine.

 Most American consumers do not even know what Libor is, but it actually plays a key role in the U.S. economy as the Washington Post recently explained....

In the United States, the two biggest indices for adjustable rate mortgages and other consumer debt are the prime rate (that is, the rate banks charge favored or “prime” consumers) and LIBOR, with the latter particularly popular for subprime loans. A study from Mark Schweitzer and Guhan Venkatu at the Cleveland Fed looked at survey data in Ohio and found that by 2008, almost 60 percent of prime adjustable rate mortgages, and nearly 100 percent of subprime ones, were indexed to LIBOR
Who Was Involved In This Scandal?

According to the Daily Mail, in addition to Barclays it is being alleged that at least 20 banks (including some major U.S. banks) were involved in this interest rate fixing scandal....

Hundreds of bankers across three continents are embroiled in the interest-rate fixing scandal that has left Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond fighting to save his job.
As pressure intensified on Britain’s highest paid banking boss to quit, MPs heard a string of other financial institutions across the world were under investigation.
At least 20 banks are believed to be under suspicion, with growing demands for a criminal investigation.

There are also indications that the Bank of England itself may have been involved in this scandal.

What Did They Do?

Employees at Barclays (and apparently at about 20 other major banks) were brazenly manipulating interest rates. A recent Yahoo Finance article described how this worked...

To help the bank's trading positions between 2005 and 2009, and most notably during the global financial crisis of 2007-09, the bank made false submissions to the Libor-setting committee, which agrees rates daily in London.
At the request of its own traders of interest-rate derivatives, Barclays made false submissions relating to Libor and Euribor (the eurozone benchmark rate). By doing this, Barclays personnel aimed to help their trading colleagues to profit by manipulating Libor.
Rigging the world's leading benchmark for interest rates is pretty serious stuff. Indeed, in the words of the FSA, "Barclays' behaviour threatened the integrity of the rates, with the risk of serious harm to other market participants".

Many in the financial world have been absolutely horrified by the details of this scandal that have been emerging.

One recent CNN article declared that "the stench" coming from London is now "overwhelming"....

The Libor scandal has confirmed what many of us have known for some time: There is something smelly  in the London financial world and the stench is now overwhelming.
But It is only when I read the Financial Services Authority report -- all 44 pages of it -- that is became clear just how widespread, how blatant was the fixing of the benchmark interest rate Libor and Euribor by Barclays. Brazen is the only word for it.

The emails and phone calls reveal that on dozens of occasions those who stood to gain by the decisions asked for favors (and got them) from those who helped set the interest rates.

You can read many examples of the kinds of emails that were exchanged between traders in New York and traders at Barclays in London right here.

What Does This Scandal Mean For The Future?

This scandal is making the global financial system look really, really bad. Confidence in global financial markets has already been declining, and these new revelations are not going to help at all. The following is how an article in the Huffington Post put it....

The ballooning interest rate manipulation scandal at Barclays, coupled with stock market instability, is likely to fuel fresh doubts about the integrity of the stock market, insiders said.
“Every time people begin to gain a little confidence, something else comes up,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. “If it’s not Europe, it’s [troubled] IPOs, or JPMorgan or Barclays. Something new blows up and people say, ‘I knew it was rigged.’"

In addition, we are undoubtedly going to see a huge wave of lawsuits come out of this scandal. Those lawsuits alone will gum up the financial system for a decade or more.

So needless to say, this is a very big deal.

Sadly, the revelations that have come out about Barclays in recent days are probably just the very tip of the iceberg. Before this is all over, we are probably going to find out that most of the major global banks were involved.

At a time when the global financial system is already on the verge of a major implosion, this is not welcome news.

This financial scandal is just another reason to be deeply concerned about the second half of 2012. The house of cards is starting to look really shaky, and nobody knows exactly when it will fall, but anyone with half a brain can see that things are progressively getting worse.

A "perfect storm" is rapidly developing, and when it strikes it is going to be very, very painful.