





Overall, it does not appear to be overly optimistic.







That certainly does not sound promising.










We shall see what happens on Sunday.



Speaking of the drachma, check out what Bloomberg is reporting





The next few days promise to be extremely interesting.













Greece Votes NO – Let The Chaos Begin…





How is the Greek economy going to function without any money?





So would they actually let Greece go bankrupt?














That is pretty strong language, eh?

Here is yet another quote from Schulz



What will they decide to do?













Does The IMF Actually Want To Cause A Greek Debt Default?

Question Marks - Public DomainWhen it comes to geopolitics, there are often wheels working within wheels that are working within wheels.  Once in a while we get a peek behind the scenes, but for the most part the machinations of the global elite remain shrouded in mystery most of the time.  And sometimes the global elite appear to be doing things that, on the surface, do not seem to make much sense at all.  What is going on in Europe is a perfect example of this.  If everyone was negotiating honestly, I believe that a Greek debt deal would have been reached by now.  As this endless crisis has stretched on month after month, it has become increasingly apparent that more is going on here than meets the eye.  In particular, the IMF has been standing in the way of a deal time after time.  So what do IMF officials want?  Are they looking for the “unconditional surrender” of this new Greek government in order to send a message to other governments that would potentially defy them?  Or could it be possible that the IMF actually wants a Greek debt default for some other insidious reason?

When the latest Greek proposal was embraced with enthusiasm by EU officials, many hoped that this meant that the crisis would soon be resolved.  But it turns out that there is still one very important player that is not happy, and that is the IMF.  The following comes from the Wall Street Journal

But the IMF is still unhappy with key aspects of Greece’s new economic proposals and German officials were irritated by the speed with which the commission welcomed them, warning that much work needs to be done.

Greece’s plan calls for reducing the deficits in its pension system and government budget by relying heavily on raising taxes and social-security contributions, whereas the IMF wanted bigger spending cuts.

The Washington-based IMF has said Greece’s economy is already too heavily taxed and that too many additional tax increases would hurt economic growth, making it harder to pay down Greece’s debt.

It is still short of everything that should be expected,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Monday, suggesting Greece will have to modify its proposals significantly to win the IMF’s backing.

So what would make the IMF “happy”?

Would anything short of total capitulation by the Greek government suffice?

Meanwhile, members of Syriza are expressing a high level of frustration with the compromises that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has already agreed to.  At this point, there is even doubt whether the current Greek proposal could get through the Greek parliament.  The following comes from Bloomberg

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is facing the first signs of dissent within his own party over his latest plan to end a five-month standoff with creditors.

Some of Syriza’s more radical and populist lawmakers expressed opposition Tuesday to the proposal as the deal’s backers called on members to see the bigger picture.

Personally, I cannot support such an agreement that is contrary to our election promises,” Dimitris Kodelas, a Syriza lawmaker associated with former Maoists, said in an interview. “I do not care about the consequences of my decision.

Despite all of the optimism that we have seen this week, the odds of a Greek debt deal getting pushed through are looking slimmer by the day.

And even if a deal somehow miraculously happens, all it would really mean is that the can has been kicked down the road for a few more months

Assuming Tsipras can force the deal through the Greek parliament, and that key creditors such as the IMF and Germany accept it too, it will do little more than buy time for negotiations on yet another rescue.

The final tranche of cash from the existing bailout should be enough to meet repayments due to the IMF and European Central Bank through the end of August. But the Greek government will then have to find more than two billion euros for both institutions in September and October.

If this week concludes with agreement between Greece and its creditors, it won’t be long before the next chapter in this drama,” said Angus Campbell, senior analyst at FxPro.

And no matter what happens by the end of this month, it is a virtual certainty that the economic depression in Greece will just continue to deepen.

At this point, normal economic activity in the nation has pretty much ground to a halt.  Just consider the following excerpt from a recent Zero Hedge article


For Greek banks, mortgage loans left unserviced by strategic defaulters have become a particular headache, especially since the Syriza-led government says it is committed to protecting low-income homeowners from foreclosures on their properties

“There’s a real issue of moral hazard . . . Around 70 percent of restructured mortgage loans aren’t being serviced because people think foreclosures will only be applied to big villa owners,” one banker said.

For a long time, I have been warning that the next major economic crisis would begin in Europe before spreading across the entire globe.

Greece has a relatively small economy, but Italy, Spain and France are going down the exact same road that Greece has gone.

And what IMF officials are doing right now is that they are setting a precedent for future debt negotiations that they know are almost certainly coming with other countries in the future.

Sadly, most of my readers (being Americans) don’t really grasp the importance of what is going on over in Europe.  We are watching a horrific train wreck unfold in slow-motion, and what is going to happen over the next few weeks is going to have massive implications for the entire planet.

“The World Has No Money, And The Emperor Has No Clothes”

Most of us are aware of the very old fairly tale by Hans Christian Andersen in which two weavers promise an emperor the finest suit of clothes imaginable, but from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or “just hopelessly stupid”.  Well, in the fairy tale it turns out that nobody wants to admit that they are “unfit” or “stupid”, so when the emperor parades before his subjects in his imaginary new suit of clothes, it takes a child to cry out: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”  Well, many of us have been declaring that the world economy “has no clothes” for some time now, but when the anchor of NBC News declares it on national television it gets a bit more attention.  During his recent appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, NBC’s Brian Williams was asked about the world financial situation.  His answer included this shocking statement: “The world has no money, and the Emperor has no clothes.”

During the interview, it was readily apparent that Williams was honestly shaken up by what had happened last Thursday in the stock market.  But who can blame him?  After all, most of us who watch the markets were totally stunned when the stock market dropped almost 1000 points exactly in less than an hour.

Normally a network news anchor is much more guarded and is much more careful about what is revealed to the public.  But on Letterman’s show, Williams gave us a glimpse of what he really thinks about the world economic situation….

“If I wasn’t a tad too close to this, I’d probably not leave the house.  But that’s how bad it is.”

A video clip that includes these jaw dropping comments by Williams is posted below….

So why did the U.S. stock market plunge so rapidly last Thursday?

Well, many have blamed the episode on a “bad trade” or a “computer glitch”.  Others claim that the Greek debt crisis caused a brief panic.  There are yet others who see something more insidious going on – such as Goldman Sachs seeking to remove their name from the financial headlines, or the Federal Reserve sending a message that S. 604 (the bill to audit the Federal Reserve) should not be passed.

The truth is that we will probably never know what actually caused the market to fall through the floor that afternoon.

But it did pave the way for more bailouts.

Over the weekend, European policy makers unveiled an unprecedented loan package worth almost $1 trillion and a program of bond purchases designed to stop the sovereign debt crisis that threatened to shatter confidence in the euro.

The Federal Reserve got into the act as well.  Over the weekend the Fed promised to flood the international financial system with U.S. dollars.  This was seen in the markets as a sign of “resolve” meant to keep doubt about the European economy from turning into a global crisis of confidence.

So on Monday, investors responded to these bailouts with exuberance.  The Dow Jones industrial average gained 405 points that day, which was the average’s biggest one day point gain since March 23rd, 2009.

But are more bailouts, more debt and a flood of paper money really something to celebrate?


The truth is that debt and paper money that continually declines in value are some of the chief causes of the financial mess that the world is now in.

In fact, Congressman Ron Paul is warning that the European bailout that was just announced will just lead to even larger financial problems in the future….

And Ron Paul is right – all of these bailouts and all of this debt will eventually cause all of the major paper currencies (including the U.S. dollar) to collapse.

The funny thing about these bailouts is that they never seem to help the average people on the street.  Just take a look at the U.S. economy.  We are told that Wall Street has recovered and that things are getting back to normal, and yet more Americans than ever find themselves dependent on the U.S. government for their survival.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that 39.68 million people, or 1 out of every 8 Americans, were enrolled in the food stamp program during February, an increase of 260,000 from the previous month.

Nearly 40 million Americans on food stamps?

How in the world did that happen?

Once upon a time, the old timers would tell us that one day things would get so bad that we would all have to stand in bread lines.

Well, today food stamps are the new bread lines.

If you have to rely on the government for the very bread that you eat, what kind of a position does that put you in?

The truth is that the once great American middle class is allowing the system to slowly keep grinding them into oblivion.

Like never before in our lifetimes, wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the “lucky one percent”, while the rest of us are rapidly being marginalized.

Do you ever stop to wonder why it seems like almost everyone is either broke or up to their eyeballs in debt?

That even goes for the major governments of the world.  The U.S. government (the “wealthiest” nation on the globe) has piled up the biggest mountain of debt in world history.

You see, Brian Williams was actually chillingly accurate when he declared that “the world has no money”.

So if the world doesn’t have any money, then who does have it?

The international bankers.

But, shhhhh, don’t tell anybody.

Just keep quietly clapping as the emperor walks down the street with no clothes on.

Is The Greek Debt Crisis Being Purposely Hyped And Manipulated?

Everywhere you turn in the financial media right now you see some “expert” declaring that the Greek debt crisis has become a “contagion” which is going to spread all over the globe and which could potentially bring down the entire world economy.  Now certainly Greece has badly mismanaged their finances for decades, and without a doubt they have gotten themselves into a huge mess.  But could Greece bring down the entire world economy?  Hardly.  The truth is that you could remove Greece from the world economy tomorrow and most people would hardly notice.  The economy of Greece is only about 2% the size of the United States economy, and it takes in less than 0.1% of U.S. exports.  But we are being led to believe that Greece has suddenly become the epicenter of a financial crisis which is going to bring down everything.  Could it be that this Greek debt crisis is purposely being hyped and manipulated?  Could it be that this Greek debt crisis is yet another example of the “problem, reaction, solution” paradigm that the global elite have employed so many times before?

Right now almost all of the governments in the western world operate debt-based economies that rely on ever-inflating amounts of paper money in order to survive.  The elite international bankers of the world have made a killing by creating money out of nothing and loaning it to the nations of the world.  The interest on those loans is the primary method by which the wealth of the world is slowly transferred into the hands of the ultra-wealthy.  When the interest on the loans starts to become too much for a particular nation, they borrow even more money so that they can stay afloat.  It is a debt trap that is designed to continue indefinitely.  Even the most powerful nations in the world are caught in this debt trap.  In fact, most people are absolutely amazed when they learn that it is mathematically impossible to pay off the national debt of the United States.  But the United States is far from alone in that respect.  Almost all of the other major nations in the world are in the exact same boat.

So what normally happens when a nation like Greece gets into big trouble is that they just go out and borrow even more money from the international bankers.

But this time the big financial powers are insisting on big budget cuts and other “austerity measures”.

So what is the deal with that?

Well, there are a couple of possibilities.

The first alternative is that the IMF and the European Central Bank actually believe that the financial situation in Greece has gotten so desperate that they could actually be forced to default on their debt and so something dramatic needs to be done.  You see, the truth is that the international bankers want the game to continue no matter what.  They are a parasite, and they can’t keep draining a host if the host dies.  So it does them no good for the economy of Greece to completely die.  So maybe they are just trying to revive the host economy (Greece) so that they can continue slowly draining the wealth of that nation.

And perhaps that is all that is happening here.  After Greece agreed to the required “austerity measures”, the EU and the IMF extended to Greece the bailout loans that they needed, and on Sunday European Union finance ministers agreed to create a 750 billion euro safety net for troubled eurozone countries.  The EU’s monetary affairs commissioner, Olli Rehn, says that this safety net “proves that we shall defend the euro whatever it takes.”

There are even rumors that the ECB is prepared to engage in a new round of quantitative easing.  That would entail very large loans to distressed governments in the eurozone in the form of buying up their bonds.

Of course all of this “help” is just more debt that continues to put Greece into an even bigger hole, but at least Greece will not be faced with immediate default.

The second alternative is that what is going on is the financial powers of the world are deliberately hyping and manipulating the Greek debt crisis because they actually want to crash the world economy.

At this point, the debt crisis in Greece has been hyped for weeks on end, and the kind of alarm being raised about the situation is Greece just seems massively out of proportion.

After reading some of the recent news reports coming out of Europe, you would think that the world is on the verge of a financial doomsday just because of what is happening in Greece.  The following excerpt from the Guardian is representative of what we have been seeing in recent days….


In fact, just about wherever you turn some financial expert is coming forward with predictions that the “contagion” of the Greek debt crisis is going to spread and cause economic chaos all over the world….

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Frankel:

“What we have seen is that contagion has gone global”

Japan’s deputy finance minister, Rintaro Tamaki:

“All the financial markets are now in turmoil”

Finance Minister Anders Borg of Sweden:

“We now see herd behavior in the markets that are really pack behavior, wolfpack behavior.”

The truth is that this Greek debt crisis could end up being the first domino in a sovereign debt crisis that will sweep the globe – if that is what the international bankers want.

If the international bankers decide to cut off the ever-expanding flow of debt to the nations around the world it would create a disastrous financial crisis.  Without the loans that they desperately need, country after country would plunge into an economic nightmare that most people do not even think is possible.

So would the international bankers ever do that?

They have done it before.

Just study the causes of the Great Depression.

Now there are indications that it may be getting ready to happen again.

Suddenly everyone is starting to talk about the “austerity measures” that will not only have to be implemented in Greece but all over the world.

For example, check out this recent quote from an article in the Guardian….


Other countries which have yet to adopt their own austerity packages?

And it just isn’t Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal they are talking about.

Bank of England governor Mervyn King recently warned that public anger over the “austerity measures” that soon must be implemented in the U.K. will be so intense that whatever party wins this election will be out of power for a generation.

Austerity measures in the U.K.?

Not only that, but Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is publicly saying that United States citizens will soon have to make difficult choices between higher taxes and reduced social spending.

Why all of a sudden do nations all over the world have to implement austerity measures?  Why all of a sudden are we all being told that we are going to have to tighten our belts?

Well, unless all of this was planned of course.

And that is exactly what some out there are claiming is happening.  There is a belief by many that the financial powers of the world are going to create a world economic crisis (the problem) so that when everyone cries out for help (the reaction) they will be there with the solution they wish to propose (perhaps a world currency or increased global governance).

In fact, Pastor Lindsey Williams even claims that an individual who is from these elite circles has told him exactly what is coming.  If you have never heard of Lindsey Williams you should really check out the video posted below.  He was the one (based on inside information from his source) who correctly predicted a couple years ago that oil would go down to 50 dollars a barrel when at the time it was pushing up into record territory.  When oil did in fact plunge down to 50 dollars a barrel people were not laughing at him anymore.  Now, the same source has told him that a massive economic downturn is planned over the next couple of years….

So is Lindsey Williams right?

As with so many things, time will tell.

But when top banking officials all over the world start talking about “austerity measures” and the need to tighten our belts, it is best to start paying attention.

We are moving into a time of extreme economic uncertainty.  To the folks that play around with hundreds of billions of dollars, you are nothing more than a pawn on a chessboard.  If you believe that “things are always going to be good” and that the people with real power in this world honestly care about you then you are going to end up in a whole lot of trouble.

Now is the time to prepare while there is still time.  Someday when the U.S. economy does completely collapse and you have done nothing to prepare it will be far too late.

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