They hope this new agreement on “coercive discipline” will allow the ECB to act decisively against debt crisis contagion.
Comments »THE ARAB SPRING FOR DUMMIES {PHOTO}
State of the Nation: Ignorant and Getting Hosed by a Phantom Al-Qaeda
Did Al-Qaeda ever exist ? Think of all the taxpayer money that may have been stolen from you and your childrens future if this account is true.
[youtube://http://wwwyoutube.com/watch?v=Gzun4ehFjeA&feature=youtu.be&a 450 300]
German Bund Under Performance to Treasuries May Help The U.S. Sell $1.3 Trillion in Paper
Socialists Accuse Sarkozy of “Pandering” to Germany
German Bundesbank Will Welcome Any Help The IMF May Provide
Will You Take the Blue Pill or the Red Pill ?
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGQF8LAmiaE 450 300]
Red Pill
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQnHwZ1Uxo0 450 300]Blue Pill
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7F2X3rSSCU 450 300] Comments »Keep Your Eye on Europe This Week to Gauge the Direction of Global Equities
Hopefully the Europeans can perform as the markets expect them too so we can go back to trading on individual fundamentals and merits of companies.
Comments »Iran Shoots Down U.S. Drone & Says Sanctions Will Push Oil to $250
America Has Squandered Its Opportunity to Lead
By MARK STEYN Posted 12/02/2011 07:05 PM ET
I’ve been alarmed by the latest polls. No, not from Iowa and New Hampshire, although they’re unnerving enough. It’s the polls from Egypt.
Foreign policy has not played a part in the U.S. presidential campaign, mainly because we’re so broke that the electorate seems minded to take the view that if government is going to throw trillions of dollars down the toilet they’d rather it was an Al Gore-compliant Kohler model in Des Moines or Poughkeepsie than an outhouse in Waziristan.
Alas, reality does not arrange its affairs quite so neatly, and the world that is arising in the second decade of the 21st century is increasingly inimical to American interests, and likely to prove even more expensive to boot.
In that sense, Egypt is instructive. Even in the giddy live-from-Tahrir-Square heyday of the “Arab Spring” and “Facebook Revolution” I was something of a skeptic.
Back in February, I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly within an hour or so of Mubarak’s resignation. Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper was interviewing telegenic youthful idealists cooing about the flowering of a new democratic Egypt.
Back on Fox, sourpuss Steyn was telling Megyn that this was “the unraveling of the American Middle East” and the emergence of a post-Western order in the region. In those days, I was so much of a pessimist I thought that in any election the Muslim Brotherhood would get a third of the votes and be the largest party in parliament.
By the time the actual first results came through last week, the Brothers had racked up 40% of the vote — in Cairo and Alexandria, the big cities wherein, insofar as they exist, the secular Facebooking Anderson Cooper types reside. In second place were their principal rivals the Nour party, with up to 15% of the ballots. “Nour” translates into English as “the Even More Muslim Brotherhood.”
As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, if that’s how the urban sophisticates vote, wait till you see the upcountry results. By the time the rural vote emerges from the Nile Delta and Sinai early next month, the hard-core Islamists will be sitting pretty. In the so-called “Facebook revolution,” two-thirds of the Arab world’s largest nation is voting for the hard, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic song of Sharia.
The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak’s Egypt was worse than King Farouk’s Egypt, and what follows from last week’s vote will be worse still. If you’re a westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian, or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that.
The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since.
In 1923, its Finance Minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a member of Parliament, and a Jew. Couldn’t happen today. Mr. Cattaui’s grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives.
In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wishes to appoint a Jew as finance minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan.
It doesn’t fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan’s network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.
Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact two decades ago we have lived in a supposedly “unipolar” world. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem like that, does it? The term “Facebook Revolution” presumes that technology marches in the cause of modernity. But in Khartoum a few years ago a citywide panic that shaking hands with infidels caused your penis to vanish was spread by text messaging.
In London, young Muslim men used their cell phones to share Islamist snuff videos of Westerners being beheaded in Iraq. In les banlieues of France, satellite TV and the Internet enable third-generation Muslims to lead ever more dis-assimilated, segregated lives, immersed in an electronic pan-Islamic culture, to a degree that would have been impossible for their grandparents.
To assume that Western technology in and of itself advances the cause of Western views on liberty or women’s rights or gay rights is delusional.
Consider, for example, the “good” news from Afghanistan. A 19-year old woman sentenced to 12 years in jail for the heinous crime of being brutally raped by a cousin was graciously released by President Karzai on condition that she marry her rapist.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Bank of Korea is Just the Latest Central Bank to Accumulate Gold: Position Increased by 39% or $1 Billion
Marc Faber: Economic Crash Looms in China
Soros: World Financial System on Brink of Collapse
Italian and Spanish Bonds Rise for a Third Day Calming Nerves of the Global Markets
For how long is the question. Everyone will wait for a meeting next week to see if solutions arise and if the ECB will cut rates.
Comments »India Sees Huge Demand for Bonds
ECB and IMF Funding Take Shape; Possibly $270 Billion Will Be Offered Up to Fund the Euro Crisis
Will Investors Be Up to the Task of Funding Europe With 3 Trillion Euros in 2013 ?
Merkel Pours Cold Water Over Investor Hopes; But Equities Ignore Negativity
Merkel said a solution to the problem could take years and compared the issue to a marathon.
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