Take to the streets now, and bring down the Corrupt Romanian Authorities

I'm glad foreign media is picking up on this disgraceful story as the local media has been muzzled by its executives who are in bed with Gabriel Resources and the criminal Government run by Victor Ponta. Make no mistake The President is no stranger to this issue , nor are the former communists running the country. In fact now any Romanian should realize that the country is dismantled piece by piece by these criminals. 

This project is a scandal and its handling by Romanian officials stinks to high heaven of corruption and bribery. There's even the prime minister, Victor Ponta who is exhibiting signs of multiple personality disorder, being both for and against the project as the wind blows. I guess the only advantage to the Romanian taxpayer is that they get two faces for the price of one.

Back to this issue, I would like to urge everybody who reads this article to spread awareness of the situation. Romanian corrupt officials and Gabriel Resources are banking on misinformation and apathy to put this project in motion, so the best way to help is to inform everybody you know of what is going on.

Besides the loss of natural beauty, one must keep in mind that pollution is very difficult to contain and that any industrial accident at this godforsaken mine will be affecting other countries and eco-systems and have far reaching consequences in Europe. After all, this project is expected to leave behind a 250,000 ton cyanide lake, on the site of the razed mountains, which incidentally will also be flooding 30 km of Roman archaelogical ruins.

Please, help us stop this outrage. Why don't they do a long term study of alternative mining, say using corn starch or something, like an alternative to 130,000 tons of cyanide in any case? These 4 mountains, and other areas in the Apuseni mountains not mentioned in the press are supposedly the largest gold and silver reserves ON THE PLANET, and not only. There is also supposedly a wealth of precious and native metals useful in defense and communication industries that the Romanian state reputedly has no right to according to the contract. These special metals are a lot more valuable than the gold. So ... why all the hurry to destroy these mountains in the worlds biggest pool of cyanide? This project needs to be thought out a lot more carefully, and should be controlled in it's entirety as a nationalised, Romanian state enterprise, not a greedy foreign corporation with no experience in mining. As it stands the whole project stinks, so it should be canned, if not for all the reasons mentioned above, then at the very least for the intention of creating the worlds largest standing pool of CYANIDE!

Europe’s largest gold mine project following protests against technology that made the country home to one of the continent’s worst environmental disasters.

Romania’s President proposed a vote on allowing development of Europe’s largest gold mine project following protests against technology that made the country home to one of the continent’s worst environmental disasters.

A day after thousands of demonstrators rallied against the use of cyanide in gold mining, President Traian Basescu said he may call a referendum next year on the Rosia Montana mine. That may delay the project, for which Canada-based Gabriel Resources Ltd. (GBU) said it could “hopefully” receive approval by November.

The rallies followed the government’s unveiling last week of a draft law to raise the state’s stake in the project, rekindling anger over the 2000 Baia Mare spill. Listed by the United Nations Environment Programme alongside Chernobyl as one of Europe’s major human-caused disasters, the spill happened when a dam holding back mine debris burst, flooding the Somes, Tiza and Danube rivers with tens of thousands of tons of cubic meters of cyanide-contaminated water.

“The biggest scare about the Rosia Montana mine is the cyanide process, which should have been discussed with experts,” Basescu said on newspaper Adevarul’s website. He said “society is rightfully reacting to this” because Romania had suffered from the Baia Mare spill.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta showed similar support, saying in a televised speech today from Bucharest that a referendum was “a good idea,” after the government had finished the “technical negotiations” on the project. The project is subject to a final decision by parliament, Ponta said.

Gold Reserves

Last month, Gabriel Resources said if parliament adopted the bill -- which increases the state’s stake in the mine to 25 percent and raises its royalties by half to 6 percent -- in a session that begins today, it would be able to accelerate its development of Rosia Montana and other mining projects.

Gabriel expects to get parliamentary approval as soon as November, Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Henry said today in a telephone interview with Bloomberg.

“Hopefully it could be a two- to three-month process,” Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Henry said today in a telephone interview. “It’s a little bit undefined.”

“We are hopeful that it will be smooth process to approval and it will be a fast process to approval. We’ve been waiting a long time and need to get on with things.”

Basescu said a referendum may take place during European Parliament elections next year. Such a vote would need a minimum turnout of 50 percent to be valid, a difficult prospect in a country where voter participation is historically low.

Opposition Rising

With proven reserves, estimated by Gabriel, of 10.1 million ounces of gold and 47.6 million ounces of silver, Rosia Montana is worth about $15 billion, or a 10th of Romania’s annual output, according to today’s spot price of the metals and World Bank data on the size of Romania’s economy.

The company, which has spent about $400 million and more than a decade trying to develop the gold mine, says it will be Europe’s biggest when it is operational.

The draft law has stoked opposition. About 2,000 people took to the streets in Bucharest yesterday and hundreds protested in big cities across the country against the project, Mediafax news service reported today.

Non-profit organization Alburnus Maior, one of the protests’ organizers, said in an e-mailed statement they had filed a request to the government today, asking for the “immediate rejection of the draft law by parliament” and “the immediate ban of the use of cyanide in mining.”

The mine may produce an average of 375,000 ounces of gold a year and cost $1.5 billion, Stephen Walker, a Toronto-based analyst at Royal Bank of Canada, said on Aug. 28.

The Chineese?..Just wait till they ask for their money back...

This is what happens when there is structural imbalance for far too many economies. Unfortunately there are no good economists and consequently nobody knows how to get the world's economies back into equilibrium. One thing is for sure though, those with more than their fair share of manufacturing production and employment, like Germany and China, will need to come to terms with supporting the other economies. Only then will a softer landing be able to be negotiated for everyone.... "Unfortunately there are no good economists and consequently nobody knows how to get the world's economies back into equilibrium" But the West has gobbled all the Nobel Prizes in Economic year after year. They can land a hand, can't they? Btw, Paul Klugman is giving advice free on New York Times daily. Me as an 'economist' without proper training suggest to the westerners, to start, spending less and save more. The equilibrium will come, someday and somehow....Well...It would be interesting to see what the USA would do if the Chinese decided to buy massive amounts of Gold on comex options and decide they want physical delivery at the end of the contract period rather than the profit/loss in yet more dollars. The Fed would not be happy at all that the physical gold gets shipped off to China....They have in the past made it illegal to own physical gold. I say :...Well...China's growth bubble is slowing down very quickly.  They naturally want to protect their own industries and investments and are wary of risk now. They have bought over 2 trillion of European and US debt to prop up those economies and to encourage world trade supporting Chinese exports worldwide for years. Now the party may be over....or is it ???..Just wait till they ask for their money back...

"The notion that you can renegotiate the pact from top to bottom and take substantial elements out of the text is a pipe dream,"

Eurozone finance chairman Jean-Claude Juncker has backed the idea of boosting the European Investment Bank (EIB)....It is one of several measures demanded by the leading French presidential candidate Francois Hollande to boost growth in the eurozone.

Mr Hollande has said he wants the measures added to newly agreed limits on European governments' borrowing.

However, Mr Juncker poured cold water on the idea that the "fiscal compact" could be amended.  Despite his opposition to renegotiating the fiscal rules, Mr Juncker appeared to offer an olive branch in a speech in Hamburg on Monday, by backing Mr Hollande's idea that the EIB could play a bigger role.

Mr Juncker said that the bank's capital - its buffer against loan losses - could be increased by 10bn euros ($13bn; £8.1bn), which would increase its lending capacity by several times that figure.

The EIB is jointly-owned by the 27 EU nations - including the UK - and finances infrastructure, small and medium businesses, and green projects among other things.

Mr Hollande is ahead of the incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy in opinion polls, having already narrowly beaten him in the first round of voting a week ago...The other pro-growth measures called for by Mr Hollande include:

1 - the introduction of Europe-wide government bonds to finance infrastructure investment:

1 -  - a financial transactions taxa reallocation of unused structural funds in the European Commission budget

If elected, Mr Hollande has said he would veto ratification of the fiscal compact - which was agreed by EU governments, except the UK and Czech Republic in March - unless some of his demands were met.

Romania - New Government ( made of very young inexperienced individuals)

Romania’s new Government, led by Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, received a confidence vote in Parliament Thursday, allowing it to continue reforms pledged by the previous government under a deal with the International Monetary Fund, EU and World Bank. Lawmakers voted 237 to two to instate the new Cabinet. The Cabinet required the confidence vote of at least 232 lawmakers. The opposition did not attend the vote. STRAGE as it may be, the new cabinet is very young, and made of the former communist sibilings...HAVING NO EXPERIENCE IN ADMINISTRATION, or background in runing anything !!!!

Germany said European Union leaders won’t provide the complete fix to the euro-area debt crisis that global policy makers are pushing for at an Oct. 23 summit. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made it clear that “dreams that are taking hold again now that with this package everything will be solved and everything will be over on Monday won’t be able to be fulfilled,” Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, said at a briefing in Berlin today. The search for an end to the crisis “surely extends well into next year.” Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers concluded weekend talks in Paris endorsing parts of an emerging plan to avoid a Greek default, bolster banks and curb contagion. They set the Oct. 23 summit of European leaders in Brussels as the deadline for it to be delivered. On the summit agenda is how any recapitalization of Europe’s banks “might be carried out in a coordinated way” and how to make the European Financial Stability Facility, the EU’s rescue fund for indebted states, as effective as possible, Seibert said. The leaders will also discuss ways to tighten economic and financial policy, he said. The euro retreated from a one-month high against the dollar after Seibert’s comments, following last week’s biggest gain in more than two years on speculation that European policy makers are stepping up efforts to stop the crisis. German 10-year bonds rallied and the Stoxx Europe 600 Index pared an advance of as much as 1.5 percent and was up 0.3 percent at 12:47 p.m. in Frankfurt.

A lot of hot air from the incompetents in Bruxelles - measures amount only to kicking the can down the road : German and French authorities have begun work on a three-pronged strategy behind the scenes amid escalating fears that the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis is spiralling out of control. Their aim is to build a “firebreak” around Greece, Portugal and Ireland to prevent the crisis spreading to Italy and Spain, countries considered “too big to bail”. According to sources, progress has been made at the G20 meeting in Washington, where global leaders piled pressure on the eurozone to fix its problems before plunging the world back into recession. In a G20 communique issued on Friday, the world’s leading economies set themselves a six-week deadline to resolve the crisis – to unveil a solution by the G20 summit in Cannes on November 4. Sources said the plan would have to be released as a whole, as the elements would not work in isolation. First, Europe’s banks would have to be recapitalised with many tens of billions of euros to reassure markets that a Greek or Portuguese default would not precipitate a systemic financial crisis. The recapitalisation plan would go much further than the €2.5bn (£2.2bn) required by regulators following the European bank stress tests in July and crucially would include the under-pressure French lenders. IT BECOMES CLEARER AND CLEARER - EURO MUST GO ! - along with Merkel, Sarkozy, Berlusconi and the incompetent crowd from Bruxelles !

The European Central Bank has moved to halt Europe's runaway debt crisis by pledging to buy government bonds from Italy and Spain. The move to prop up Europe's struggling nations came after a day of frantic discussions between the finance ministers of the world's leading economies. Markets open for the first time since Standard & Poor's decision to cut the US's credit rating from AAA late on Friday. In a statement, the ECB said it welcomed announcements by Spain and Italy of "new measures and reforms" aimed at the financial problems and urged both governments to roll them out swiftly. The agreement of the bank's policy-making governing council is a watershed moment for the ECB. The central bank has so far insisted that the main responsibility for acting lies with national governments. But last week a more modest bond buying effort failed to halt the European slide. The ECB said it had taken note of a statement by France and Germany released on Sunday stressing their commitment to European financial reforms. Silvio Berlusconi's government cobbled together an emergency austerity package for Italy late on Friday to placate the bond markets. Italy's borrowing costs shot up last week amid fears that its debts have become unsustainable. The Tokyo Stock Exchange opened down 1.4% after the announcement, the first test of the move ahead of the opening of European and US markets. US markets also looked set to open down with futures traders betting the markets would open below Friday's closing prices.

While the world has been transfixed with Japan, Europe has been struggling to avoid another financial crisis. On any Richter scale of economic threats, this may ultimately matter more than Japan’s grim tragedy. One reason is size. Europe represents about 20 percent of the world economy; Japan’s share is about 6 percent. Another is that Japan may recover faster than is now imagined; that happened after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. It’s hard to discuss the “world economic crisis” in the past tense as long as Europe’s debt problem festers — and it does. Just last week, European leaders were putting the finishing touches on a plan to enlarge a bailout fund from an effective size of roughly 250 billion euros (about $350 billion) to 440 billion euros ($615 billion) and eventually to 500 billion euros ($700 billion). By lending to stricken debtor nations, the fund would aim to prevent them from defaulting on their government bonds, which could have ruinous repercussions. Banks could suffer huge losses in their bond portfolios; investors could panic and dump all European bonds; Europe and the world could relapse into recession. Unfortunately, the odds of success are no better than 50-50. Europe must do something. Greece and Ireland are already in receivership. Private investors won’t buy their bonds at reasonable rates. There are worries about Portugal and Spain; Moody’s recently downgraded both, though Spain’s rating is still high. The trouble is that the sponsors of the bailout fund are themselves big debtors. In 2010, Italy’s debt burden (the ratio of its government debt to its economy, or gross domestic product) was 131 percent, reports the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; that exceeded Spain’s debt ratio of 72 percent. Debt ratios were high even for France (92 percent) and Germany (80 percent).

The ninth arrangement that Romania is preparing to sign with the IMF next month kicks off with a rather vague agenda, less ambitious than the preceding letters of intent which, in fact, were left with some unmet targets every time. According to the letter of intent obtained by Mediafax, the problem of the arrears accumulated by the big state companies - the chapter of the current arrangement where Romania has fallen behind the most, is discussed in a paragraph in which the Government announces the shift of financial control from the respective ministries to the Finance Ministry. In addition, the régies and the companies subordinated to the local authorities will report financial indicators on a quarterly basis to the Finance Ministry, but there are no means of penalising slippages, if they continued to occur. Much more ambitious are the plans announced recently by Jeffrey Franks, chief of the IMF mission for Romania, who talked about evaluating and setting a strategy for a list of 150 state companies. But the provisions of the letter of intent published by Mediafax do not include any mention of this list. (Z.F)

Romanian tax authority ANAF will refund in January value added tax to companies worth 1.36 billion lei (EUR1=RON4.2621), the highest sum returned so far in a single month, the authority said Wednesday.

Romania To Pay VAT Refunds Worth RON1.36B In January

Of the total refunds, ANAF has already paid Monday RON557 million, and will pay the rest of the sum by the end of the month. Some RON1.21 billion of the total refunds represents compensations.

Germany sees no alternative to the Euro

(Reuters) - Germany sees no alternative to the euro and Angela Merkel's government believes the best way to strengthen the currency which has helped make the German economy so competitive is closer policy convergence across Europe.
But with German public support in the balance for rescuing euro partners Greece, Ireland and possibly others, it is a tough message for the domestic audience. This explains the apparently mixed messages emerging from Berlin. Germany voices strong objections to some of the proposed solutions to the euro crisis, such as joint euro zone bonds, and Merkel's insistence on a crisis mechanism from 2013 involving private investors has upset markets.
"But in the end Germany has a vital interest in the survival of the currency union," Dekabank economist Andreas Scheuerle said. While mass-selling daily Bild runs headlines like "How Long Will the Euro Hold Out?" and some pundits suggest a north-south euro divide, the crisis seems to have hardened the German establishment's view that there is no alternative to the single currency. The government, including the sometimes fractious members of Merkel's centre-right coalition, plus the business world and the serious media are at pains to nix any talk of Germany losing its enthusiasm for the euro or returning to the deutschemark. Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle, from the Free Democrats, Merkel's often uneasy coalition partners, said on Thursday reinstating national currencies in the euro area was "not realistic". Merkel repeats that Europe's fate is inextricably tied to the currency shared by 16 countries and her comments on private investors needing to share in sovereign risk from 2013 reflect a belief that the euro will still be around. Currently enjoying a much stronger economic recovery than its partners, Germany may return to pre-crisis growth levels as early as next year, largely thanks to exports. So grumbles about the euro are slapped down with the argument that a revived deutschemark would quickly render German exports too expensive."The mark would be so overvalued against other currencies that our exports would be in trouble," said Andre Schwarz of the exporters' association BGA. "The solution is not to let the euro break up."Agerpres, Mediafax, Romanian Vancouver Sun,Global News, Financial Times,Le Monde,Tribune, ,Wall Street Journal,The Washington Times,Athens News,The New York Times,USA Today

The Irish government stood on the brink of collapse Monday

DUBLIN (Nov. 22) -- The Irish government stood on the brink of collapse Monday, a day after being forced to accept a massive bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen said he would call an election for early next year, once Ireland passes an emergency budget and finalizes the bailout.The admission represented a huge political blow to Cowen, who only days ago was denying even the need for a bailout to solve the problems brought on by Irish banks' reckless speculation in overpriced real estate.
Ireland's six banks, five of which are already nationalized or part-owned by the state, would be pruned, merged and possibly sold off."Because of the huge risks they (Irish banks) took earlier this decade, they became a huge risk not only to this state but to the eurozone as a whole," he said.Irish banks invested aggressively in runaway property markets at home and abroad. After the 2008 credit crunch sent property prices into freefall, the government tried to save the banks from bankruptcy by insuring all of their borrowings against default. That unprecedented promise - made to retain investor confidence in the country - cannot be kept without a bailout, the government has finally been forced to concede.Unions warned that overhauling the banks would mean thousands more lost jobs in Ireland, where unemployment has already reached 13.6 percent, the second-highest rate in Europe after Spain.Banca Mondiala,FMI, Guvern,agenda de business, bugetul de stat, economie, revistapresei,romania,antena3.ro,realitatea.net,mediafax,bucuresti,camera de comert

"ID card-based" lending?

Bankers, who during the economic boom period lured clients with consumer loans granted upon proof of ID, have over the past two years been trying to offset the declining demand for large loans through aggressive promotional offers for credit cards, which have become the main growth driver of the retail segment overnight.
Amid the falling sales of traditional loans, could credit cards become the new form of ID card-based loans, given that as small sums are involved clients get such a product more easily?

Economists do not like such an outlook, rather viewing this as a bet on the future that could prove risky.Last year, many banks reported two-digit increases in the number of issued cards and the value of sums approved on such cards, as consumer loan portfolios shrank and housing loans were supported only by the "First Home" scheme.In 2010, card portfolios rose at a slower pace amid the prolonged recession, but promotions offers are still driving sales, even though at a slower pace. Banca Mondiala,FMI, Guvern,agenda de business, bugetul de stat, economie, revista presei,romania,antena3.ro,realitatea.net,mediafax,bucuresti,camera de comert