There is a better way, worldwide strike June 21 2015...Social Justice, Climate Justice, Basic Income, nationalize corporations, nationalize banks....end the 1% forever....stay home for the duration do not take to the streets, work together with your community to ride out strike until we bring the system down..We shall install direct democracy, with regional, national and international administrative panels of experts hired on yearly contracts that can be terminated at any sign of corruption. Revolution Hub find us on facebook.....This is what Ucraine wants !! The pro-EU neo-faszist, ultra-nazi ucranian people want to join this desaster called EU !! Crimean people are being more intelligent and know very well how to choose between something bad and something much worse. Putin is bad but the EU is the worst option.

See here's the thing - all the fake activity the west and particularly the Anglosphere is built upon may be the 'engine of the world economy' but actually how relevant is this to the vast bulk of the world's population? ... We need a different model - great 'victories' like selling the same consumer product over and over and over in ever decreasing cycles is not sustainable. Raping the third world of its resources and bribing its elite for the privilege is not sustainable.   India and China are abetting the west by under cutting western workers and not advancing their own people. In India this is an emergent phenomena in China a deliberate one.   We're running towards the Marxist end game of stagnation as capital tries to shore itself up by forcing its customers to accept a lower standard of living via bought and paid for politics.  There is plenty of scope for activity to increase if it is geared towards something other than preserving destructive business models. But that is not as profitable in the short term as gambling in a rigged financial market and riding asset bubbles...  The global economy is in trouble because of a fundamental problem: the way institutional capital is concentrated in a few hands (the big banks and allied funds) and distributed to the usual suspects more often than not for the wrong reasons.  Skewed wealth distribution among individuals has received much more attention. But even the ultra rich individuals have to rely on the same financial network, managed by Central Banking with the Fed as the big daddy of the Central Banks. This network has become short sighted, greedy, incompetent, and often acts corruptly in a variety of ways. Too much power tends to do this.  The UK economy is not doing so well. Would be silly to think a few blips of growth, returning to the size of an economy several years ago (less per capita), in return for a mountain of debt is a positive development. No, it's just building up for a bigger disaster around the corner. The US and the EU have to realize that the recovery of the global economy has to emanate from four factors: (a) reforming the banking industry so capital, (b) investing in and developing emerging markets where the greatest growth potential is, (c) focusing on "real" products and services rather than financial manipulations, and (d) making capital available across the board to the bulk of the people rather than the cronies of the banks and the state.   The debt defaults of the poor are never so severe as the rich. Any single poor person will never have a debt default to rock the bank. But not so the case with the ultra rich. But the ultra rich tend to get far greater access to capital, underwritten by all of us thanks to the fiat currency structure, by orders of magnitude. And this capital is spent far from prudently or optimally for the economy.

Europe has so far stuck to the mutualisation model, in which individual states’ debts are underwritten by a common central bank or fiscal bailout system, ensuring security for investors and largely eliminating interest-rate spreads among countries, regardless of their level of indebtedness. In order to prevent the artificial reduction of interest rates from encouraging countries to borrow excessively, political debt brakes are instituted.  In the eurozone, mutualisation was realised through generous ESM bailouts and €1tn ($1.27tn) worth of TARGET2 credit from national printing presses for the crisis-stricken countries. Moreover, the European Central Bank pledged to protect these countries from default free of charge through its “outright monetary transactions” (OMT) scheme – that is, by promising to purchase their sovereign debt on secondary markets – which functions roughly as Eurobonds would. The supposed hardening of the debt ceiling in 2012 adhered to this model.  The alternative – the liability model – requires that each state take responsibility for its own debts, with its creditors bearing the costs of a default. Faced with that risk, creditors demand higher interest rates from the outset or refuse to grant additional credit, thereby imposing a measure of discipline on debtors.  The best example of the liability model is the United States. When US states like California, Illinois, or Minnesota get into fiscal trouble, no one expects the other states or the federal government to bail them out, let alone that the Federal Reserve will guarantee or purchase their bonds.  Indeed, the Fed, unlike the ECB, does not buy any bonds from individual states; investors must bear the costs of any state insolvency. In 1975, New York had to pledge its future tax revenues to its creditors in order to remain solvent.  Of course, the US was not always so strict. Shortly after its founding, it tried debt mutualisation, with Alexander Hamilton, America’s first Treasury secretary, describing the scheme in 1791 as the “cement” for a new American federation.  But, as it turned out, the mutualisation model – used again in 1813 during the second war against the British – fueled a credit bubble, which collapsed in 1837 and thrust nine of the 29 US states and territories into bankruptcy. The unresolved debt problem exacerbated tensions over the slavery issue, which triggered the Civil War in 1861.

Global shadow banking assets rose to a record $75 trillion (£46.5 trillion) last year, new analysis shows.  The value of risky investment products, mortgage-backed securities and other non-bank entities increased by $5 trillion to $75 trillion in 2013, according to the Financial Stability Board (FSB).   Shadow banking, which is not constrained by bank regulation, now represents about 25pc of total financial assets - or roughly half of the global banking system. It is also equivalent to 120pc of global gross domestic product (GDP).   The FSB, which monitors and makes recommendations on financial stability issues, said that while non-bank lending complemented traditional channels by expanding access to credit, data inconsistencies together with the size of the system meant closer monitoring was warranted.   "Intermediating credit through non-bank channels can have important advantages and contributes to the financing of the real economy; but such channels can also become a source of systemic risk, especially when they are structured to perform bank-like functions and when their interconnectedness with the regular banking system is strong," the FSB said in its annual shadow banking report. 

Ultimately some of this money leaks into physical assets and we will see tremendous inflation and asset bubbles. The money creation is all being retained in the banking system whilst M2 money supply is crashing to record lows. All the economic meters are going into the red except GDP growth because that is funded by debt funded by money printing which is fueling the distortion in our financial system. Even the IMF is ringing the fire alarm.
Economically this is a fascinating experiment with FIAT money which has not been around that long compared to its predecessor (asset backed currency) invented by Sir Isaac Newton as Master of the Royal Mint. This shadow is 120% of Global GDP haha and `no systemic risk`. They just type figures into a computer and call it money.  No one understands this and no one can explain what it means... It`s like trying to regulate the Sun while flying like Icarus...Granular data from 23 countries which stripped out assets not related to credit intermediation - or taking money from savers and lending it to borrowers - showed the size of the shadow banking system stood at $34.9 trillion in 2013, compared with $34 trillion in 2012.  Under this measure, growth of shadow banking in China was even larger than under the headline measure, rising by 40pc in 2013 to $2.7 trillion.  The FSB data follows a report by the International Monetary Fund this month which urged regulators to do more to police activity in the non-bank sector.  The FSB and IMF said more data were needed to conduct in-depth healthchecks of the sector.

 

ECB President Mario Draghi's last move towards more QE is no more than stupidity on steroids, even words like misdirected and boneheaded do it a disservice. This is more proof that the Euro-zone is in big trouble, both the union and the flawed currency is again begging to crumble.

One is forced to wonder if Japan and the Yen will crash first considering how each day Japan slides closer to the economic abyss or whether the Euro will lead the way into the wastebasket. Draghi has helped the countries of Europe kick the can down the road but this only delays the failure on the Euro. More on how the Euro-zone has failed to make any real reforms in the article below....Tension about the way the EU has dealt with the debt crisis could erupt this month when voters from the 28 nations elect members of the European Parliament for the first time since Greece nearly brought the euro currency bloc to its knees. The required bailout unleashed a wave of German-led austerity demands that continue to rile several of the more indebted nations. A moderate deceleration in growth and world trade coupled with geopolitical risks over Ukraine and tensions with Russian have not been the foundation needed to propel the Euro-zone forward. As of today it is easy to say many issues remain unresolved....The European Commission recently said they expect the 18-nation euro-zone would grow by 1.2% this year and 1.8% next year. In both cases, the figure was 0.1 percentage points higher than in earlier predictions. The wider 28-nation EU's prospects have been revised up by the same amount, to 1.5% in 2014 and 2% in 2015. "Recovery is gaining ground," said Olli Rehn, commissioner for economic and monetary affairs. "The worst of the crisis may now be behind us." However, he also warned that the recovery was "still modest".

"The illegitimate and illegal elections held in parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on Sunday 2nd November 2014 were organized contrary to Ukrainian law. They do not constitute any basis for the free expression of the will of Ukrainian citizens and as such will not be recognized by the European Parliament nor the international community. The attempts by Moscow to legitimize these illegally-organized elections are against the Minsk Agreement and could undermine the efforts aimed at finding a peaceful solution to the conflict and the reintegration of these areas into the legal and constitutional order of Ukraine", commented Croatian MEP Andrej Plenković, Chairman of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Ukraine.

For Plenković, the only elections valid in Ukraine are those carried out under the Constitution and electoral law adopted by the legitimate Ukrainian authorities, such as the early parliamentary elections held on 26 October 2014, where he led the European Parliament’s Election Observation Mission. He emphasized the European Parliament’s strong support for Ukraine's EU-oriented reforms.  The EPP Group maintains that in the parliamentary elections of 26 October, the Ukrainian people voted not only for Europe and the territorial integrity of Ukraine, but also for democracy, reforms and the unity of the country.

Opec's oil production is unlikely to change much in 2015 and there is no need to panic at the crude price drop, Opec's secretary general has said, adding to indications the exporter group is in no hurry to cut output.

Abdullah al-Badri said output of higher-cost oil supplies such as shale would be curbed if oil remained at around $85 a barrel, while the organisation enjoys lower costs and will see higher demand for its crude in the longer term.

The drop in the oil price to below $100, the level many Opec members had endorsed, has raised questions over whether Opec will cut supply when it meets in November. Mr Badri said Opec's output was unlikely to change much next year, adding to signs a decision to cut in November is unlikely.

"I don't think 2015 will be far away from 2014 in terms of production," Mr Badri said at the annual Oil & Money conference in London. "There is nothing wrong with the market."

Brent crude has dropped more than a quarter from above $115 per barrel in June as abundant supplies of high-quality oil such as US shale have overwhelmed demand in many markets, filling stocks worldwide.