Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Leaders face a no-win dilemma: any change of course will crash the system, but maintaining the current course will also crash the system.
The end-state of unsustainable systems is collapse. Though collapse may appear to be sudden and chaotic, we can discern key structures that guide the processes of collapse.
After yesterday's two key events, the ECB and OPEC meetings, ended up being major duds, the market is looking at the week's final and perhaps most important event of the week: the May payrolls report to generate some upward volatility and help stocks finally break out of the range they have been caught in for over a year. However, even today's jobs number will likely be skewed as reported previously as a result of the Verizon strike which is said to trim some 35,000 jobs from the headline print, casting anything the BLS reports today in doubt.
Following Mario Draghi's seemingly constant mention of The ECB's credibility during yesterday's press conference, none other than ECB member (and Austrian national bank chief) Ewald Nowotny exclaimed rather oddly that "The ECB is the most independent central bank in the world." This was apparently more than former Greek FinMin Yanis Varoufakis could handle as he unleashed a scathing op-ed to explain why, in fact, The ECB is the least independent central bank exclaiming that "the pretense of independence serves as a fig leaf for interventions th
Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
A year ago, Germany’s Green Party wanted to hold a vote on responsibility for the Ottoman massacres, a systematic expulsion and annihilation of over 1 million ethnic Armenians in 1915.
Germany delayed the vote, not wanting to upset Turkey... until yesterday, when Germany held the vote, upsetting Turkey much more.
Europe are cracking down on freedom of speech and people’s right to privacy by insisting that all social media giants require users to provide state-issued ID cards to log-in. The European Commission say that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Uber must require all European Union citizens to show proof of their identity before being allowed to access the sites. Leaked EU Commission documents reveal a concerted push by Brussels to roll out more expansive use of national ID cards across the EU. The documents have been uploaded to the Commission’s official website since the leak.