Unsolvable Insolvency

Time and time again, Europe solves its debt problems… and every time they don’t get solved at all.

Italian bond yields are edging back up. And Greece is negotiating a default. They want to avoid a naked, noisy default…so they are dressing it up as “voluntary” or ‘soft.’ But they can’t disguise the fact that Greece has bills it can’t pay. On the 20th of March it needs to come up with 14.4 billion euros, followed by billions more in the months following. That is more than 6% of national GDP. It would be as though the US had to pay a trillion dollars.

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

In today’s column, I’d like to share with you a few ideas I presented at the recent Agora Financial Investment Symposium in a speech titled You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. I called it that because it’s hard to fathom serious people writing lines like this:

The renewed willingness and confidence to spend money we don’t have is vital to the continuing recovery.

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The Turns of the Century

Listen up, dear reader….herein we announce an historic Daily Reckoning forecast.

Here’s your north star…your compass….your GPS to the future. Print it out. Paste it to your refrigerator.

About the turn of the century, two markets turned
Gold turned up
Stocks turned down
These major trends will end
Whence they meet

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On Deleveraging, the Collapse of the Dollar and Rise of a ‘Lost Decade’

The Daily Bell recently caught up with Bill Bonner while at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver, BC. Their exclusive interview with the Daily Reckoning founder can be found below…

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Why Debt Does Matter

On Sunday, we celebrated America's independence from Britain.

Having just come from London, it's hard to see what the fuss was all about. The English seem like decent people. The queen still has her dignity. The British government seems no worse than its American counterpart. And David Cameron appears to have a much better idea of what he is doing than the Obama team.

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Phony Choices From a Bogus Profession

We got a look at how the world really works last week. Bloomberg ratted out Sophia Constantinidou:

“The 52-year-old gets 400 euros ($496) a month from the Greek government, part of her late mother's state pension. Under the current system, Constantinidou qualifies to receive the payment for life as the only surviving child of a deceased civil servant, provided she doesn't tie the knot.?

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Congress Punts On Deficit Decisions… Again

Congress has hit on the perfect way to avoid the problem of a yawning deficit: Hand off the problem to a blue-ribbon panel.

“It isn’t possible to debate and pass a realistic, long-term budget,? says House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, “until we’ve considered the bipartisan commission’s deficit-reduction plan, which is expected in December. I believe that Congress must take up and vote on that plan.” Conveniently, after the election.

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The Persistent Myth of American Economic Dominance

“The great enemy of the truth,? John F. Kennedy declared in a 1962 commencement address at Yale University, “is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.?

Fifty years later, a Yale education, itself, may be one small part of a vast American myth – the idea that America is forever and always the land of the free; the land of opportunity; the land of true capitalism. A degree from Yale, like so many other facets of the American economic myth, may possess more prestige than genuine economic value. But the declining value of a college education is a mere sub-plot to the de-mythologizing of American economic prowess.

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US Economy in a Self-Made Vise

Stocks rallied yesterday. The Dow rose 213 points. Gold went up too – plus $9. So many people are buying gold coins that the storage vaults are getting crowded, says a Bloomberg report.

But since we don't trust the numbers anyway…let's return to words.

Vise is a funny word. It looks like it should be pronounced like ‘vies'…but it is actually pronounced like ‘vice.'

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