Don't ask me how I know this. If I told you, I'd have to. . . .

A new level of purgatory that even Dante could not dream up

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-04/sweden-s-borg-raises-unemployment-forecast-amid-slow-recovery.html

Sweden predicted higher unemployment this year while keeping estimates for economic growth little changed as the euro-area crisis weighs on a recovery in the largest Nordic economy.

The economy will expand 1.3 percent this year and 2.1 percent in 2014, compared with April forecasts of 1.2 percent and 2.2 percent, the government said in a statement handed out today in Visby, Sweden. Unemployment will rise to 8.4 percent this year, versus an 8.3 percent April forecast

“The protracted crisis is leaving deep scars and a recovery in Europe is having a hard time gaining traction,” Finance Minister Anders Borg said in a statement.

Sweden’s exports, which account for about half of its $540 billion economy, have fallen as the euro-area struggles with a recession. Ericsson AB (ERICB), the world’s largest maker of mobile networks, and other companies have been forced to cut jobs to cope with falling demand.

But what is the point of learning Swedish if you can't make jokes about it?

Make more Sewde jokes than any one.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-03/hong-kong-futures-signal-stock-gains-as-egypt-lifts-crude.html

European shares snapped a two-day decline, led by Portugal, after the region’s central bank kept interest rates on hold today. Egypt’s bond yields fell by the most on record and the nation’s equities rallied after the army deposed President Mohamed Mursi.

The Stoxx Europe 600 Index gained 0.7 percent to 287.45 at 12:46 p.m. in London, with trading 5 percent less than the average of the past 30 days. Portugal’s main equity gauge jumped 2.7 percent and the cost of protecting the country’s debt against default fell from a more than six-month high. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) futures rose 0.4 percent with U.S. markets shut today for the Independence Day holiday. U.K. bonds gained while the pound weakened after the Bank of England signaled a growing concern about rising bond yields and volatile markets. The yield on Egypt’s bond due April 2020 tumbled 144 basis points to a two-week low of 9.34 percent.

The European Central Bank kept its benchmark interest rate at 0.5 percent, matching economists’ forecasts. Paulo Portas, the Portuguese minister whose resignation this week threatened to bring down the government, meets Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho to try to overcome differences on budget policy. Adly Mansour, the chief justice of Egypt’s constitutional court, was sworn in as interim president after the army ousted Mursi in a move it said aimed to restore stability.

“We’ve seen slightly more positive tones out of Portugal in the last hours, which gives markets some relief,” Witold Bahrke, who helps oversee $55 billion as a senior strategist at PFA Pension A/S in Copenhagen, wrote in an e-mail. “This supports markets for now, and probably some expectations about a dovish ECB are building ahead of today’s press conference. Volume is thin out there since the U.S. is closed.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-04/ecb-keeps-interest-rates-as-investors-seek-policy-hints.html

The European Central Bank kept interest rates unchanged at a record low amid rising bond yields in the region and pressure for President Mario Draghi to give investors hints on his future policy.

ECB officials meeting in Frankfurt today left the main refinancing rate at 0.5 percent after reducing it by a quarter point in May. The decision was predicted by 61 of 62 economists in a Bloomberg News survey, with Morgan Stanley the only institution forecasting a cut. Draghi will hold a press conference at 2:30 p.m.

With Portugal’s 10-year bond yield yesterday climbing above 8 percent for the first time since November and the Federal Reserve signaling it may withdraw monetary stimulus, investors are now seeking assurance from the ECB president that it has no plans to end its current accommodative stance. Some economists are suggesting Draghi will go a step further and offer commitments on the path of interest rates.

“Forward guidance is something they probably will venture into,” said Nick Matthews, senior European economist at Nomura International Plc in London. “If you get closer to the lower bound and have an external environment in which rates, especially in the U.S., are moving higher, the ECB has to differentiate itself.”

To all the great people here, have a safe one!

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/efforts-to-halt-the-euro-crisis-ineffective-in-southern-europe-a-908856.html

Spanish top models strutted on the stage to the sounds of flamenco music. They were wearing tightly fitting clothes made by their country's most famous designers and presenting plates of bold tapas creations by Spanish chefs.

Staged in the middle of the European Parliament in June, the show represented a rebirth of sorts. "We have something to offer to the world. We are not just a land of crisis," said Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo. And he hopes to use the blend of fashion show and cooking event to present the Spanish brand name, the "Marca España", to the world. It comes with a promotional video proclaiming that Spain has the "world's best bank," the largest number of installed solar panels of any country across the globe and a big heart. The Iberians, the video notes, are also unbeatable when it comes to the number of organ donors.
But will that be enough to lead Spain and the rest of Southern Europe out of the current crisis? There is plenty of room for doubt on that score.

Aside from the lender praised in the video, Banco Santander, Spain has a weak savings bank sector with an uncertain future, all efforts to rehabilitate it notwithstanding. And despite the many reforms, government debt and unemployment are still on the rise in Spain, while the economy remains stuck in recession. And Spain remains one of the more hopeful of Europe's many troubled economies.

The sovereign debt crisis has been eating its way through the Continent for the last four years, despite the various remedies prescribed by crisis managers in Brussels and Berlin, and at the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. The situation in the euro zone eased somewhat after ECB President Mario Draghi's announcement last summer that he intended to do everything possible to preserve the euro. But it is now becoming clear how deceptive this period of calm was. Since US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced his aim to gradually pump less money into the financial markets, interest rates have gone up considerably in both the United States and Europe.

Despite being bled to death......

Bloodletting (or blood-letting) is the withdrawal of often small quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. Bloodletting was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluid were regarded as "humors" that had to remain in proper balance to maintain health. It was the most common medical practice performed by physicians from antiquity until the late 19th century, a span of almost 2,000 years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/european-leaders-warn-of-setback-to-democracy-after-egypt-coup-a-909447.html

Wednesday night's coup d'etat by the Egyptian military that toppled Mohammed Morsi as the country's Islamist leader and installed a temporary civilian government has been described as a "serious setback for democracy" by Germany. Leaders across Europe have expressed concern over the development, which saw the ouster of a democratic government just one year after Morsi took office. On Thursday, military leaders installed Adly Mansour, the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, as the country's interim leader and said that elections would be scheduled soon.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said the country must return to constitutional order as quickly as possible. "I call on all those responsible in Egypt , to act calmly, to meet each other halfway and to seek ways out of this serious crisis of state together."
In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron called on all parties to end the violence in Egypt, where nearly 50 people have been killed in clashes between Morsi supporters and opponents since Sunday. "It is not for this country to support any single group or party," he said in a statement. "What we should support is proper democratic processes and proper government by consent."

Foreign Secretary William Hague also told the BBC: "We don't support military intervention as a way to resolve disputes in a democratic system." "It's of course a dangerous precedent to do that, if one president can be deposed by the military, then of course another one can be in the future -- that's a dangerous thing."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23177463

The pound has fallen sharply after the Bank of England warned that markets were wrong to assume that it would start raising interest rates soon.

Sterling immediately dropped a cent and a half against the dollar to $1.5141.

It came as the Bank held interest rates at 0.5% and kept its quantitative easing programme (QE) unchanged.

The decisions were made at the first meeting of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee since Mark Carney took over as governor from Sir Mervyn King.

I'd have to answer an emphatic yes!


http://www.alternet.org/south-dragging-rest-nation-down


Is the South Dragging the Rest of the Nation Down?
Why poor white Southerners keep voting for policies that screw them and how this hurts the rest of the nation.

uly 3, 2013 |




In 1978, out of college without a job and having failed to establish Birmingham’s version of The Village Voice, I took a job as advance man for the Alabama Republican Senate candidate.

One incident that stuck with me was a visit to campaign headquarters by a young Republican adviser—I didn’t recognize his name, but I remember that he strummed a guitar while talking to us. He told us, “Don’t ever use the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ in an argument. Always say ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ You’ll turn every argument about race into a political one. You do that, and race will start to disappear as an issue.”

Our candidate, Jim Martin, lost the election to somebody named Donald Stewart, who was the very model of the politically ineffectual Democrat who would soon get steamrolled by the new Reagan-led Republican Party. Within a few years, however, Alabama would move, along with much of the South, from the Democratic to the Republican Party. But it was a case of rebranding rather than change. In less than a generation, every Wallace segregationist Democrat I knew had turned into a conservative Reagan Republican; as the guitar-picking adviser had predicted, race almost ceased to be a political issue and, as my friend the late journalist Paul Hemphill put it, “George Wallace’s role in framing the politics of the new South was obscured.”

I thought of these words while reading Chuck Thompson’s “Better Off Without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.” Or rather, rereading. On its release in August, I dismissed it because the author is rude and obnoxious and because his chapter on football in the South is utterly lacking in logic and sound history. Thompson doesn’t think that the Alabama Crimson Tide has the greatest tradition in college football. But I digress. (More on football later.)

Over the past months, however, I’ve become more convinced by Thompson’s main argument, that the South—the states that comprised the Old Confederacy—should not only be allowed to secede, but both countries created by the split would be better off.

Most of Thompson’s main points are in the first 40 pages:

—“It’s too bad that we just didn’t let the South secede when we had the chance.”

(snip)

What would the snowbirds do?

Personally, I think it's a GREAT idea.

But we'd have a landslide of people moving back to their political roots...

I have a client who lived through the great divide of India and Pakistan. Sounds chancy, and it didn't really fix anything.

It's too hot to think.

I know! Nelson Mandela... I don't know much about him, and we have lost him...he's permanently vegetative.

I was thinking of suggesting that. If I believed in souls, I would say he is a great soul ... I am sure that in months and years to come we will learn of all his failures and probably evils as a person - after all, none of us are free of them ... (if there is anything not already out in the public record, but there does always seem to be). But nonetheless, he inspired me ... I guess I feel about him as so many (not I) feel about the Kennedys ... I tear up every time I see anything about his dying, and I don't weep over public figures.