Are The Europeans About To Start The Second Half Of Our Great Depression?

From Zerohedge

 His main concern is that this kind of (bank-run) event can quickly spiral out of the control of even the ECB as he uncomfortably conjures the image of the initial US stabilization that occurred in 1930 to May 1931 only to be knocked back into a greater depression by the failure of Credit-Anstalt, which set off bank failures and eventually defaults in 1932 on many government debts. 


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IMF advisor says we face a Worldwide Banking Meltdown

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From The Telegraph


Sir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to put £75billion of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession.

Economists said the Bank’s decision to resume its quantitative easing [QE], or asset purchase programme, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead.

Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster.
“This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We’re having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but to act calmly to this and to do the right thing.”

Jobless America threatens to bring us all down with it

From The Telegraph

A depression may have been averted, but nothing has been fixed. This is the depressingly downbeat message that came across loud and clear from last weekend's annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund.

By Jeremy Warner, Assistant Editor
Published: 7:40PM BST 11 Oct 2010

The destructive trade and capital imbalances of the pre-crisis era are back, banking reform appears stuck in paralysing discord, public debt in many advanced economies remains firmly set on the road to ruin, and the spirit of international co-operation that saw nations come together to fight the crisis has largely disappeared.
This was not where we were meant to be in tackling the underlying causes of the crisis and returning the world to sustainable growth. Yet beneath this sense of frustration at lack of progress – and at international organisations such as the IMF and the G20 to bring it about - there is an underlying truth that's often left unspoken; many of the problems in the world economy right now are not international at all, but US specific and can only really be solved by America itself.

I don't want to belittle the difficulties faced by some of the peripheral eurozone nations, but in the scale of things they are a sideshow alongside the malaise which has settled on the world's largest economy.
Ignoring the troubled fringe, Europe as a whole is to almost universal surprise starting to look in reasonable shape again, and for reasons that I will come to, Europeans are in any case not nearly as fixated by high unemployment as their American peers...

Feldstein, Krugman Agree: Another War Would Help

From The National Journal

Two wars are not enough.

America's economic outlook is so grim, and political solutions are so utterly absent, that only another large-scale war might be enough to lift the nation out of chronic high unemployment and slow growth, two prominent economists, a conservative and a liberal, said today...

Jim Rogers: 'I Would Abolish the Federal Reserve and Resign.'

That was his answer when asked what he would do if he was in Mr. Bernanke's seat tomorrow morning.