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The euro is the only current alternative to the US dollar as world reserve currency. Being sole reserve currency really helps when you need to sell mountains of bonds. Given the amount of debt the US must sell over the coming years, why encourage the competition, especially if it’s unclear that contagion can be avoided anyway?

Also, as anyone familiar with forex markets knows, the EUR/USD pair alone accounts for about a third of all forex trade. That means that for every 3 euros bought or sold, a USD is used. Thus the two push each other in opposite directions. As the EUR falls, the USD gets a huge boost and vice versa. A falling EUR means more USD demand, and lower US borrowing costs. That helps the US recover.

A falling euro also helps keeps US mortgage rates low as investors buy dollars and T bonds in a flight to safety, and that is a VERY big deal, given that starting July the US sees a wave of resets of a magnitude not seen since the wave that created the subprime crisis, which of course metastasized into the current Great Recession.

As noted above, if Washington needs to sell more bonds to pay for another bailout, the increased demand from a full blown crisis in the EU would not be the worst thing imaginable.

Conclusion: What Washington Must Weigh.

In sum, against the risk of EU implosion and contraction under the weight of a wave of PIIGS state defaults (as one default sends borrowing rates for all to unaffordable levels), and possible global sovereign and banking default contagion, the US must weigh:

Contagion and crash part II may be unavoidable anyway, so best to face it without another layer of deficit spending
Near term benefits of a flight to safety that bolsters the USD and lowers US borrowing costs (though there is real risk that all sovereign states may see higher rates)

Longer term benefits of a much weakened euro eliminated as competition for reserve currency status. Yes, a cheaper euro makes US goods more expensive, but given US borrowing needs and impending mortgage rate resets, keeping US borrowing costs lower is arguably the greater near term economic and political priority.

Key point – despite what markets currently think, it’s really uncertain that the EU can be saved, whereas the above advantages of keeping the US purse shut are fairly clear.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/200118-more-euro-bleeding-and-3-reasons-why-washington-may-refuse-more-imf-aid

Impensable il y a quelques années !!

Title : Jewish Terrorism in Israel
Author: Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Year 2009 Pages 264 pp. ISBN 9780231154468
Price $29.50

Copyright ? 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65869/ami-pedahzur-and-arie-perliger/jewish-terrorism-in-israel

Jewish Terrorism in Israel, the second book to appear in the Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare series, sets a high bar for subsequent works. After a brisk treatment of terrorism in ancient Israel (which often inspires today’s terrorism), it moves to modern times, documenting not just the well-remembered examples, such as the 1948 assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 mass murder in Hebron, and the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin but seemingly every terrorist act by Israeli Jews realized or aborted from 1948 to 2007. Avoiding the pitfalls that generally confront the study of terrorism—either expressing outrage at such inhumane behavior or dismissing one man’s terrorist as another man’s freedom fighter—the authors dispassionately study the backgrounds, social networks, and motives of the terrorists. Several of these case studies are based on interviews with perpetrators quaintly labeled as “retired.” Comparing Jewish terrorism to that of Islamists, the authors show that “religious terrorism is not a one-faith phenomenon.”

A creuser ?

http://www.truveo.com/the-kevin-barrett-show-with-alan-sabrosky-was-911/id/2771301785

http://www.newsoftomorrow.org/spip.php?article7937

Moi, je vais apprendre le russe !

School Lunches Blamed As More Americans Too Overweight To Join The Military

WASHINGTON - School lunches have been called many things, but a group of retired military officers is giving them a new label: national security threat.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25270.htm
via http://contreinfo.info/

Enfin, l’espoir d’une évolution intelligente de la politique européenne de la France. Car la Russie est dans l’Europe. Non les USA. Et, si peu la Grande-Bretagne.

Alors, même si la motivation profonde était commerciale - et, après tout, pourquoi pas? Si, en plus, cela contribue à donner du travail aux chantiers de Saint-Nazaire… - il n’en demeure pas moins que cet accord, s’il aboutit, contribuerait à resserrer les liens avec la Russie. Pays d’une grand culture, heureusement libéré des folies du communisme.

Alors, je ne souhaite qu’une chose: que ce contrat se fasse. Ensuite, que nous vendions aux Russes des Rafale. Et qu’on leur achète des équipements qu’ils savent bien faire, et dont nous avons besoin.

mélanchon a bien enregistré le rappel de 1783-89 , sur un ton mi rigolard, misérieux.

http://www.jean-luc-melenchon.fr/2010/04/laki-est-de-retour-lhistoire-sent-le-soufre/#more-2895

Surprise, Dedefensa est référencé sur Marianne2, en fin de page.
http://www.marianne2.fr/

Site agrégateurs : Vendredi   Dedefensa   Contreinfo

Goldman Sachs, l’autre volcan qu’on n’a pas vu venir

http://www.marianne2.fr/Goldman-Sachs,-l-autre-volcan-qu-on-n-a-pas-vu-venir_a191978.html?com#com_941369

Accusée de fraude par le gendarme de la bourse américaine, Goldman Sachs, la banque la plus puissante de Wall Street, semble pour la première fois ébranlée. L’accusation d’agent double, jouant contre l’intérêt de ses clients est cette fois-ci patente. “The big Short”, un livre paru récemment en avait largement fait la démonstration
Les cendres islandaises couvrent à peu près tout l’espace aérien nord européen mais pas seulement. L’espace médiatique est également saturé. Et comme le notait malicieusement ce matin la revue de presse de France Inter, il est fort probable que, sans l’éruption islandaise, la dernière affaire impliquant Goldmann Sachs aurait fait la une de tous les journaux.

Après les bonus extravagants, le scandale du fast trading, les techniques financières visant à camoufler la dette grecque, c’est maintenant pour son rôle dans le scandale des Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), en fait les subprimes, que Goldman Sachs est une fois de plus montrée du doigt. Et cette fois-ci, l’accusation émane de la Sec. Le gendarme de la bourse américaine accuse de rien moins que de fraude la banque qui prête invariablement ses meilleurs éléments à la Maison Blanche quelles que soient les administrations au pouvoir
etc.————————————————————

Mais plus interessant:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/;kw=[3351,53763]

Looting Main Street
How the nation’s biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

By Matt Taibbi Mar 31, 2010 8:15 AM EDT
I

f you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. “I’d be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning,” she says. “I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I’d go to bed at night, and I’d be in tears.”

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. “Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years,” she says.

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world’s grandest toilet — “the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants” is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.
etc.————————————————————

Dans mon milieu professionnel, plutôt technophile pourtant, nombre de gens semblent se sentir plus délivrés que privés de l’aéronautique.

Ce nuage transparent sur paris qui efface les trainées de condensation est vécu comme dépollution. La grâce de la nature, cette fois.

Il est rare de voir une critique si juste de Clinton.

On decouvre la face cachee de Clinton dans le fim Life as debt http://www.lifeanddebt.org

Quand a l’attentat a Oklahoma City, j’imagine que Webster Tarpley saura facilement convaincre un esrpit ouvert et fonctionant encore sous le regime du reel.

Toute la question est de savoir si c’est bien l’effet Tea party qui est à l’origine de la baisse des bourses us vendredi, ou bien l’annonce de la poursuite de Goldman Sachs par la SEC….

autant je ressens vos approches vraies - intuitivement justes - autant votre position d’observateur me gène - les systèmes anthropotechniques dans lesquels nous vivons tous sont une chose étrange vu de l’extérieur - mais retournez la vison et regarder de l’intérieur - la logique de système se vit - on le voit décider tout seul - parfois avec un illogisme/logique fou - mais du même ordre que ces réponses pleines de poésies que donnent un enfant pour retraduire le monde - la logique de l’enfant est parfois étrange mais pour lui c’est terriblement logique - le système complexe vu de l’intérieur n’est pas si compliqué que cela - l’intuition, les valeurs, des approches philosophiques - le taôisme par exemple - sont des outils de luttes internes - pour me battre tous les jours à l’intérieur de ses structures que vous décrivez bien elles sont plus sensibles que vous ne le pensez à l’intelligence de l’intérieur - le wou wei des taôisme - fonctionne - le fatalisme - le constat de l’extérieur regardant ce grand corps aller à sa perte est bien sur tentant - mais l’intelligence de l’intérieur doit rester primordiale - tout comme le cornac dirigeant l’éléphant nous pouvons tous par nos actions orienter la bête loin de l’abime - je veux le croire même si je lis avec fascination le blog tout les jours pour voir la bête bouger - wou wei - le non faire n’est pas absence d’action. Je veux le croire.

L’Histoire a-t-elle une conscience ?

Ce n’est pas parce que deux nuages se rencontrent que l’éclair jaillit,
c’est afin que l’éclair jaillisse que deux nuages se rencontre.

proverbe mazdéen cité par Raymond Abellio dans son roman “Les yeux d’Ezechiel sont ouverts”.

“Self licking icecream cone”