Philippe Herlin

The situation is untenable in Japan and can only be contained in the States and the Eurozone if rates go just slightly up.

Investors must remain calm and keep a critical mind permanently. They have to go beyond the big media noise. And now is really not, really not the time to sell one’s gold.

Weirdly enough, the media didn’t dwell on this amazing issue, and the TV people didn’t even talk about it in their news bulletins. Of course, it’s about one of Europe’s most powerful man, Mario Draghi, head of the European central bank.

What’s happening in China? The interbank market succumbed to two panic attacks, on June 7th and last week, immediately doused by monetary injections from the central bank, the People's Bank of China, but tensions remain.

Along with its public deficits going the wrong way, as we wrote about last week, France has now to contend with its banking sector. According to Euromoney, a study from the Lausanne Center for Risk Management shows that french banks represent the most important systemic risk of Europe!

France is losing its footing. It just fell to the other side of the Laffer Curve : tax increases not only did not produce any revenue, but we’re witnessing a decline in fiscal revenue.

The european economy’s landscape looks sad... The Eurozone saw its GDP lose 0.2% in the first quarter, and the OECD revised to the downside its forecast for 2013 and sees a 0.6% recession ahead

Nikkei’s 7% plunge, last Thursday, and the way it happened, gives us a glimpse into how the next crisis will play.

China knows it has created a credit bubble. But its effects are subsiding and, contrary to the Western governments who keep printing and printing, China has put in place an emergency strategy that is the exact opposite of the actual bubble-creating policies.

Are we witnessing the emergence of bubbles everywhere, or isn’t the whole thing becoming a gigantic bubble? All financial assets are going up at the same time, whether it be stocks, sovereign debts, or corporate bonds!

After the LIBOR scandal, are we witnessing the ISDAfix scandal? This time it’s not about interbank lending rates, but rather about interest rates for swaps.

The bank with the most exposure to derivatives is not JP Morgan, as we thought, but Deutschebank

By wanting to respect each country’s whims and maintaining the fiction of « national » central banks despite the creation of a unique currency, the euro promoters have created an explosive internal systemic risk.

Cyprus did serve as a general rehearsal for the experimentation of a plan that will be reproduced elsewhere. The European Commission is preparing a proposition to include deposits over 100,000 euros in bank bailouts

Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, saluted the restructuration of Japan’s monetary policy, which constitutes a welcome support to world growth

In Cyprus, confusion is growing, and there is talk of a 60% tax on bank accounts exceding 100,000 euros! Actually, no one knows, and we have to wait

So Cyprus has been bailed out, for the time being, but we must ask the question : Isn’t the new plan worse than the first one? Given, of course, that both plans are nothing short of theft of private and company savings by incompetent political leaders, it’s like comparing pestilence with malaria.

Risks are increasing everywhere and the situation is becoming more and more confusing. We need to get back to the fundamentals : ideally we need to get out of paper currencies and into gold, get out of the banking system to avoid all confiscation, and get out of the Eurozone toward a country that...

A great amount of money is being created by the central banks (FED, BCE, BoJ) but, for now, we’re not seeing a strong inflation

The european banking system remains entirely dependant on the ECB for its daily operations, and this is not good news