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Meanwhile, back at the Depression…

I’m just catching up to the news today from the UK. The Bank of England announced that it was going to print a whole lot more money. The Telegraph says the Bank has “hit the panic button”: Since nominal interest rates are already as low as they can realistically go and the Government has, rightly, […]

I’m just catching up to the news today from the UK. The Bank of England announced that it was going to print a whole lot more money. The Telegraph says the Bank has “hit the panic button”:

Since nominal interest rates are already as low as they can realistically go and the Government has, rightly, ruled out easing back on deficit reduction – more QE is about the only thing left in the locker as the world slides, inexorably, towards depression.

Depression? The D-word? Sir Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, put it bluntly today:

“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.”

Tyler Durden has a clip of a BBC interview with an IMF adviser who says something rather chilling. TD writes:

In an interview with IMF advisor Robert Shapiro, the bailout expert has pretty much said what, once again,is on everyone’s mind: “If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps 2 to 3 weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system. We are not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we are talking about the largest banks in the world, the largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France, that will spread to the United Kingdom, it will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected. All those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the United States, and in Britain, and in Japan, and around the world. This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serious than the crisis in 2008…. What we don’t know the state of credit default swaps held by banks against sovereign debt and against European banks, nor do we know the state of CDS held by British banks, nor are we certain of how certain the exposure of British banks is to the Ireland sovereign debt problems.”

And, um, look what Soros says. I know he’s the kind of guy who makes money on shorts, but still:

Billionaire investor George Soros said the disruption to global financial markets since 2008 has implications for Europe and the U.S. that remind him of the final years of the Soviet Union.

“Something similar is happening in the West,” Soros, 81, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Eye to Eye with Francine Lacqua,” airing today. “You had a financial crisis where the market did actually collapse, but it was kept alive by the authorities. People don’t realize that the system has actually collapsed.”

If this all comes down, I’ll be glad I’m moving back to a place where you can grow food, hunt, fish, and rely on your neighbors because everybody knows everybody else, and has their back. And where everybody’s armed. I’m actually not kidding.

 

 

 

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