Germany attacks the dollar ahead of market opening in crucial week!

The long summer holidays of the indolent rulers of the Euro Zone country's leaders, with none at the helm and no attempts being made to pretend that the supposed agreements of 21st July are not now irrevocably smashed, where no effort had been made to make them effective, now ensure that the EU fiasco will merely drift on for yet another week.

The German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble was on the radio this morning trying to draw attention away from the vacuum in Europe to the size of the US deficits and debts, read here.

Rumours regarding an unknown European bank continued to swirl over the weekend, with the most accurate summary of the present state of affairs which I read, being by John Ward, on The Slog, linked here. A selection from a plethora of various possible choice quotes from that blog is this:

The last few paragraphs represent a slightly long-winded way of saying that the system is dead. Bernanke and others have tried to nail its feet to the perch, but it is no more. It is an ex-system, no longer extant and – beautiful plumage or not – it has expired.

I quite like the word ‘expired’, because in commercial terms it is redolent of something being past its sell-by date. And yet, still our ‘leaders’ insist on trying to sell it as the only alternative. Every utterance from the EU, the World Bank, Westminster and the White House is designed to evoke fear of change, and steer people away from the Thought Crime of embracing a very different future. As always, this reflects two things: the lack of respect politicians have for the ordinary citizen’s stoicism, and the barren minds of those in charge. The Berlin farce last Tuesday, and the Christine Lagarde FT piece of the same day, offer all the evidence of this latter reality we will ever need: pompous banalities wrapped in visions of Paradise, and surrounded by diaphanous veils designed to hide a nasty power-play agenda.