Will Dexia Bank become Europe's Lehman Brothers?

We were all spared the "Mayan misery" pessimists had prepared us for at this year's winter solstice - so what can the EU now manage to deliver upon us as a substitute? How about a European version of the Lehman Brothers' bank collapse? That should start the New Year amid suitable gloom and chaos!

Crunch day for the next episode, in the sorry saga that the Belgian/Franco Dexia Bank has recently become, has moved a step closer today with this release from the EU Commission's Press Office. EU Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, has approved the rescues undertaken to date. In what could well be a coup de grâce for many small savers and communal municipalities, conditionality has been attached, not least, I would imagine, as to where all the necessary money will be found. Dexia depositors, who ignored the old maxim "higher yields = greater risks", may still eventually realize that the reported backers for the remaining presumed assets will not rapidly appear from Germany. How much more of this can the ECB front given the dreadful news from Spain's similarly troubled Bankia only yesterday? 

To get some perspective go to this link to the Europolitics web site and read the stark facts in nice round numbers. €85 billion is to be spent to allow the "orderly resolution" of the problems at Dexia Bank; thus avoiding, we are informed, the potential "disorderly consequences" of resolving the problems at this bank and "allows for the controlled winding down of the largest bad bank in the EU with over €300 billion in assets".

I have been blogging on the farce and fiasco that is the Dexia Bank crisis for much more than a year now, and if the EU Commission determines this week that all has been in accordance with EU competition rules and policy, hollow laughter will be heard across Europe.

Consider if you will for a brief moment the 2008 Annual Report of this bank, linked here in pdf format. No need to peruse column after column of figures, nor table after table of the detail, or indeed paragraph after paragraph of the text. Just scroll to page 196 (page 198 of my pdf reader) and at the foot of the page on the bottom right read note E, which states:

§§§

E. Carrying amount of financial assets 

with renegotiated terms that otherwise 

should be past-due or impaired

No major operation is concerned by this point as Dexia is 

mainly active in the public sector.

§§§

How about that for a gem of a disclaimer, which for this reader at least seems to make complete garbage of every other fact and figure put across in all the remainder of the 250 odd pages of the document, signed in Antwerp in April 2009.

Warnings of the utmost suspicion of all coming out of Dexia were clearly picked up by the ECB, as any quick read of the Bloomberg Business News Report, linked here, dated 14th October, 2011, will show.

One other item of interest for those who have not been following this matter is the role of the Chairman of the Board of Directors, whose statement on the results is on page 8 and 9, namely one, Jean-Luc Dehaene. Mr Dehaene's name is mentioned in one of my earliest "Ironies Too" postings on Dexia, linked here, as once having received the European "Vision for Europe" award!

19/2/11 "Can it be any surprise to learn that Trichet is the latest recipient of the ‘Vision for Europe’ award? Previous laureates have included Jacques Santer, Jean-Claude Juncker, Jean-Luc Dehaene and Helmut Kohl, a depressing and dreary collection of functionaries in the ‘leadership’ of Europe. This award is granted ‘in recognition of outstanding achievements in taking Europe into the future’; self-evidently an exercise in fatuity.The first recipient of this self-congratulatory award was Jacques Santer, former EU President, forced from his extravagant sinecure by Paul Van Buitenen’s devastating accusations of corruption and fraud.

Mr Dehaene might be better remembered by English speakers as having been the nominee for President of the EU Commission, who was blackballed by then British PM John Major, only to be replaced by fellow Benelux candidate, Jacques Santer - now notorious for being the victim of the sole democratic act ever undertaken by the European Parliament, namely, the sacking of his entire Commission!

Twenty-one years ago this morning the EU Tory Traitors ousted Thatcher

Yesterday in the comment threads of the Spectator Magazine I saw growing evidence that the full depths of the dreadful treachery in the Conservative Party, started by Edward Heath in his European Communities Act of 40 years ago, then continued by Howe, Heseltine, Clarke and Major 21 years ago this very morning, was beginning to be more widely understood across Britain.

The full implications are clearly nowhere yet sufficiently seen. I once again urge readers of this blog to re-view the interview John Major, the main beneficiary of the treachery perpetrated twenty-one years ago today, gave to David Frost over last weekend, and the utter hopelessness and despair his views offer Britain, purely to justify his and his co-plotters, earlier grave and treasonous errors!

(Note particularly with Major, a point not often enough made, that his errors did not end with Maastricht as he also planned to sign up to the Amsterdam EU Treaty, actually offering to accompany Blair after his election defeat, to effect the ridiculous plan he believed he had concocted to thwart the EU Federalists' devious plots!)

The demented EU delusions of Ex- Prime Minister John Major!

If you have yet to view the interview between David Frost and John Major on Al Jazeera, then I urge you to do so as it reveals some really disturbing misapprehensions on the part of a man still said to have the ear of the present British Prime Minister, David Cameron, plus perhaps some others within the present British Conservative Party. The broadcast is again linked here.

Most of the interview is given over to what is a reasonably fair description of the Eurozone crisis. What is not addressed is why the Major administration exposed Britain to this well foreseen danger, by signing the Maastricht Treaty under Major's Premiership, nor why it can now ever be expected that the EU could ever be a "good" thing if it survives this crisis, which Major describes as the optimistic scenario, perhaps according to Major, attainable after ten more years of misery, in pursuit of maintaining an exaggerated EU proportion of present trading ratio, while presumably we continue to ignore the Commonwealth and the rest of the world.

There is so much that is intellectually unsound in the measured words and tones of Major, that it should be a major priority of the Research Department of the Conservative Party, (if such still exists,) to nail each half-truth and utter lie so that some sensible strategy for the nation over the disastrous EU could at last be put forward for possible cross-party agreement.

The depth of the crisis described by John Major, at the very least deserves that!

Failing that one of our three main parties must surely now adopt as its main policy the urgent necessity for Britain's entire EU withdrawal!

Watch John Major with Frost on the FTT and other EU dangers

The video of the programme Frost over the World, from Al Jazeera, is much better than most of the output from the British based broadcasting media this weekend, it may be viewed from here.

Mubarak vs Major - whose was the greater evil?

John Major, assumed power in Britain almost ten years after Hosni Mubarak, took over in Egypt, and ceased to influence British politics some ten years ago. Yet it is perfectly possible to make a respectable case that Major, in one decade, had a far more malign influence on the fortunes of his nation than the the iron-fisted dictator, and alleged mass torturer Mubarak, had during his thirty years of power.

Mubarak, took over an already existing dictatorship, upon the shooting of his predecessor at a parade. Major, was the beneficiary of a ruthless coup, instituted by an ambitious man at the behest of foreigners who went on to become Major's supposed Deputy Prime Minister and still exerts much influence over today's Conservative PM.

Major inherited a sovereign, independent, parliamentary democracy with an uncorrupted civil service. Many believe that Major declared those individuals supporting the continuation of such institutions as targets for the state intelligence sevices, to date this still remains unproven, given the climate of fear now prevailing in Britain. Nevertheless with the clear and growing evidence of national bankruptcy under EU rule, and the dreadful consequences of the deliberate misgovernance, we trust this will not long remain unclear.

Mubarak, if he stands down in the near future, will leave a nation much as he found it. Mubarak will be a victim of his own policies but felled due to the courage of his citizens and Quantatitive Easing (the logical end  result of Major's overthrow of Thatcher's sound economics) with its disastrous effect on the price of wheat on the world's largest importing nation.

The heirs to Major, of which Blair and Brown were fitting examples, will possibly remain in power indefinitely, with democracy now effectively destroyed, unless an Egyptian style protest of a newly politically aware British people can eventually be mounted and thereafter democracy and sovereignty restored.

London's Mayor demands an apology for all Euro-sceptics! What about Major over Thatcher?

The amusing article with a harsh, strong and hard element of truth is in the Daily Telegraph this morning, linked here. The short piece concludes as follows:

Politics made the euro, and politics can destroy it, especially if electorates start to feel it is a machine for German domination and the destruction of benefits and wages; or if the German electorate feels that it is a machine for fleecing Germany. 

In the meantime, all those snooty Europhile politicians and journalists who sneered at us for our doubts should be forced to crawl in penitence to Dublin Castle, scourging themselves with copies of the Maastricht Treaty. We have been vindicated, and the least they can do is admit it. They know who they are.

In fact, matters are far more serious than the vote-dependent London Mayor dares to proclaim as he is a member of one of the three main British political parties that have wrought this disaster. Those responsible for the destruction of the nation's democracy, as can now be be seen for reasons almost solely connected with the aquisition of unaccountable political power and personal gain from their self-perpetuating obscene perks and subsequent pensions need to be completely stripped of both, if any kind of return to accountable democratic rationality requiring a broad national healing process is to be achieved.

Watch one such smug, self-satisfied, former Conservative Prime Minister (signatory of Maastricht) on TV only yesterday morning, acting for all the world as though he were an ordinary decent human being with no connection to the man who benefitted from replacing MaggieThatcher only 20 years ago when she warned the nation in Parliament of the grave dangers we faced, from here.

Below this is the fighting lady this smarmy low-life, John Major, actually fought against to gain power and his present fat pension and appear on the nation's main BBC TV channel and propaganda outlet for the EU, on a Sunday morning and support a left-leaning ultra pro-EU Coalition Government (which has ceded more power in a few months to the EU than others have done over years):

Can the UK be put back together AND repaired

In the aftermath of the disastrous EU experiment, which is happily now drawing to a close, it is time to start thinking of the best way forward.

This does not include incompatible long term partnerships of poltical opposites with the sole intention of obtaining a stranglehold on 'power' as proposed by ex-PM John Major in the Daily Telegraph this morning linked here.

Scottish Nationalism, built on a solid foundation of historic hatred of the English, was fuelled by the knowledge that a more powerful centralised system stood in the background offering both subsidies and wholehearted support. The essence of the EU was the break-up of former nation states thus allowing a power and asset grab by the signatories to the Treaty of Paris who jointly controlled the direction of travel in a deliberately non-democratic tyranny (as defined by Karl Popper).

The Scots must now realise the dangerous nature of the flirtations in which they have dallied, best starting point to take on board the real world being the situation of both Ireland and Iceland, two small nations they have often stated they wish to emulate. The English and Welsh and Northern Irish must consider whether they wish to resume the former Union or seek some other, perhaps more international route ahead perhaps in concert with the older Commonwealth countries.

Anything is now possible, trust the lacklustre former Tory PM, John Major, to only have arrived at the least inspiring and entirely self-interested starting point of a long term pact Tory with the Lib/Dems to further deprive our nation(s) of any real democratic say!