Bill Bonner says the world as we know it is finished. We are entering a new era of inflation and dollar weakness, and it’s here to stay. Even T-bonds aren’t a safe haven anymore…
The papers today all carry the news that a whopping 81% of Americans, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll, believe that the US is on the wrong track — or to be precise, that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.”
But behind this headline is the finding that spiraling gas and oil prices are of more concern to Americans than the home mortgage crisis.
If you want to bet on something. Bet on deleveraging. It is a “leveraged planet,” says the New York Times. It explains that an ounce of leverage in Manhattan is likely to turn into a pound of credit in Dubai…which could quite possibly fall as a ton of debt on someone’s head in Norway.
The pace of inflation in the Euro zone accelerated in March to its fatest pace since 1992, reports The New York Times.
Eurostat, the European statistics agency, said prices rose in March at a 3.5 percent annual rate in the 15 countries that share the euro, the highest rate since June 1992. The rate in February was 3.3 percent, which had itself been a record. Inflation is running far above the European Central Bank’s 2 percent guideline.
The concern about rising prices is not confined to the euro zone. In a speech on Monday, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, noted that “food prices on world markets are more than 50 percent higher, and oil prices two-thirds higher, than…
Swiss bank UBS makes front-page news on The Wall Street Journal for its thumping quarterly loss of more than $12 billion on write-downs of $19 billion. The losses have claimed chairman Marc Ospel.
– USA 2008: The Great Depression
Brit newspaper The Independent leads with “dismal projections” that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will rely on government food stamps to survive, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.
Paulson plan will be “dead on arrival”, according to The New York Times, as “lawmakers and lobbyists from an array of industries” oppose to the plan to create a new financial regulatory system…