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The German economy has been one of the wonders of the world over the last couple of years. While the rest of Europe staggered, German unemployment fell to the lowest level in decades. This week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of developed economies around the world, issued a new “Economic Survey of Germany.” The biggest challenge it could find facing the country was finding enough workers. It recommended steps to encourage more women to work. “Please accept our sincere congratulations for a well-managed economy,” said Angel Gurría, the O.E.C.D.’s secretary general, in a speech in Berlin....

WASHINGTON – A senior defense official announced a planned series of changes to U.S. force posture in Europe on Thursday that would reduce the number of U.S. troops on the continent by more than 11,000 by 2017. Families of affected troops are being notified Thursday, the officials said. INACTIVATED 170th Infantry Brigade: The unit’s 3,850 soldiers, currently redeploying to Baumholder, Germany, from Afghanistan, will begin moving with their families this summer, the Pentagon said. 172nd Separate Infantry Brigade: 3,850 soldiers, currently in Afghanistan, will redeploy this summer to Germany. Soldiers and their families will begin to move in summer 2013....

TEHRAN — In a new show of defiance against tightened sanctions, Iran on Wednesday threatened to cut oil exports to several European Union countries and unveiled controversial advances in its nuclear fuel programs. In a day of fiery speeches, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also lashed out at the West, condemning recent assassinations of Iranian scientists. Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned ambassadors of six E.U. states and warned at least four of them — Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece — that they must extend their long term oil-purchasing contracts with Iran or face cutoff, the semiofficial...

U.K. MEP Gives Epic Warning on Greek Chaos: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!’ Jonathon M. Seidl, The Blaze Febuarary 15,2012 URL Jonathon M. Seidl is an assistant editor at The Blaze. An outspoken member of the European Parliament has struck again with another viral speech, this time warning that the chaos in Greece is just the beginning. Nigel Farage is the leader of the UK Independence Party and has been an outspoken opponent of bailouts and what’s been going on in Greece. This week, he blasted his colleagues who have treated Greece like a puppet government, and he shunned the...

You know there is a reason why Europe just came crawling with an advance handout looking for US assistance: Moody's jsut went apeshit on Europe. In other news, we wouldn't want to be the company that insured Moody's Milan offices.Full release:Moody's adjusts ratings of 9 European sovereigns to capture downside risksAs anticipated in November 2011, Moody's Investors Service has today adjusted the sovereign debt ratings of selected EU countries in order to reflect their susceptibility to the growing financial and macroeconomic risks emanating from the euro area crisis and how these risks exacerbate the affected countries' own specific challenges.Moody's...

Cue the fireworks in 3...2...1... FRIEDEN EUROPEANS CAN'T DO MUCH FOR GREECE BEYOND AGREEMENT - BBGFRIEDEN: GREECE NEEDS STRUCTURAL REFORMS, SHORT-TERM FINANCING - BBGFRIEDEN: GREECE HAS HISTORY OF PROBLEMS IMPLEMENTING DECISIONS - BBG And... drumroll please: FRIEDEN SAYS HE WISHES U.S. MORE INVOLVED IN STRENGTHENING IMF - BBG Translation: Hey America, we've done all we can, now it's your turn to sustain the Ponzi. Because if we go, you go.The upside: think of just how much faster the latest and gratest $16.4 trillion debt target will be breached if America simply issues Greek bonds with a US guarantee. Like...

Abu Qatada, the radical Islamic preacher once described as Osama bin Laden’s “right hand man in Europe”, will be back on the streets within days after being granted bail. A senior immigration judge said yesterday that Qatada could be released despite even his own defence team suggesting that he posed a “grave risk” to Britain’s national security. Qatada was granted bail by Mr Justice Mitting after the European Court of Human Rights ruled last month that he could not be deported to his native Jordan. The bail conditions will be similar to those set in 2008, with the cleric confined...

Cold, snow headed to Greece, Germany and Belgium, forecasters sayReuters Vehicles drive through blizzards near the Lehliu railway station, 45 miles east of Bucharest.The storm, which swept in from Siberia, has killed more than 200 people.. NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Unusually cold weather, plunging temperatures to 31 degrees below zero in some areas, is expected to continue sweeping across Europe in coming days after causing hundreds of deaths in Eastern Europe and air-traffic delays in London and elsewhere. January has been the ninth-snowiest month since 1966 for Europe and Asia, though for the entire northern hemisphere, it’s been about average...

In Case You Hadn't Noticed, Everything Is Going Wrong In Greece Right Now Simone Foxman Febuary 3, 2012 Markets haven't been paying much attention to Greece lately, as multiple sets of negotiations drag on between the Greek government, representatives of its private creditors, troika officials, and even the European Central Bank. In case you hadn't noticed, they're not going anywhere. After more than three months of bickering about the scale of a Greek debt restructuring, officials still keep pushing back the date at which they expect to have a deal. According to sources cited by Bloomberg, a deal to impose...

Today We Saw This Chart Literally Make People's Jaws Drop Joe WeisenthalJanuary 30,2012 We were just in the studios of GBTV (Glenn Beck's online network) around a group of folks who were watching Glenn's show, when he put up this chart from ZeroHedge of youth unemployment in Europe. Jaws literally dropped around the room. The extent of how bad it is is not well known.ZeroHedge By the way, the salience of this issue was underscored today, when even Rupert Murdoch began tweeting about it.

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) - A severe and snowy cold snap across central and eastern Europe has left at least 36 people dead, cut off power to towns, and snarled traffic. Officials are responding with measures ranging from opening shelters to dispensing hot tea, with particular concern for the homeless and elderly. This part of Europe is not unused to cold, but the current freeze, which spread to most of the region last week, came after a period of relatively mild weather. Many were shocked when temperatures in some parts plunged Monday to minus 20 Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit). "Just as...

CHART: You're Going To Need Big Haircuts To Make PIIGS Debt Sustainable January 30, 2012Global Macro Monitor Interesting calculations posted by Spiegel from the Kiel Institute on the sovereign haircuts which would make the debt of the listed countries sustainable. We would love to see the calculations for the U.S., U.K., and Japan.

20 Signs That Europe Is Plunging Into A Full-Blown Economic DepressionJanuary 30, 2012 An economic nightmare is descending on Europe. With each passing month, the economic numbers across Europe get even worse. At this point it is becoming extremely difficult for anyone to deny that Europe is plunging into a full-blown economic depression. In fact, some parts of Europe are already there. In Spain the overall unemployment rate is over 22 percent, and in Greece one out of every five retail establishments has already been closed down. All over Europe, economic activity is rapidly slowing down, unemployment is skyrocketing and...

The Hot New Worry In The Eurozone... Joe Weisenthal January 29, 2012 Greece is still furiously working out a haircut deal with its creditors, but the hot new worry in Europe is unquestionably Portugal, land of the surging bond yields. In a note that identifies: "TOP CLIENT QUESTIONS", SocGen's Global Head Of Economics Michala Marcussen writes Will Portugal follow Greece? Portuguese bond yields have increased on the back of downgrades and fears that Portugal will follow in the footsteps of Greece. Under the current EU/IMF program, Portugal is due to return to market funding in 2013. For this to become...

The e-mail said that the following article was published in a Spanish newspaper on January 15, 2008 and was written by Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez--- I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth – Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, and talent. We destroyed the Chosen People, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above...

FITCH GOES ON RAMPAGE: CUTS SPAIN, ITALY, BELGIUM, CYPRUS, AND SLOVENIA Simone Foxman January 27,2012 Fitch just cut the long-term issuer ratings of 5 EU countries: Belgium: AA+ to AA Spain: AA- to A Italy: A+ to A- Cyprus: BBB to BBB- Slovenia: AA- to A It affirmed Ireland's BBB+ rating with a negative outlook. Borrowing costs have been sinking for these countries lately–particularly for Italy and Spain—after the European Central Bank announced liquidity support measures in early December that have lessened mounting worries about the health of the banking system. While Fitch says that it supports EU leaders actions...

While Germany and Austria have just blocked Serbia's entry into the European Union Croatia was admitted in a ceremony at which David Cameron shook the hand of Croat leaders, whose country by any democratic or moral standards is a disgrace. Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, in an exact reprise of the fascist 1940s, have been systematically attacked and dismembered by Germany and Austria since the 1980s. Germany, without the support of other countries, the EU or the UN, joined the Vatican in illegally recognising Croatia in 1991 which led to that State effectively declaring war on Yugoslavia (of which it...

Iran continues to claim it is reaping the rewards of European sanctions even amid a deep currency crisis that rocks Tehran. In fact, the oil ministry in Tehran claims the embargo would leave Iran unscathed while inflicting "heavy economic loss" on the "people of Europe, who have been affected by crisis". The result would be a "slowdown in global economic growth, particularly in the crisis-hit Western world," said the statement. However, the value of the rial, Iran's national currency, has fallen by around 50 per cent against the dollar in the last month alone as Iran tries to circumvent sanctions...

As we watch the Eurozone struggle with its financial challenges Keynesians keep telling us the solution to our economic problems is to spend more money, to pile up bigger debts. A week and a half ago, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of more than half of the Eurozone's countries, and the failure of those policies should be very obvious by now. Solving the Greek debt crisis hit yet another snag on Sunday afternoon. New aid for Greece from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank would have relied on private bondholders “voluntarily” agreeing to a 50...

Europe Is Setting The Stage For The Mother Of All Black Swans Simon Black, Sovereign Man Jan. 18, 2012, 12:39 PM [Editor's note: Simon's friend Tim Price is a delightfully witty fund manager in the UK, one of the few free-thinking individuals in all of institutional finance. His recent thoughts below on the euro debacle, gold, and hyperinflation are some of the best ever written on the topics.]“Under the circumstances, discussions with Greece and the official sector are paused for reflection on the benefits of a voluntary approach.” Debt talks “have not produced a constructive response.” - The Institute of...

It is said that history is written by the victors. In the case of the 2012 election it’s hard to see how that’s even possible given that with the current trajectory of the GOP primaries we’re all going to end up losers. Rarely does it occur that choices and consequences of government policies are so starkly presented for an electorate as they are today. Unfortunately, I’m not talking about the GOP field as an alternative to our big government president. Today, the national debt stands at approximately $15 trillion, or almost $50,000 per American citizen. $4.6 trillion of that debt...

ZULAUF: THE KEY TO 2012 & THE COMING BANKING BUST 14 January 2012 by Cullen Roche The 2012 Barrons Roundtable came out this morning and the discussion is always interesting. I have tended to veer towards the comments of Felix Zulauf since he’s the global macro master at the table. That said, here are some of his macro thoughts. I think he’s a bit dramatic, but given that he’s one of the few roundtable members who has been able to connect the dots (for the most part) his comments are always worth considering (see past performance from Roundtable members here:...

Jewish teenagers in Belgium quit their schools because of anti-Semitism by: EJP Updated: 04/Dec/2011 23:56 BRUSSELS (EJP)---Like every Friday, as part of the day school activities, 13-year-old Oceane Sluijzer goes to the sport training center in Neder-Over-Hembeek, a Brussels suburb, where she plays football. There she meets other girls from the same nearby secondary public school. Many of them are from Moroccan origin and Oceane feels sometimes difficult to be integrated and to be treated well. She was in fact excluded from the group because of her look, she is blond, and because she is not of Arab descent, she...

Key US oil supplier may cut off spigot SundayCHRIS KAHN, AP Energy Writer Saturday, January 14, 2012 NEW YORK (AP) — One of the biggest suppliers of oil to the United States may shut off the spigot this weekend, pushing crude and gasoline prices higher for Americans. Nigeria, which supplies 8 percent of U.S. oil imports, could see production halted if striking workers walk off the job Sunday. Workers are demanding the return of a vital government fuel subsidy that has kept gasoline prices low in that impoverished and restive nation of 160 million people. It’s unclear how much of...

The European debt crisis has just gone to an entirely new level. Just when it seemed like things may be stabilizing somewhat, we get news of huge financial bombs being dropped all over Europe. Very shortly after U.S. financial markets closed on Friday, S&P announced credit downgrades for nine European nations. This included both France and Austria losing their cherished AAA credit ratings. When the credit rating of a country gets slashed, that is a signal to investors that they should start demanding higher interest rates when they invest in the debt of that nation. Over the past year it...

In accordance with a tradition that has been in place since 2005, Ramzan Kadyrov rang in 2012 with his estimate of the number of insurgents in Chechnya. Citing numerous operational sources, he stated that there are only 50 or fewer militants left in the republic. Kadyrov asserted that members of the illegal armed underground who recently surrendered had confirmed this information (www.rg.ru, January 3). However, Kadyrov did not elaborate on how a low ranking militant could have known how many rebels there were left scattered across Chechnya. It is unlikely that even Chechen rebel commanders of the highest rank know...

What kind of country would France be if it abandoned its 35-hour work week (it actually kills jobs), set up an affirmative action program for its Muslim immigrants (featuring a zero-tolerance framework for their assimilation), and scaled back its ambitions for Europe as a global political force to more attainable goals?    Answer: An imaginary one. There are no signs of it happening. Roughly 100 days before voting in an elimination round April 22, and then in a final ballot on May 6, the French presidential election campaign so far involves back and forth on possible variations in French comfort...

New information reveals that more women across the United States and Europe are being murdered for the sake of preserving religious family honor. The Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organization revealed last month that 2,823 incidents of “honor” based violence were reported to police across the U.K. last year. The numbers reflect only 39 of the 52 police stations that responded from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Nine police stations also offered data from the previous year, which revealed a 57 percent increase in honor-based violence from 2009 to 2010.

Interview Series: Frits Bolkestein, former EU commissioner: "People defer to numbers. There are hundreds of millions of Arabs and less than eight million Israelis...then there is the oil issue". And four more reasons for anti-Israel bias. From 1999-2004, Frits Bolkestein was the European Union’s commissioner responsible for the internal market, taxation, and customs union. Before that, he had been the Dutch Defense Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, VVD. In 2005, he became a professor – of the intellectual background to political developments – at both Leiden University and the Technical University of Delft. Bolkestein observes: “The Israeli ‘file’...

Flying to and from Europe just became more expensive thanks to the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The ETS was instituted in January 2005, in an attempt to control greenhouse gas emissions, specifically carbon dioxide. Initially the scheme applied to power-generating facilities, oil refineries, steelworks, and other heavy industry in Europe. Now, as of the first of the year, the regulations have reached the airline industry, including aircraft based in the United States. Flights to and from Europe account for a third of all global air travel, thus this plan is the widest-reaching measure ever imposed by any country,...

The normally Republican-phobic continent is taking a surprising shine to the lead GOP candidate, which it sees as a champion against the fringe   Mitt Romney, the GOP forerunner, met with fanfare on his recent travel to Europe.  The presidential primaries look a little different from across the Atlantic, and not necessarily in the way that you'd expect. The coverage isn't an Obama love-fest as it was early in his presidency, nor is it entirely GOP-bashing. That said, mainstream Europe -- whose open antagonism toward the Republican party appears to have faded somewhat since the Bush years ended, despite an...

October 10, 732 AD marks the conclusion of the Battle of Tours, arguably one of the most decisive battles in all of history. A Moslem army, in a crusading search for land and the end of Christianity, after the conquest of Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, began to invade Western Europe under the leadership of Abd-er Rahman, governor of Spain. Abd-er Rahman led an infantry of 60,000 to 400,000 soldiers across the Western Pyrenees and toward the Loire River, but they were met just outside the city of Tours by Charles Martel, known as the Hammer, and the Frankish Army.

http://www.latma.co.il/elatmatv.aspx

One great way to start a bar fight during an American Economic Association conference is to claim that the U.S. economy is preferable to Europe’s. Someone will undoubtedly start quarreling about how G.D.P. per capita doesn’t measure a person’s happiness. Someone else may point out that if you look at income inequality and entitlements, the average European is doing much better. But G.D.P. per capita (an insufficient indicator, but one most economists use) in the U.S. is nearly 50 percent higher than it is in Europe. ... A reporter in Greece once complained after I compared her country to Mississippi,...

Look Out Below – The Nightmarish Decline Of The Euro Has BegunJanuary 6, 2012 The euro is a dying currency. On Thursday, the EUR/USD fell below 1.28 for the first time since September 2010. In fact, as I write this the EUR/USD is sitting at 1.2791. Back in July, the EUR/USD was over 1.45. But this is just the beginning. The euro is going to go a lot lower. At this point, there are several major European nations that are on the verge of default, the European financial system is overflowing with debt and toxic assets, and most major European...

The European Debt Crisis: Still A Major Problem With Global Implications Comstock Partners Jan. 6, 2012, 4:43 AM |The European debt crisis has not gone away. Concern about Euro debt has ebbed and flowed in the markets for the last two years, but is still far from a solution. Periodically, various high-level meetings and resulting announcements of vague outlines of plans have led to quiet periods, only to re-emerge again when something happens that indicates that not much has really been accomplished, and that there are still serious problems ahead. The latest eruption of worry burst forth as Unicredit, Italy's...

Revealed: The priest who changed the course of history ... by rescuing a drowning four-year-old Hitler from death in an icy river * Future Fuhrer was plucked from certain death by boy who grew up to join the church * German newspaper from 1894 reveals incident It may be the most devastating act of mercy in history. A newspaper report chronicling how a boy of four was saved from drowning has surfaced in a German archive. The child – who historians believe could have been Adolf Hitler – was plucked from the icy waters of the River Inn in Passau,...

The Daily Mail stirs up some Euro anxiety with a headline today "Is a super-volcano just 390 miles from London about to erupt?" The story talks about the little known Laacher See volcano in northwestern Germany. It last erupted about 12,000 years ago and the Daily Mail believes it is due to erupt again. It is not considered extinct, merely inactive. An eruption of the Laacher See volcano would destroy much of Europe as we know it. London is 390 miles away. The German capital of Bonn is about 25 miles away. The potential eruption of the Laacher See volcano...

The last half of 2011 was dominated by ever more grim news from Europe. But will 2012 be the same? The eurozone sovereign debt crisis has escalated, but recent moves by the European Central Bank have calmed that angst for now. However, analysts have waxed skeptical that these measures will be enough to keep that optimism going for long, and are unconvinced that EU leaders' current plans for fiscal consolidation and a firewall against contagion go far enough towards addressing the crisis. We combed research reports from the street and put together a compendium of predictions from Wall Street's major...

A sleeping super-volcano in Germany is showing worrying signs of waking up. It's lurking just 390 miles away underneath the tranquil Laacher See lake near Bonn and is capable of ejecting billions of tons of magma. This monster erupts every 10 to 12,000 years and last went off 12,900 years ago. ... Volcanologists believe that the Laacher See volcano is still active as carbon dioxide is bubbling up to the lake’s surface, which indicates that the magma chamber below is 'degassing'.

Ancient DNA Reveals Lack Of Continuity Between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers And Contemporary Scandinavians September 24, 2009. Summary The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century [1] , [2] and [3] . Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible [3] , [4] and [5] . Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture [6]. Intriguingly, these late hunter-gatherers existed in parallel to early...

Grim Economic Prospects For 2012, U.S. Fed To Overshadow The European Banking System Economics / Global Debt Crisis 2012 Jan 01, 2012 - 11:06 AM By: Bob Chapman Public institutions worldwide are fighting ratings downgrades foremost of which is France, the US and, of course, sovereigns and banks worldwide. Miracles of miracles finally the rating agencies are doing their jobs. The caper they pulled in collusion with Wall Street in rating mortgage securities should have put them all in jail for life. We’ll call these efforts makeup time for their previous sins, which they never were prosecuted for. The complaint...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned on Saturday that the country's future hung in the balance in 2012 amid the eurozone debt crisis but said ratings agencies would not decide French policy. "France's destiny could once again be tipped" in 2012, Sarkozy said in a televised New Year's address. "Emerging from the crisis, building a new model for growth, giving birth to a new Europe -- these are some of the challenges that await us." "This crisis... probably the most serious since World War II, this crisis is not over," Sarkozy said. "Yet there are reasons for hope... We must, we...

This Ancient, Deadly Disease Is Still Killing In Europe John Donnelly, GlobalPost Dec. 30, 2011, 12:53 PM GENEVA, Switzerland – On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization’s headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world. Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – the highest rate in the world ever recorded for...

Estonia is the euro's newest member and also has the eurozone's fastest growing economyMost European leaders would be delighted if their economy was growing as fast as Estonia's.The small Baltic state's economy is forecast to have grown by 8% during 2011, according to the EU's official statistics body. That's more than five times faster growth than the European Union as a whole. But Estonia is still regaining the ground it lost during a financial crisis that struck it and its Baltic neighbours in 2008-9, when a property bubble burst spectacularly, causing the economy to shrink and unemployment to rocket to...

The Thinly-Veiled Fed Bailout Of Europe Phil's Stock World Dec. 30, 2011, 5:45 AM The ECB is borrowing U.S. Dollars from the Fed to bailout European banks. And that is in addition to the Long Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO). However, the "borrowing" is not called "borrowing." It's called a "temporary U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangement." Yet it is really borrowing because it's going massively in one direction for the purpose of giving the ECB Dollars to lend to European banks, so the ECB can avoid lending more Euros. The ECB doesn't want to tarnish its "inflation fighting" reputation and further...

Several dozen young men are basking in the warm mid-day sun. They are Afghan and Pakistani. Behind them, on a white wall, is graffiti extolling the glories of the UÇK -- ex-Kosovo Albanian guerilla fighters.Over the past two years, the Macedonian village of Lojane, which borders Serbia, has become a stop-over on the illegal migration routes to Western Europe. “It started when groups of three or four would arrive periodically. It didn’t disturb us at first,” says Selam Mehmeti, the head of the village community. “But since this summer, it’s grown to a whole other dimension: there were 500 in...

Nearly 10 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to "Old Europe." How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us "old" when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration! Yet the more things change in Europe, the more they stay the same. The island of Britain usually is, and is not, a part of Europe -- carefully pulling out when things heat up, terrified that it will be pulled back in when things boil over....

First it was Zero Hedge. Then Ron Paul joined in. Now it is the turn of a former Dallas Fed Vice President, Gerald ODriscoll, to outright accuse the Fed of bailing out Europe courtesy of "incomprehensible" currency swaps, and implicitly accusing Bernanke of lying that he would not bail out Europe even as he has done precisely that. And not only that: by cutting the USD swap spread from OIS+100 to OIS+50, the Fed has made sure it gets paid less than ever for extended Europe the courtesy of bailing it out all over again. Incidentally, O'Driscoll says, "America's central...

A number of economists believe the U.S. debt burden, budget problems, recession and lack of growth will soon be the same as those now facing many EU nations. This would mean that America has begun to enter a period of economic stagnation that will last for years. No prediction could be further from the truth. The difference between the U.S. and every country in Europe — and the EU as a whole — is that America has a much broader array of resources. These include natural resources, intellectual property created by research and development, an activist central bank and a...