Iceland Voters Reject Bank Bailouts in Crushing Electoral Defeat; Neo-Liberalism In Context

"Voters rejected the bill because ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, are being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers."

"Is there any reason why the American people should be taxed to guarantee the debts of banks, any more than they should be taxed to guarantee the debts of other institutions, including merchants, the industries, and the mills of the country?" Senator Carter Glass (D-Va), author of the Banking Act of 1933 and of Glass-Steagall

It is interesting that the government of Iceland had already declared the vote of the people as 'obsolete.' One has to wonder when the voters will declare their current government and their representatives as obsolete. One would give the government credit for at least allowing a vote on a referendum, but to then disregard and circumvent it through political devices is seems like a base hypocrisy.

Iceland is a victim of the neo-liberal economic deregulation of the 1990's, in which a few bankers can buy the government, and rack up enormous profits for themselves in Ponzi like leverage, and then attempt to socialize the debt back to the people when their schemes collapse.

Neo-Liberalism is a system of economic thought embracing the efficient markets hypothesis, the inherent good of deregulation and the natural impediment of government regulation, the necessity of free trade and globalization, the supremacy of the corporation over the individual person in the social economy, and supply side economics. It most likely favors a one world currency and consolidation of production into large corporate combinations or 'trusts' under the principle of laissez-faire.

Neo-liberalism may degenerate into crony capitalism, or even corporatism, as its theoretical idealism of perfect rationalism and virtue falters against the reality of human behaviour. In times of financial crisis, for example, neo-liberalism ironically turns to centralized economic planning by allegedly private banks which appropriate public funds and the power of the monetary license to socialize private debts, and, in a strikingly Orwellian twist, eviscerate the discipline of the markets and the individual to preserve their freedom, and the well being of the private corporations. Although now largely repudiated, neo-liberalism has strong roots in the public consciousness, and its adherents hold considerable power in Western governments and among the 'freshwater school' of American economics.

What makes neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism 'neo' or new is their attitude towards the relationship of the individual to the state. Both tend to denigrate and diminish the condition and rights of the inividual as compared to the consideration of the corporate system or the centralized command state.

In the States, the Congress and the President have just ignored the massive protests against their own bank bailouts. The US was able to cloak its own debt assumptions through accounting frauds, claiming that the bailouts were repaid by the banks. The bailouts are wrapped in AIG, Fannie and Freddie, and the Federal Reserve. This is the advantage of owning the currency, the IMF and ratings agencies. And of course your media.

Although Europeans and the markets are looking at the 'PIGS' for the next serious default as the economic hitmen are moving from Iceland to Greece, the real test of globalization in financial markets and the dominant control of the private banks will come in the UK, a sovereign people too proud and strong to go down into feudal servitude and the rule of tyrants easily. Or at least one would hope.

The Relationship of the Condition and Rights of the Individual to the Organized State




Bloomberg
Iceland Rejects Icesave Depositors Bill in Referendum
By Omar R. Valdimarsso

March 7 (Bloomberg) -- Icelanders rejected by a massive majority a bill that would saddle each citizen with $16,400 of debt in protest at U.K. and Dutch demands that they cover losses triggered by the failure of a private bank.

Ninety-three percent voted against the so-called Icesave bill, according to preliminary results on national broadcaster RUV. Final results will be published today.

The bill would have obliged the island to take on $5.3 billion, or 45 percent of last year’s economic output, in loans from the U.K. and the Netherlands to compensate the two countries for depositor losses stemming from the collapse of Landsbanki Islands hf more than a year ago. The island’s political leaders say they’ve already moved on to talks over a new accord.

“The government’s survival doesn’t rest with this Icesave vote,” Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir told RUV after the preliminary count was announced. “The government coalition remains solid,” Finance Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson told RUV.

Failure to reach an agreement on the bill has left Iceland’s International Monetary Fund-led loan in limbo and prompted Fitch Ratings to cut its credit grade to junk. Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s have signaled they may follow suit if no settlement is reached.

‘Obsolete’

Iceland’s leaders are trying to negotiate a new deal with the U.K. and the Dutch that focuses on the interest rate payable on the loan, making the bill in yesterday’s vote “obsolete,” Sigurdardottir said on March 4.

Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager in a statement posted on the Internet last night said he is “disappointed” the agreement hasn’t yet come into effect. The U.K. was “obviously disappointed,” while “not surprised,” said a Treasury official who declined to be identified in line with departmental policy.

Iceland’s government pointed to “steady progress toward a settlement” in the past three weeks in a statement.

“The British and Dutch Governments have indicated a willingness to accept a solution that will entail a significantly lower cost for Iceland than that envisaged in the prior agreement,” the statement said.

The U.K. and Netherlands have offered an interest rate of the London Interbank Offered Rate plus 2.75 percentage points, according to the U.K. Treasury official. That’s the same as the rate for the loan from the Nordic countries that the Icelandic Government accepted in July 2009. The new offer also gave relief on the first two years of interest for the loan, amounting to 450 million euros.

‘Ordinary People’

The three governments have declared their intention to continue the talks, the Iceland statement said.

Voters rejected the bill because “ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, are being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers,” said President Olafur R. Grimsson, whose rejection of the bill resulted in the plebiscite, in a Bloomberg Television interview on March 5.

The Icesave deal passed through parliament with a 33 to 30 vote majority. Grimsson blocked it after receiving a petition from a quarter of the population urging him to do so. The government has said it’s determined any new deal must have broader political backing to avoid meeting a similar fate.

Icelanders used the referendum to express their outrage at being asked to take on the obligations of bankers who allowed the island’s financial system to create a debt burden more than 10 times the size of the economy.

Protests

The nation’s three biggest banks, which were placed under state control in October 2008, had enjoyed a decade of market freedoms following the government’s privatizations through the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this decade.

Protesters have gathered every week, with regular numbers swelling to about 2,000, according to police estimates. The last time the island saw demonstrations on a similar scale was before the government of former Prime Minister Geir Haarde was toppled.

Icelanders have thrown red paint over house facades and cars of key employees at the failed banks, Kaupthing Bank hf, Landsbanki and Glitnir Bank hf, to vent their anger. The government has appointed a special commission to investigate financial malpractice and has identified more than 20 cases that will result in prosecution.

Economic Impact

The island’s economy shrank an annual 9.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, the statistics office said on March 5, and contracted 6.5 percent in 2009 as a whole.

Household debt with major credit institutions has doubled in the past five years and reached about 1.8 trillion kronur ($14 billion) in 2009, compared with the island’s $12 billion gross domestic product, according to the central bank.

Icelanders, the world’s fifth-richest per capita as recently as 2007, ended 2009 18 percent poorer and will see their disposable incomes decline a further 10 percent this year, the central bank estimates.

Grimsson, who has described his decision to put the depositor bill to a referendum as the “pinnacle of democracy,” says he’s not concerned about the economic fallout of his decision.

“The referendum has drawn back the curtain and people see on the stage the matter in a new perspective,” he said in an interview. “That has strengthened our position and our cause.”

SnowJob: Revising the Non-Farm Payrolls Report

It appears as though the concerns expressed by the Administration about the snow storms and their impact on lost employment was overdone, if not misplaced. The market is pleasantly surprised with this -36,000 jobs number, since the expectations had been calibrated lower so effectively.

In fairness to the Obama Administration, they are only doing what Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I* had been doing right along with almost every statistic that they have issued. It's called 'perception management.' Greece used one method of accounting management in shaping the numbers, and the US uses its own approach to what is essentially a similar problem.

“Propaganda proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, and the creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes.
The two great routes that propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth.” Jacques Ellul

In addition to the 'better-than-expected' jobs loss announced today for February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also went back and adjusted the employment numbers from April-July 2009.

"With the release of February data on March 5, 2010, BLS has corrected April-July 2009 establishment survey estimates for all employees and women employees for the federal government series. The changes result from corrections to initial counts for Census temporary and intermittent workers for Census 2010."

This adjustment itself was not so great, certainly not as significant as the benchmark revision done in January for the 12+ months preceding.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare the views of the US employment Seasonally Adjusted "headline numbers" presented by the BLS in December 2009, and the current view that they are showing as the true number today after the two recent sets of revisions.



The net result of the revisions is that jobs were added to the beginning and the end of what will be defined as 'the recession.'

This serves to now make the slump look steeper and more severe, and the recovery to be a little sharper, with plenty of jobs leftover to create a 'flat impression' in 2010 at worst.

In short, jobs were removed from almost every month in the revision during the slump, and shoved into the beginning and into the end.

That looks like a nice picture of a recovery, doesn't it? See, the February 2009 stimulus program and the strategy of massive bank bailouts have worked.

I have seen corporate managers who have come into a new position and inherited a mess jigger the numbers in a similar way. You make the slump look as bad as possible, and shove the excess profits or revenue into the beginning and the end of the problem, to make your efforts look as heroically effective as is possible.

Perhaps this is all just the way things turned out, in revising the numbers so as to make them the most accurate.

Or perhaps the US economy and its monetary system are an increasingly untenable Ponzi scheme, the mother of frauds.

Mr. John Williams of ShadowStats, the must read site for commentary on US government statistics, had this this say this morning about Non-Farm Payrolls:

"With an unchanged unemployment rate and a near-consensus payroll number reported this morning (March 5th) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), I certainly misread the nature of Larry Summers’ employment comments, as discussed in yesterday’s Commentary No. 283. Historically, at least with earlier administrations, it has been unusual for individuals in positions such as Mr. Summers’ to offer comments on employment in the week before a pending release, without having a specific political or market-related purpose.

Distortions to economic reporting — in seasonal factors and in other methodologies not designed to handle a protracted and severe economic downturn — appear to be continuing."

I think that Larry Summers did have a definite agenda in his remarks, and said so. My instincts were that Summer's comments were a setup for the stock market bulls, in the spirit of his mentor Robert Rubin, who loves to throw a positive spin to help a market rally through resistance.

The lowball is helping the SP to break out of a trading range, and potentially to help fuel the economic stimulus through monetary and financial asset expansion. All is well. Let's all buy risk assets. Let's see if they can make it stick.

There are no accidents in politics.

Guest Post: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism

"...exposes the mechanism by which one market operator set out to profit from the credit boom, and even more, from the bust...it’s an eye-popping story of vandalism-for-profit."

Richard Smith, a London-based capital markets information technology manager, was kind enough to provide an advance copy of his review for the book ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism by Yves Smith, the author of the well-known financial blog Naked Capitalism.

Mr. Smith (real name, and no relation to Yves) helped in the proofing of the copy and fact searches, so he was already well familiar with the text. Perhaps this makes him a not entirely dispassionate source, given the regard that even copy editors can obtain for their associated works. But I thought it was a very nice summary of many of the salient points, and that you would enjoy having the opportunity to read it.

I intend to read the book in order to both learn something, and to be entertained as well. I love reading accounts of this period of time that are both authoritative and well-written, and understandable by the non-expert. Given the author's performance on her blog, and her detailed industry knowledge and experience, it looks to be a 'must read' for those following the financial crisis and its associated developments.


Reading ECONned
By Richard Smith

The Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 (no-one’s settled on a name yet; we are still too close to the action, and that end date might still need some discreet pushes to the right) has naturally set off a book publishing frenzy. With the first wave of instant histories now spent (the startlingly fast-out-of-the-blocks chronicle “Bailout Nation”, the elephantine “Too Big To Fail” etc, etc), we are now getting a second wave of books, whose authors have had time to dig deeper and reflect more on how we got into this mess. Yves Smith’s offering is the first integrated account of the root causes of the financial crisis, and a compelling one.

For Smith, it turns out to be a matter of bad economic theory, self-serving ideology, and, under cover, plain old rapacity. The author gives us a brisk historical sweep through what sounds like deeply unpromising, but, as it turns out, surprisingly engaging terrain: post- war economic theory, the evolution of the financial services industry and its regulation since the 1970s, modern financial instruments, and the Crisis itself. It’s been a long time a-comin’, this Crisis. It all culminates in a whodunit account of the mechanisms that brought the crisis to its acute phase; an account that respects the complexities, yet grips like a vice. But first of all, it’s about the way a single phrase, “free markets”, was turned into a justification for profoundly destructive behaviour.

Yves Smith (got it yet?) points out that there was always more to Adam Smith’s account of the free market than its modern reduction allows:

“Smith also pointed out that self-interested actions frequently led to injustice or even ruin. He fiercely criticized both how employers colluded with each other to keep wages low, as well as the “savage injustice” that European mercantilist interests had “commit[ted] with impunity” in colonies in Asia and the Americas.”

Yves shows us that little has changed since Adam’s day (last chance!). Running through the book, we will find ever more glaring contrasts between the official slogans: “invisible hand”, “free market” and so on, and what is really going on: scams, rip-offs, increasingly brazen looting. This is sanctioned, in an unwelcome display of bipartisanship, by intellectually bankrupt and venal politicians of all hues.

Chapter 1 is a sort of prelude, a first salvo at officially sanctioned economic theory, highlighting the absurd complacency of mainstream economists’ happy talk in the run up to the Crisis, pointing to just a few of the not insignificant number of people who saw the train coming down the tracks; and giving the lie, of course, to all those claims that its arrival was unpredictable. Officialdom does not get off lightly either: deserved prominence is given to some worthless good cheer emanating circa 2006 from the glossy but clueless Timothy Geithner, then Chairman of the New York Fed, and now, God help us all, US Treasury Secretary. As British Prime Minister Disraeli remarked of another talentless office-holder from an earlier era, “If a traveller were informed that such a man was the leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect.”

Next we are into the meat of the economic theory (Chapters 2-4). Smith briskly takes a sledgehammer to any number of plaster saints cluttering up the edifice of modern economics:

“assumptions that are patently ridiculous: that individuals are rational and utility-maximizing (which has become such a slippery notion as to be meaningless), that buyers and sellers have perfect information, that there are no transaction costs, that capital flows freely”

And then…papers with cooked figures, economists oblivious to speculative factors driving oil prices, travesty versions of Keynes’s ideas that airbrush out its most characteristic features in the name of mathematical tractability.

And then…any number of grand-sounding theoretical constructs: the Arrow-Debreu theorem, the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model, the Black-Scholes option model, Value at Risk, CAPM, the Gaussian copula, that only work under blatantly unrealistic assumptions that go by high falutin’ names – equilibrium, ergodicity, and so on.

The outcome of this pseudo-scientific botching is an imposing corpus of pretentious quackery that somehow elevates unregulated “free markets” into the sole mechanism for distribution of the spoils of economic activity. We are supposed to believe that by some alchemical process, maximum indulgence of human greed results in maximum prosperity for all. That’s unfair to alchemy: compared with the threadbare scientific underpinnings of this economic dogma, alchemy is a model of rigor. One skeptical insider:

“The result of all this is that we now understand almost less of how actual markets work than did Adam Smith…”

The disdain for actually checking the predictions is disastrous. One skeptic quoted by Smith:

“even though every organ of 1960’s-era orthodoxy is mortally wounded, the entire body strides vigorously forward. That is a prime reason why, despite the labors of so many clever and right-thinking economic theorists, we are in this mess.”

Smith’s coup de grace is the human factor, something else from which economists mostly avert their eyes:

“If people will be foolish, lazy, or cheat, the certainty, the scientific mantle is nothing but the emperor’s new clothes.”

Hitch the spurious certainty that the “free market” defined in its most extreme form knows best, first to the neo-liberal creed (Chapter 4), and then to policy recommendations (this cozying up of economists and politicians is covered in Chapter 5), and you have a prescription for officially sanctioned thievery on an epic scale.

And lo, that is exactly what happened. If Chapters 1 to 5 give us the theory, 6 to 9 give us the practice.

If for some reason you thought the Crisis was anything brand new, Smith has some vivid older examples of the folly, laziness and cheating of modern financial markets. Unfortunately the long-term lessons to be learned from these episodes seem to have accrued to investment banks – they cover their tracks a little better, these days; and they know that the more you stick to unregulated business, the less likely it is that you will have to answer charges in court.

Of course, the failure to rein in abuses years ago set the stage for the Crisis. Over at Morgan Stanley in 1994 they were busy stitching up Mexican banks with swaps that would blow up in the banks’ faces if the peso declined 20%. Smith quotes Partnoy’s account:

“The banks were already at their legal borrowing limits, but the Cetes swaps permitted them to evade these rules by entering into deals that were the economic equivalent but did not have to be disclosed to regulators or the public at large…Once the banks were bloated and could not eat another bite, it would be easy to bat them down. Then, at the appropriate moment one little nudge would cause the entire obese Mexican banking system to topple like Humpty Dumpty.”

The swaps duly blew up and crippled the banks. There was nothing “illegal” about any of this. It is of course instructive to contrast the pious predictions of the rickety theoretical framework delineated in Chapters 1-5 with the dreary reality of this Mexico episode. Oh, and draw a parallel between the modus operandi of MS in 1994 and the current Greek debt crisis, with particular attention to the role of Goldman Sachs. There is nothing new under the sun.

In the balance of Chapter 6, Smith sets out the relationship between deregulation, structural change in the financial services industry, and an accelerating trend towards MS-style predatory behaviour. By 2000 or so, we are in our modern world: investment banking partnerships, relationship banking, and Glass-Steagall are out; publicly quoted investment banks, one-off deal-driven business, and combined commercial banking and investment banking are in; and the unregulated OTC markets are growing ever larger.

Unfortunately, as Chapter 7 shows us, this new structure has one huge perverse incentive built into it, encapsulated here in a paper of Akerlof and Schiller from 1994:

“Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.”

This is “looting”. Survey the wreckage of Bear Stearns, Lehman, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, and the large-scale taxpayer support still flowing into the near wrecks of BoA/ML and Citigroup. Then consider the massive level of bonus payments to the management and employees of those firms prior to their demise. That was looting. And in early 2010, of course, with the support of the taxpayer more or less formalized for large firms, the surviving firms have the opportunity to carry out still more looting. And as they have witnessed, as a strategy, it works really well, for them. Expect more looting.

Preparing the grand finale of Chapter 9, Chapter 8 moves another piece of the puzzle into place; that piece is asset booms, and the risk it leads to. The mechanism is simple enough – secured lending against assets that have had a speculative price boom looks like great business, to the simple-minded, while prices are on the way up – more and more credit is available, which funds more and more asset purchases. But of course there is an inevitable day of reckoning when an asset price bust, triggered by some shock or other, exposes the no-longer-secured debts. Well we all know that, from countless historical examples. As you might also expect by now, traditional neoclassical economics has nothing whatever to say about such lethal feedback loops. The boom was boosted, Smith suggests, by international capital flows (still controversial, that) and by the notorious Greenspan Put (pretty much conventional wisdom now, judging by the destination of the recent Dynamite Prize award).

And now we are ready for Chapter 9, where all the malign forces described in the rest of the book converge into one mighty foul-up. Exhibit One is the Shadow Banking System, whose components are: securitization, whereby loans turn into assets; repos, whereby assets are used as security for loans (note that we are now into the dangerous territory sketched out in Chapter 8); and finally, Credit Default Swaps, which guarantee the quality of the loans underlying the assets, and thus the resilience of the repo market; and everything in the garden is lovely. There are still other elements of the shadow banking system: the notorious conduits (a zoo of abbreviations: SPEs, OBS vehicles, SIVs, CDOs); the money market funds. These are all just thinly capitalized banks, totally dependent on capital markets to fund their activities.

But it’s really the description of mid-Noughties repo that made the light bulbs go on for me. Via the repo market, real banks came to resemble shadow banks, more and more; and their fortunes became intertwined; which was very dangerous. In the good old days, repos were a respectable mechanism for managing liquidity by securing lending against high class assets – Treasuries; the highest quality assets of all. But various new myths meant that there was a ready way to satisfy the massive demand for short term funding driven by the rise of hedge funds and OTC derivative trading during the Noughties.

Myth 1: the false security of the Credit Default Swap, which simply substituted the creditworthiness of the swap seller for the creditworthiness of the debt issuer; myth 2: the credit rating bought from agencies by the debt peddlers; myth 3: the “haircut”, propagated by the Basel II regulations, by which all manner of securities could be deemed suitable collateral for repos, subject only to a finger in the air discount, the ‘haircut’.

The BIS (originators of Basel II) cleared its throat discreetly in 2001, warning that a collateral shortage would cause

“appreciable substitution into collateral having relatively higher issuer and liquidity risk.”

…but no-one was listening. Estimates are hard to come by, but the claim that the Shadow Banking System was just as big as the regulated one by 2006 seems plausible: that’s $10 Trillion in old fashioned deposit based banking and the same again in Shadow Banking. But note: you would have to put pretty wide error bars on that number; the whole Shadow Banking System was unregulated, quite invisible to outsiders.

Its fragile structure did catch the eye of the looters, though. Chapter 9 exposes the mechanism by which one market operator set out to profit from the credit boom, and even more, from the bust. I’m afraid you will have to buy your own copy of the book to get the full details. Suffice it to say that it’s an eye-popping story of vandalism-for-profit, with elements wholly familiar from earlier chapters: it’s the Mexico story and others, all over again; but lots bigger. The lazy or hurried may prefer Appendix 2 as a short form summary, but it’s worth reading Chapter 9 to get the full flavour.

It is illuminating indeed to see the events of September ’08 and after as a near-cataclysmic run not so much on traditional banks as on the shadow banking system, as the Credit Default Swaps turned out to have been written by companies that couldn’t honor their promises, the loans turned out to be of dreadful quality, panicked investors pulled their money from the repo market, and there was a monstrous loss of liquid funding, with the undercapitalization of the banks hideously exposed.

Repo is at the very core of the near-collapse of the financial system. It is very striking that there have been few efforts to reregulate repo – of course, the low quality repo market packed up altogether during the crash, so maybe it’s completely invisible again to those bind and amnesiac powers that be. Partly, this sudden disappearance was the result of a buyers’ strike (still seemingly in force at the end of February 2010 – “fool me once”, they must be thinking out there); partly, though, the result of the Fed’s frantic efforts to plug the huge funding gap that had suddenly (and one suspects wholly unexpectedly) appeared. Yes, well, that’s the sort of nasty surprise you get when you don’t exercise oversight. Will the whole precarious mechanism all come back again when the Fed’s programs are finally terminated and the yield curve slope is no longer such an obliging source of riskless profit? One hopes not, but fears it will be so.

We know the immediate consequences of the Crisis; by the miracle of doublethink, the most vocal free market advocates suddenly endorsed epic government intervention, in the name of…ahem…free markets. After the nerve tingling highlights of Chapter 9, the most sobering part of the book is Chapter 10, in which the dismal prospects for reform are discussed. Yves had this part written up, as I recall, by September of last year. With the bonus mill now in full swing again, significant actors in the run-up to the catastrophe still firmly ensconced, bank lobbyists all over Congress, and timid reform proposals further diluted or derailed, it is pretty hard to demur from the author’s prescient gloom of six months ago.

For those with a little fire in their bellies, ECONned ought to be a trigger for whatever form of protest is countenanced by their politics. Go on, have a read: and then, do what you can to help put a stop to some very dangerous nonsense, before it’s too late.

Disclosure: The reviewer was a collaborator of the author; he’s read successive versions of some chapters half a dozen times in the last six months, and is not only alive to tell the tale, but remarkably, continued to enjoy perusing the successively tweaked versions. So, be advised – this may not be an entirely impartial review.

Russia Continues to Build Its Gold Reserves Ahead of the SDR Discussions

Thanks to Dave at Golden Truth for this updated chart.



As you know, Russia, India, China and some of the BRIC-like countries will continue to push hard for a gold and silver content in the new formulation of the SDR this year. The US and UK are vehemently opposed.

Europe is still wallowing in confusion and is virtually leaderless, as the most recent financial crisis in Greece shows. This may not be all bad, because it highlights the weaknesses in their union, and gives them the incentive to take it to the next step.

One cannot have a common currency with uncommon fiscal policies and laws. While there is some room for discretion, it is sorely tried in changing economic conditions and social attitudes. America went through a bloody Civil War for this reason.

This is why a one world currency, except for international trade only and at the discretion of trading partners, is so dangerous. One cannot maintain their sovereign freedom when someone else controls the supply of their money: either you cheat or you submit. All serious economists understand this; too few of the voting public do.

What Will the World Currency Become? The Stakes Are Enormous

And the Winner Is...the SDR?

This is the fallacy of the US dollar as the reserve currency for the world. It 'worked' as even Mr. Greenspan noted, as long as the US dollar was able to demonstrate the objective stability of an external gold standard relative to other currencies. That lasted for a few years, and the rest is foreign policy and currency wars. The time for its replacement is long past. The BRIC's understand this, and are playing their hands accordingly.

If one submits to a single world or regional currency for domestic use, they may as well take their constitutions and individual rights and throw them away. And globalization has been serving as a proxy for this, paving the way.

Gold and Economic Freedom: Did Greenspan Know What He Was Doing? - ZeroHedge

The moves here are slow and subtle, since great nations are involved. I get the impression, though, that most traders are playing checkers at a chess match. Well, that works for the daytrade. But only time will tell what will happen, and when. But sometimes events can break free and move quickly. Best to gather those nickles off the freeway before the rush hour commences.

Or as the man behind the .50 cal would say, 'Git some. Come git some.'