Merkel, Sarkozy propose eurozone government back in January the wording was different? hmmmmm

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bilderberg
Excerpt:
Lord Victor Rothschild and Laurance Rockefeller hand picked 100 of the world's elite with the purpose of "regionalizing Europe", according to Giovanni Agnelli, head of the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Fiat), the 6th largest car maker in the world and the largest car maker in Italy:

"European integration is our goal and where the politicians have failed, we industrialists hope to succeed."

http://themoscownews.com/business/20110815/188927165.html
Excerpt:

BUSINESS

EU bond plan recalls Ponzi

by Mark Gay at 15/08/2011 20:08

French and German leaders meet on Tuesday to try to save the euro. Several countries want the European Union to issue its own bonds, including Italy and Britain.
Russia, China and Japan are trade partners and already hold euros as part of their foreign reserves. But why should they invest in a single European treasury?
Some governments, like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, already have a bad credit score and there are doubts about the credibility of others, like France, Belgium, Italy and Spain. They already spend more than they earn from tax revenues.
Asset values remain dangerously out of kilter. While the economy teeters, European politicians have asked the principal investors in the banks which lent to governments to take a loss of only 10 to 20 percent.
By sheltering bondholders, politicians hope to keep their creditors sweet. But they ignore the real collapse in asset values, which in some cases reaches 70 to 80 percent. This means any new lender is being asked to extend credit against wildly overvalued assets.
Economic growth, which could restore asset values, is slowing. Like a Ponzi scheme, Europe’s politicians are trying to pay off the initial investors in the euro project at the expense of latecomers.

http://news.yahoo.com/merkel-sarkozy-propose-eurozone-government-162137481.html
Excerpt:

Merkel, Sarkozy propose eurozone government

AP – 13 mins ago

• 

• France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, right, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel gesture …
• France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, welcomes German Chancellor Angela Merkel …

PARIS (AP) — All countries that use the euro should have mandatory balanced budgets and better coordination of economic policy, the leaders of France and Germany said Tuesday, pushing for long-term political solutions instead of immediate financial measures like a single European bond.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also pledged to harmonize their countries' corporate taxes in a move aimed at showing the eurozone's largest members are "marching in lockstep" to protect the euro.

Both leaders stressed their commitment to defending the common currency, a cornerstone of integration on this long-fractured continent. They presented their proposals after meeting Tuesday in Paris amid signs of economic slowdown, and after an exceptionally turbulent week on financial markets prompted by concern about Europe's financial health.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100073283/eurocrats-demand-a-single-european-bond-market/
Excerpt:

Eurocrats demand a single European bond market

By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: January 24th, 2011
106 Comments Comment on this article

Anyone who thinks that I exaggerate the power-hunger of the Brussels nomenklatura should watch the above clip. The leader of the Euro-liberals, Guy Verhofstadt, is roundly applauded as he calls for “real economic governance”, “a real economic and fiscal union” and “one European bond market”.
This last idea has been enthusiastically taken up by our own Lib Dems – and (hat-tip, Left Foot Forward) by elements of Labour.
See, once again, how, whatever the question, the answer is always More Europe. EMU succeeding? More Europe! EMU in crisis? More Europe! EMU just bumbling along? More Europe! Revolution in Tunisia? More Europe! Overcast day in Eindhoven? More Europe!
And they call us obsessives!

Tags: ambitions démesurées des Eurocrates fous, economic union, EU taxation, Euro Bond Market, fiscal union, Guy Verhofstadt


Merkel and Sarkozy steal the limelight at Hungary's EU Energy summit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz6apGx9ty0

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bank_for_International_Settlements
Excerpt:
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is an "international organisation which fosters international monetary and financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks. ... The BIS commenced its activities in Basel on May 17, 1930, and is thus the world's oldest international financial organisation."[1]
"The BIS emerged from the Young Committee set up in 1929, which was created to handle the settlements of German reparations payments outlined in the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The Committee was headed by Owen D. Young, President and CEO of General Electric, co-author of the 1924 Dawes Plan, member of the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation and was Deputy Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As the main American delegate to the conference on German reparations, he was also accompanied by J.P. Morgan, Jr.[1] What emerged was the Young Plan for German reparations payments." [2]

http://www.bis.org/review/r061214g.pdf

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/77da5df0-eae5-11dd-bb6e-0000779fd2ac.html#axzz1VDOjY7D6 (I put most all of this link as it disappeared the second time I went in to copy and paste)  ...cal
Excerpt:

The benefits of a single European bond

By Wolfgang Münchau

Published: January 25 2009 18:21 | Last updated: January 25 2009 18:21

The rise in European bond spreads has triggered a discussion among finance ministers about the wisdom of a joint issuance of a single European bond. It is a bad pretext for a good idea. It is difficult to see how a common bond issuance would solve the acute problem of a hypothetical payment default of a member state of the eurozone. But it is a good idea nevertheless. A common eurozone market for government debt would be a powerful rival to the US Treasury market and it could bring substantial financial and economic benefits.
The idea was predictably knocked down by the German finance minister, who quickly calculated that a joint European bond would cost Germany extra annual funding costs of €3bn ($3.9bn, £2.8bn) a year. I do not know how he arrived at the figure because the actual cost depends greatly on how such a common bond would be constructed. In any case, if Germany was a loser, there would be a simple solution to the problem: let every loser be compensated by the winners. The financial and potentially economic benefits would be larger than the compensation.
When the Europeans created monetary union in the 1990s, the resulting short-term interest rate was not an arithmetic average. Instead, it converged towards the lowest interest rates among its members. So what would happen if you merged Germany’s triple A bonds with the lower rated bonds of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain? Would you get an average? Would it converge to Germany’s triple A rating, or towards Greece’s A-minus? To answer that, the European Primary Dealers Association (EPDA) has conducted a survey among dealers and produced a discussion paper to evaluate a number of competing options. Indeed, it turns out that simply merging everybody’s old and new debt into a single eurozone bond without any further supporting arrangements might not be the best answer.
But there are several alternatives. You could create a fund that guaranteed the coupon payments. Member states would pay into this fund according to some agreed criteria. The success of such an arrangement would obviously depend on its credibility among investors.
Mark Austen, managing director of the EPDA, says a simpler alternative would be a system that provided automatic caps on participation. Those caps could be determined on the basis of credit ratings, or on the ratio of debt to gross domestic product.
Yet another option is to keep the traditional bond market national, while creating a joint European market for treasury bills only. A bond is a long-term finance instrument with a fixed coupon, paid in regular intervals. A bill, by contrast, has a much shorter duration, normally a year, or less, and it is a discounted security. This means you buy a bill at a discounted price and it is repaid at par value on expiry.
The treasury bill market is huge in the US, much larger than in the eurozone, which is more reliant on traditional bonds. But the creation of a common bills market could be a good start. It is not nearly as controversial politically and European governments may even start to shift from bonds into bills over time. Once this experiment is deemed to have worked, you could merge the bond markets in a second step.
Any substantial move towards joint issuance would produce a government bond market that is large and more liquid and thus more likely to attract foreign investors. It would also provide better hedging opportunities. At present, the Bund future is considered an efficient contract as the gap between buying and selling prices is very low. But the Bund future is no great hedging instrument if you hold, say, Greek debt. With common issuance, you would have large, liquid markets for European bonds and also efficient European bond futures.
Richard Portes, professor of economics at the London Business School, makes the point that the eurozone already has a single and highly efficient corporate bond market, which benefited greatly from increased liquidity. His research has shown that comparable corporate bond spreads fell to levels below prevailing rates in the US.
There is no reason why that performance could not be matched in the market for sovereign debt. Largely because of the role of the dollar as a global reserve currency and the quasi-monopoly of the US treasury market, the US enjoys what economists pompously call the exorbitant privilege, essentially the ability to get something for nothing. In the case of the US, there is some research evidence that large demand for US treasuries from foreign investors has driven down bond yields. If the eurozone created an equally efficient bond market, there is no reason to think it would not share some of this exorbitant privilege.
What about the Maastricht Treaty’s no bail-out clause? Would joint issuance not constitute an infringement of that rule? The answer is no. You can still have joint issuance, but divided liabilities. There are already plenty of examples, such as joint issuance of local government bonds in Japan and Scandinavia or joint issuance of the German regions.
We should remember, however, that common issuance cannot be a quick fix for rising spreads. This is why the timing of this debate is unfortunate. No scheme, however clever, will change the necessity for Greece, Portugal and Spain to undertake economic reforms.