17 Quotes About The Coming Global Financial Collapse That Will Make Your Hair Stand Up ...

Is the world on the verge of another massive global financial collapse?  Yes.  The western world is drowning in an ocean of debt unlike anything the world has ever seen before, and our financial markets are gigantic casinos that are dependent on huge mountains of risk and leverage remaining very stable.  In the end, this house of cards that has been built on a foundation of sand is going to come crashing down in a horrifying manner.  Usually in this column I go on and on about why things will soon get much worse.  But today I am going to take a bit of a break.  Today, I am going to let some of the top financial professionals in the world tell you why things will soon get much worse.  Many of the quotes that you are about to read just might make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.  Most people out there have no idea what is about to happen.  Most people out there are working hard and are busy preparing for the holidays and they are hopeful that the economy will turn around soon.  But that is not going to happen.  We are heading for another major global financial collapse, and when it happens the U.S. economy is going to get even worse.

The epicenter for the coming global financial collapse is almost certainly going to be in Europe.  As you will see below, financial professionals all over the world are sounding the alarm about Europe.  It is a disaster that everyone can see coming but that nobody seems to be able to prevent.

Of course the failure of the “supercommittee” in the United States certainly is not helping matters.  There is already talk that we may soon see another downgrade for U.S. debt.  It is hard to even describe how incompetent the U.S. Congress is.

There is a tremendous lack of leadership both in the United States and in Europe right now.  The financial world is more interconnected than ever before, and when the financial dominoes start to fall it is going to take a miracle to keep a complete and total disaster from unfolding.

So when the time comes, who is going to step forward and provide that leadership?

That is a really, really good question.

Right now, panic and fear are spreading like wildfire in the financial world and nobody knows for sure what is going to happen next.

But one thing is for certain.  Pessimism is growing stronger by the day.

The following are 17 quotes about the coming global financial collapse that will make your hair stand up….

#1 Credit Suisse’s Fixed Income Research unit: “We seem to have entered the last days of the euro as we currently know it. That doesn’t make a break-up very likely, but it does mean some extraordinary things will almost certainly need to happen – probably by mid-January – to prevent the progressive closure of all the euro zone sovereign bond markets, potentially accompanied by escalating runs on even the strongest banks.”

#2 Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup: “Time is running out fast.  I think we have maybe a few months — it could be weeks, it could be days — before there is a material risk of a fundamentally unnecessary default by a country like Spain or Italy which would be a financial catastrophe dragging the European banking system and North America with it.”

#3 Jim Reid of Deutsche Bank: “If you don’t think Merkel’s tone will change then our investment advice is to dig a hole in the ground and hide.”

#4 David Rosenberg, a senior economist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto: “Lenders are finding it difficult to finance their day-to-day operations with short-term funding. This is a lot like 2008 but with more twists.”

#5 Christian Stracke, the head of credit research for Pimco: “This is just a repeat of what we saw in 2008, when everyone wanted to see toxic assets off the banks’ balance sheets”

#6 Paul Krugman of the New York Times: “At this point I’d guess soaring rates on Italian debt leading to a gigantic bank run, both because of solvency fears about Italian banks given a default and because of fear that Italy will end up leaving the euro. This then leads to emergency bank closing, and once that happens, a decision to drop the euro and install the new lira. Next stop, France.”

#7 Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group: “More and more, we are hearing anecdotal comments from individual and professionals that this is the most difficult environment they have ever experienced as the market is like a fish flopping around after being taken out of the water.”

#8 Bob Janjuah of Nomura International: “Germany appears to be adamant that full political and fiscal integration over the next decade (nothing substantive will happen over the short term, in my view) is the only option, and ECB monetisation is no longer possible. I really think it is that clear and simple. And if I am wrong, and the ECB does a U-turn and agrees to unlimited monetisation, I will simply wait for the inevitable knee-jerk rally to fade before reloading my short risk positions. Even if Germany and the ECB somehow agree to unlimited monetisation I believe it will do nothing to fix the insolvency and lack of growth in the eurozone. It will just result in a major destruction of the ECB‟s balance sheet which will force an ECB recap. At that point, I think Germany and its northern partners would walk away. Markets always want short, sharp, simple solutions.”

#9 Dan Akerson, CEO of General Motors: “The ’08 recession, which was a credit bubble that manifested itself through primarily the real estate market, that was a serious stress….This is much more serious.”

#10 Francesco Garzarelli of Goldman Sachs: “Pressures on Euro area sovereign bond markets have progressively intensified and spread like a wildfire.”

#11 Jim Rogers: “In 2002 it was bad, in 2008 it was worse and 2012 or 2013 is going to be worse still – be careful”

#12 Dr. Pippa Malmgren, the President and founder of Principalis Asset Management who once worked in the White House as an adviser to President Bush: “Market forces are increasingly determining what the options are and foreclosing on options policymakers thought they had. One option which is now under discussion involves permitting a country to temporarily leave the Euro, return to its native currency, devalue, commit to returning to the Euro at a better debt to GDP ratio, a better exchange rate and a better growth trajectory and yet not sacrifice its EU membership. I would like to say for the record that this is precisely the thought process that I expected to evolve,but when I proposed this possibility back in 2009, and again in September 2010, I had a 100% response from clients and others that this was “impossible” and many felt it was “ridiculous”. They may be right but this is the current state of the discussion. The Handelsblatt in Germany has reported this conversation, but wrongly assumes that the country that will exit is Germany. I think that Germany will have to exit if the Southern European states do not. Germany’s preference is to stay in the Euro and have the others drop out. The problem has been the Germans could not convince the others to walk away. But, now, market pressures are forcing someone to leave. Germany is pushing for that someone to be Italy. They hope that this would be a one off exception, not to be repeated by any other country. Obviously, though, if Italy leaves the Euro and reverts to Lira then the markets will immediately and forcefully attack Spain, Portugal and even whatever is left  of the already savaged Greeks. These countries will not be able to compete against a devalued Greece or Italy when it come to tourism or even infrastructure. But, the principal target will be France. The three largest French banks have roughly 450 billion Euros of exposure to Italian debt. So, further sovereign defaults are certainly inevitable, but that is true under any scenario. Growth and austerity will not do the trick, as ZeroHedge rightly points out. Ultimately, I will not be at all surprised to see Europe’s banking system shut for days while the losses and payments issues are worked out. People forget that the term “bank holiday” was invented in the 1930’s when the banks were shut for exactly the same reason.”

#13 Daniel Clifton, a policy strategist with Strategas Research Partners on the potential for more downgrades of U.S. debt: “We would expect further downgrades, a first downgrade from Moody’s and Fitch and possibly a second downgrade from S&P.”

#14 Warren Buffett on the problems in the eurozone: “The system as presently designed has revealed a major flaw. And that flaw won’t be corrected just by words. Europe will either have to come closer together or there will have to be some other rearrangement because this system is not working”

#15 David Kostin, equity strategist for Goldman Sachs: “The wide range of possible outcomes on both the super committee process and the unstable political economy in Europe drives our view that investors should assume the worst while hoping for the best.”

#16 Mark Mobius, the head of the emerging markets desk at Templeton Asset Management: “There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner”

#17 Gerald Celente, founder of The Trends Research Institute: “The whole system is going down. Pull your money out your Fidelity account, your Scwhab accout, and your ETFs.”

Are you starting to get the picture?

When so many top financial professionals are freaking out like this, perhaps the rest of us should start paying attention.

They are telling us that “time is running out”.

They are telling us that “there is definitely going to be another financial crisis”.

They are telling us that this “is going to be worse” than 2008.

They are telling us that “the whole system is going down”.

Yes, a devastating financial collapse really is coming.  Just like in 2008, it will seem like the “end of the world” while it is happening, but it won’t be.  It will severely damage our financial system and our economy, but it will not finish us off.

Think of it this way.  When you build a sand castle at the beach, it doesn’t get totally wiped out by the first wave or the second wave that hits it.  Each wave does significant damage, but the destruction of your sand castle is a process.

It is the same thing with the U.S. economy.  We once had the most incredible economic machine that the world has ever seen.  It is constantly being gutted and the financial crisis of 2008 hit us really hard, but we are still doing okay.

After this next financial crisis we will be in even worse shape.  But we will still be breathing.

More “waves” will come after this next financial crisis.  If we continue on the road that we are on, our economy will progressively get worse and worse.

Not everyone will agree with this analysis, and that is okay.  In the end, time will reveal the truth to all of us.

Right now, we all need to get ready for the next wave that is about to hit us.  A lot of people are going to lose their jobs over the next few years.  Hopefully you are prepared for that.

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1 Through 30 – The Coming U.S. Financial Crisis By The Numbers ...

The American Dream

The United States is drowning in a sea of red ink from coast to coast and most Americans have absolutely no idea what is about to happen.  Hopefully you have started to prepare for the coming U.S.financial crisis.  If not, hopefully this article will be a wake up call for you.  Right now, governments all over Europe are on the verge of financial implosion.  Most Americans aren’t paying much attention to that, but they should be, because what is happening to Greece and Italy right now will eventually be happening here.  Just recently, the U.S. national debt passed the 15 trillion dollar mark.  State and localgovernment debt is also at record levels.  Tens of millions of American families are in debt up to their eyeballs, and millions more Americans fell into poverty last year.  Meanwhile, the “too big to fail” banks just keep getting larger and theFederal Reserve continues to inflate the debt bubble.  At some point this debt bubble is going to burst, and when it does it is going to unleash financial hell all over America.

Below you will find a list of numbers – 1 through 30.  For each number, a statistic has been chosen that demonstrates the financial nightmare that the United States is facing.  It is simply not possible to rack up debt at staggering rates forever.  At some point the debt spiral is going to stop.

A lot of politicians are claiming that they can stop the coming financial crisis from happening.  But the truth is that unless our entire financial system is fundamentally transformed, nothing is going to be able to stop the financial nightmare that is headed our way.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of our politicians still believe that the current financial system can be fixed and the vast majority of them still fully support the Federal Reserve.

That is going to prove to be a gigantic mistake.  The following are 30 facts that show that the United States is heading directly for a massive financial crisis….

1 – For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit of nearly 1.3 trillion dollars.  That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars.

2 – The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve has been ballooning like crazy.  At this point, the Federal Reserve has very little capital backing a balance sheet that is well over 2 trillion dollars.

The following is how Michael Pento of Euro Pacific Capital describes the situation that the Fed is in….

Today, the Fed has $52.5 billion of capital backing a $2.7 trillion balance sheet.

Prior to the bursting of the credit bubble, the public was shocked to learn that our biggest investment banks were levered 30-to-1. When asset values fell, those banks were quickly wiped out. But now the Fed is holding many of the same types of assets and is levered 51-to-1! If the value of their portfolio were to fall by just 2%, the Fed itself would be wiped out.

3 – It is being estimated that it would take a total of 3 trillion euros to bail out all of the countries in Europe that are in imminent danger of financial implosion.  Europe is heading for a gigantic financial crisis, and when it happens the United States is going to be dragged down as well.

4 – As the U.S. economy continues to decline, millions of American families are having a very hard time feeding themselves.  Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every fourAmerican children is on food stamps.

5 – The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year.  It looks like the federal government is going to have to help the U.S. Postal Service out financially.

6 – Freddie Mac says that it is going to need another $6 billion bailout from the federal government.

7 – Fannie Mae says that it is going to need another $7.8 billion bailout from the federal government.

8 – We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year.

9 – The U.S. unemployment rate has been hovering around 9 percent for 30 straight months.  It is currently sitting at 9.0 percent.

10 – The total cost of just three federal government programs – the Department of Defense, Social Security and Medicare – exceeded the total amount of taxes brought in during fiscal 2010 by 10 billion dollars.

11 – Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty.  Today, 15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty.

12 – The “free trade” agenda being pushed by our globalist politicians is absolutely killing us.  Even in industries that we were once dominant in we are now getting wiped out.  For instance, in 2010 South Koreaexported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.  Hundreds of billions of dollars that should be going to support American jobs and businesses is going overseas instead.

13 – Since 1985, the federal government has added 13 trillion dollars to the national debt.

14 – The U.S. Treasury Department says that instead of $14.3 billion, the total losses from the auto industry bailouts will actually be $23.6 billion.

15 – Amazingly, the U.S. federal government is now 15 trillion dollars in debt.  When Obama first took office the debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.

16 – According to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Federal Reserve made 16 trillion dollars in secret loans to big corporations, Wall Street banks, foreign nations and wealthy individuals during the financial crisis.

17 – The “too big to fail” banks just keep getting larger and larger.  In the year 2000, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo held approximately 22 percent of all banking deposits in FDIC-insured institutions.  By the middle of 2009 that figure was up to 39 percent.  That is an increase of 17 percent in less than a decade.

18 – More Americans than ever are totally dependent on the government.  In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income.  Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.

19 – As a result of the lack of good jobs, we have huge numbers of Americans in their prime working years that cannot financially support themselves.  As I have written about previously, 19% of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are living with their parents.

20 – America is rapidly getting poorer.  Today, more than one out of every seven Americans is living in poverty and more than 20 million of them are considered to be living in extreme poverty.

21 – Income inequality is rising to very dangerous levels.  According to a joint House and Senate report entitled “Income Inequality and the Great Recession“, the top one percent of all income earners in the United States brought in a total of 10.0 percent of all income in 1980, but by the time 2008 had rolled around that figure had skyrocketed to 21.0 percent.

22 – It is not just the federal government with a debt problem.  State and local government debt has reached an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP.  Many state and local governments are even closer to going broke than the federal government is.

23 – If you can believe it, during 2010 an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day were shut down in the United States.  Our economy is literally being gutted like a fish.

24 – Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP.  Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.

25 – According to Shadow Government Statistics, the “real” rate of unemployment in the United States is creeping up toward 25 percent.

26 – The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (an agency of the federal government) says that it ran a deficit of $26 billion during the fiscal year that just ended and that it will probably need a bailout from the federal government.

27 – In the midst of everything else, the United States is bleeding national wealth like crazy.  Tens of billions of dollars more goes out of this country each month than comes into it.  Instead of improving, our trade deficit just keeps getting worse.  For example, the U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.

28 – The U.S. housing crash is a crisis that never seems to end.  According to one source, approximately 28 percent of all home loans in the United States are currently “underwater”.  So what is going to happen if the economy gets even worse?

29 – The federal government has borrowed more than 29,000 dollars per household since Barack Obamafirst took office.

30 – 30 years ago, the U.S. national debt was about 15 times smaller than it is today.  How in the world are we ever going to explain this foolishness to future generations?

Please share these facts with as many people as you can.  The reality is that most Americans have no idea just how bad things have become.

Instead of dealing with the problems that this country is facing, most Americans just try to numb the pain.  As a nation, we are incredibly addicted to pleasure and entertainment.  It is so much easier to spend endless hours staring at the television than it is to get out there and try to do something to turn this country around.

America is in big time trouble.  We desperately need a new generation of heroes to step up to the plate.

All of us have different talents and all of us have something that we can contribute.

Will you answer the call?

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Obama Is Under CIA Subliminal Mind Control ...

Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a covert and illegal CIA human experimentation program, run by the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence.  The CIA was created by former Nazi SS officers who were smuggled into the United Statesunder Operation Paperclip.  Immediately after escaping prosecution for war crimes, by agreeing to work for the United Statesgovernment, these Nazi SS officers started work developing the technology for mind control.

The ultimate goal of Nazi German MKULTRA project was to control the future presidents of the United States.  In the beginning they focused on using drugs to control test subjects but with the advent of microscopic computer chips (the size of a grain of sand) all mind control research and development is now focused on using radio frequency emitters to control the president.  The first device that was developed was the implantable RFID chips (13.56 MHz RF) which can be implanted into an unsuspecting recipient through a nation wide ordered vaccination program.  The chip is so small it can pass through a specially made Verichip vaccine syringe.  During the 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic millions of vaccine syringes were immediately declared illegal and pulled from shelves and replaced with a new syringe that was capable of implanting the microscopic chip.  Obama initially refused to be vaccinated against the Swine Flu because he knew what the vaccines contained.  He later agreed to be vaccinated with a placebo.  His vaccinescontained only sugar and water and it was repeatedly zapped before he was given it in order to destroy any secret doping of a microscopic chip.

Now that the president is well aware of the true intent of vaccines – to implant the masses with a tracking Verichip and to kill billions using the deadly carcinogenic and neurological toxins and live viruses included in all vaccines  – the CIA have had to resort to using another type of radio frequency mind control device – the president’s earpiece.

Through the president’s earpiece the CIA is able to piggyback subliminal messages onto Secret Service communications with the president.  The subliminal messages are transmitted as audio stimuli played below audible volumes.  At these levels the president is not aware of the stimulus being presented.  The CIA has developed this type of mind control technology to induce a hypnotic state of mind so that they can subliminally instruct through hypnotic suggestion what the president should say or do.  This technology was perfected under the presidency of George W Bush.  The CIA used George W Bush’s earpiece to control Bush’s thoughts, speech and actions.  The CIA made Bush say stupid things.  The CIA made Bush spoke in inaudible gibberish.  They even prevented him from speaking.  The CIA has been using this technology ever since.  They use the president’s earpiece to control the president.

Much more @ presscore.ca/2011/?p=5115

Think that this would be impossible? I’d suggest that you watch the video below.

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The Enemy Within – A Global Conspiracy ...

Full Length Feature – Since our nation’s inception in 1776 – cold, cunning conspirators have sought to undermine our political sovereignty for their own personal profit. Behind a facade of corporate and congressional respectability, a cabal of ruthless men use extortion and murder to steal our nation’s wealth and turn theUnited States into a fascist war-machine that inexorably threatens the entire world. But now at last, the American people are rising to unmask “THE ENEMY WITHIN”!

COMING TO DVD from UFOTV – The Enemy Within – LOADED with Bonus Features and Film Extras – Go towww.UFOTV.com

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Is a German ‘Fourth Reich’ emerging?

Germany — It may have been a bad idea to send a German. And his name certainly didn’t help matters.

When Horst Reichenbach arrived in Athens recently to head a new European Uniontask force to help the country deal with its debt, the Greek media instantly dubbed him “Third Reichenbach.”

Cartoons appeared of him in Nazi uniform. A Greek tabloid showed a photo of his office with the headline: “The new Gestapo headquarters.”

The Greeks are not alone in harboring suspicions toward Germany, which occupied the country during World War II. The British conservative press is up in arms. The Daily Mail went so far as to accuse the Germans of attempting to use the euro crisis to “conquer Europe” and establish a “Fourth Reich.” Meanwhile in Poland, Germany’s supposed imperial ambitions became an issue in the recent elections.

And as the euro crisis has deepened, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed for the EU to have a greater say in the domestic governance of the euro zone’s seventeen members. Among other measures, she has called for real European power over countries’ budgets.

Related: Euro zone crisis erodes democracy

With Italy now getting sucked into the debt spiral, Merkel has warned that deep structural reforms were needed quickly. “That will mean more Europe, not less Europe,” she has said repeatedly, most recently on Monday at a meeting of her conservative Christian Democratic party. Likewise, party members reportedly want more power for Germany in the European Central Bank, by changing its voting system so that it is based on economic strength. Currently, each member country has one vote.

Here’s the rub: when the German leader calls for greater European power and influence, pretty much everyone interprets that to mean German power and influence. As the richest and largest country in the union, Germany’s influence vastly overshadows that of the Brussels-based eurocrats.

Indeed, when people have a beef about the EU, they no longer complain about Brussels. They complain about Berlin.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. On the contrary, after World War II, a major impetus for creating theEuropean Union was that it would curb German power. Countries that had waged war against each other twice would tie their economies so closely together that future conflict would be impossible.

A similar calculation helped fuel the rise of the euro zone. As the price for accepting German reunification, the French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, demanded that Germany give up its precious deutschmark and commit to a common currency. The goal was to buffer German power, not to bolster it.

Reluctant hegemony

In practice, while the member states big and small always had a supposedly equal say, the heart of the union has long been the Franco-German relationship. From the outset, Germany was to provide the economic firepower, and France the political leadership. That was how the Germans like it.

“Germans tended to lead from behind, and allow the French symbolically to occupy a major role,” said William Paterson, professor of German politics at Aston University in the UK. Now, however, the French economy appears increasingly shaky, with its banks deeply exposed to the debt of weak peripheral countries. Paris is desperately attempting to hold on to its coveted triple-A credit rating. The traditional relationship has tilted power toward Germany.

For all the talk of “Merkozy,” it’s increasingly clear that the German chancellor is in the driver’s seat.

“Germany does everything it can to portray an image of evenness, and a balanced relationship” with France, said Olaf Cramme, director of the Policy Network think-tank based in London. However “the relationship has become extremely one-sided, and Germany is calling the shots,” policymakers in France have told him, he said.

Berlin seems not to be completely comfortable with this role. Germany is a “reluctant hegemon,” said Paterson. Debtor countries “look to Germany to get them out of the mess,” he said. “This puts the Germans in the unenviable position of: if not Germany, who?”

Exacerbating the tensions, Germans grumble about the costs of the euro zone. Their politicians in turn appear patronizing toward the countries in trouble, lecturing them about fiscal responsibility.

Read more: Germany vs. China

This, of course, ignores the many benefits that Germany has derived not only from the common currency, but also from its neighbors’ profligacy. The euro zone has provided Germany with a massive market into which it can sell its products easily and cheaply. And heavy borrowing by other members drove greater demand for its exports, making up for Germany’s relatively weak domestic consumption growth. In other words, without the euro zone, Germany’s economy would not have performed nearly as well.

“The counterpart to Germany living within its means is that others are living beyond their means;” said Philip Whyte, senior research fellow at the London-based Centre for European Reform. “So if Germany is worried about the fact that other countries are sinking further into debt, it should be worried about the size of its trade surpluses, but it isn’t.”

The view from Germany

Only a few years ago, as economies elsewhere on the continent boomed, Germany was regarded as the sick man of Europe. It was still bearing the huge costs of reunification with East Germany. Unemployment was stubbornly high. A decade ago, it endured a tough restructuring of its economy, including unpopular labor and welfare reforms.

“Germany did what Greece and Italy and France will now need to do,” said Ulrike Guerot, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “We did this 10 years ago and we are now seeing the fruits of what we did.”

On a macro level, the belt-tightening appears to be yielding results. The economy is showing relatively strong growth. Unemployment has fallen to the lowest level since reunification, and exports have soared.

Germany’s recent struggles mean that its electorate sees matters quite differently from the rest of Europe. Just as they have stepped out of the mire, Germans see the euro zone’s profligate countries dragging them back in.

Another key fact is that while other countries regard Germany as an economic colossus with the means (if not the will) to help, the reality for its workers is at odds with this image. While wages increased significantly in many other countries over the past decade, in Germany they have remained stagnant for years. A report released by the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research last week showed that when adjusted for inflation, wages actually declined by 4.2 percent over the past decade.

In part, this is due to the mushrooming of low-paid, precarious jobs, a result of the labor law liberalization that helped boost growth. Yet even in highly unionized jobs, wages have not risen significantly.

“There has been a large shift of income from labor to capital,” said Whyte, at the Centre for European Reform. “In other words, German firms are now sitting on large piles of cash, but German workers have not been getting pay rises.”

Selling the bailout to Germans

The plight of the German worker makes the bailouts a harder sell. The advantages of a strong euro zone aren’t clear to the many people who have not gained financially from the country’s increasing wealth.

“Many Germans basically have not seen the fruits of the euro and benefits of the single market in the first place, and now they feel like they are going to pay for the all others,” said Guerot, from the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s very hard to make the argument among Germans that they should put billions on the table for Italy or Greece to save the single market.”

Opinion polls support this theory. The majority of Germans are not happy about the bailouts. After all, when they joined the euro zone, they had been assured that they would never be liable for other members’ debts. The electorate has already shown its wrath, punishing the governing parties in a string of regional elections this year.

A recent poll, carried out by Infratest Dimap for the public broadcaster ARD, showed that while support for Merkel’s current handling of the euro crisis is now growing slightly, 82 percent of Germans fear the worst is yet to come, while 84 percent said they feared Germany would end up having to pay even more for the bailouts. And with no final resolution of the debt crisis in sight, they may be right to be worried.

This increases the pressure on Merkel to attach as many strings as possible to the bailouts. “If they are going to have to pay, then they want to have a say,” said Paterson, the professor at Aston University. “They want the conditions to be the ones that they would favor.”

Given that Germans have endured cuts and liberalizations to make their economy strong, it makes sense to them that others should do the same. Yet unlike Germany, which could count on the booming euro zone to drive growth at a time when budgets were being slashed, Italy, Greece and other indebted countries don’t have any such engine of growth to latch onto.

The wrong medicine

“The policies which it has been imposing on other countries are flawed policies,” said Whyte. “Germany wants to turn the euro zone into a larger version of itself. That is essentially going to push the block as a whole into a depression.”

This in turn could lead to growing hostility towards Germany, he said. “If you’re swallowing what is perceived to be German medicine, and that medicine is essentially forcing economies to contract by 20 percent, with sharp increases in unemployment — and on top of that the Germans are saying, well, you clearly haven’t gone far enough and you need to do even more — then it’s inevitable that anti-German feeling is going to increase.”

Teemu Lehtinen, a Finnish public-policy adviser living in Athens, said, “It currently seems like the EU is being run by a group of large states, and the head of those is Germany.” This does not go down well at home with ordinary Greek citizens, he said, and makes them feel that the decision-making power is taken away from them and their elected politicians.

“It’s not that the Greeks trust their government or their parliament that much,” he added. “But it leads to the question: Who is in charge of our future? And more and more it seems that the Greeks think their future is in the hands of Mrs. Merkel.”

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‘Super soldiers’: The quest for the ultimate human killing machine ...

We’ve seen in previous articles that the concept of transhumanism and “enhanced human” is being actively promoted in movies, music videos and video games. Here an article from the Independentdescribing the “enhancements” that are being planned to be given to soldiers to make them better at killing people including exoskeleton, memory erasing drugs and exposing the brain to magnetic fields. What’s even more upsetting is that the author of the article sounds actually quite excited about these “improvements” that deshumanize humans into unthinking, highly altered killing machines.

‘Super soldiers’: The quest for the ultimate human killing machine

Guilt, tiredness, stress, shock – can specialised drugs help to mute the qualities that make soldiers human, asks Michael Hanlon?

The ancient Spartans believed that battlefield training began at birth. Those who failed the first round of selection, which took place at the ripe old age of 48 hours, were left at the foot of a mountain to die. The survivors would, in years to come, often wonder if these rejects were the lucky ones. Because to harden them up, putative Spartan warriors were subjected to a vigorous regime involving unending physical violence, severe cold, a lack of sleep and constant sexual abuse.

As with the English public schools, which used similar tactics to produce the warriors who carved out theBritish Empire, the Spartan regime worked; the alumni were the most feared soldiers in the easternMediterranean. And ever since then, military chiefs have wondered whether it may be possible to short-cut the long and demanding Spartan regime to produce a soldier who kills without care or remorse, shows no fear, can fight battle after battle without fatigue and generally behave more like a machine than a man.

In the post-war era, the future of fighting was thought to be about tanks and missiles, large impersonal machines that would fight huge battles over the open terrain of Northern Europe. The soldiers would be pressing buttons in a command centre. But despite the advent of drone aircraft, much of 21st-century warfare is turning out to be a drawn-out, messy business, fought on a human scale in the mud and dust ofAfghanistan. And fought against a mercurial army of irregulars who melt away into the fields and farms once the skirmish is over. Modern soldiers are not the cannon fodder of before. Highly trained and super fit, each one represents a huge investment by the nation that sends them into battle. A soldier who is too tired to fight effectively, who has gone mad or who is suffering from severe stress is like a broken-down tank, no use to anybody. What if soldiers could be made that did not break down?

The era of The Terminator, the perfect robotic killing machine, is decades away; to date, all efforts to create a humanoid robot that can climb the stairs, let alone fight the Taliban, have been risible. But scientists are reporting breakthroughs with the next-best thing – the creation of human terminators, who feel less pain, less terror and less fatigue than “non-enhanced” soldiers and whose very bodies may be augmented by powerful machines.

Efforts to understand the brain of the soldier and put this knowledge to good use have been going on for some time. Professor Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at Pennsylvania State University, studies the way neuroscience is being co-opted by the military. “Right now, this is the fastest-growing area of science,” he says.

The Pentagon is currently spending $400m a year researching ways to “enhance” the human fighter. The defence giant Lockheed recently unveiled its “Hulc” (Human Universal Load Carrier), a science fiction-like, battery-powered exoskeleton that allows a human to lift 100kg weights and carry them at a fast run of 16kph (10mph). The videos of the Hulc in action are truly impressive. Superman strength is one thing, but soldiers still need to sleep. In Afghanistan the average soldier in combat gets only four hours’ rest a day and sleep deprivation is the single biggest factor in reducing fighting performance. Not only are tired soldiers less physically able to fight and run, they make more mistakes with the complex weapons systems at their disposal – mistakes that can prove deadly to themselves and their comrades.

Using chemistry to attack fatigue is, of course, nothing new. Two centuries ago, Prussian soldiers used cocaine to remain alert and Inca warriors used coca leaves to stay alert long before that. Since then, nicotine, amphetamines, caffeine and a new class of stimulants including the drug Modafinil have all been used successfully, to the extent that American soldiers can now operate normally even after 48 hours without sleep. Now the chemists are trying to tweak the molecular structure of this drug so that it will switch off the desire for sleep for even longer.

Tiredness is not the only psychological problem faced by soldiers. Combat is immensely stressful and although proper training means that men and women can remain focused while in mortal danger, it is afterwards that problems begin. During the Vietnam War, one in three soldiers was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and in the Second World War a significant proportion of Allied conscripts never fired a shot in anger because of stress and fear before the battle had even begun. Up to now, PTSD has been treated by a mix of psychotherapy and antidepressants – effective techniques but expensive and time-consuming. But as with fatigue there may be a chemical shortcut for PTSD.

The trick is to erase unwanted memories, or at least take away their sting. Professor Roger Pitman, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in the US, has been experimenting with a drug called propranolol, a “beta blocker” normally used to treat high blood pressure, which he believes can erase the effects of terrifying memories.

Professor Pitman has given the drug to young volunteers who have suffered extreme trauma in, for example, road accidents. Those given placebos suffered nightmares, and remained fearful of the road. When exposed to recordings describing their accidents they suffered typical stress responses – sweating, beating heart, dilated pupils. But those who had been on a course of propranolol showed no response at all. It was as though the trauma had not happened. For a soldier, memory-altering drugs such as this could mean violent combat becoming no more troubling, retrospectively, than a visit to the gym. “The problem is,” Professor Moreno says, “what else are they blocking when they do this? Do we want a generation of veterans who return without guilt?” You may not even need drugs to short-out the unwanted side effects of battle. Dr Albert “Skip” Rizzo, a psychologist from the University of Southern California, has created a “virtual Iraq” video game, in which veterans have been able to re-enact their experiences to release pent-up stress.

Generals not only want stronger, more alert and less stressed soldiers; they want smarter ones, too. One of the most bizarre neuroscience findings in recent years is that by immersing the human brain in a powerful magnetic field, its powers of reasoning and learning are almost magically enhanced.

No one knows exactly how “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS) works, but the Australian neuroscientist Professor Allan Snyder believes that magnetic fields in some way “switch off” the higher levels of mental processing that normally cloud our thoughts, allowing a “pure” form of reasoning to take over.

“Each of us could draw like a professional, do lightning-fast arithmetic,” he says. In fact, some subjects in TMS experiments have acquired (temporarily) similar abilities to the rare “autistic savants”, people who are able to perform astounding arithmetical feats and memorise whole telephone directories (an autistic savant was played by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man).

In 2009, a US Academy of Sciences report concluded that within 20 years we could be using TMS to enhance soldiers’ fighting capabilities. As Professor Moreno says, “there is talk of TMS machines being used on the battlefields within 10 years in vehicles and in 10 years more in helmets.” Why? Being a soldier demands a high level of technical expertise. It is no longer just a case of pointing a gun and shooting. Even combat rifles are now “systems” and mastering battlefield electronics requires a lot of training.

It may seem clear that if you could create a man with no scruples, who feels little pain and no fear, you would have an excellent fighting machine, but this may be a case of be careful what you wish for. We get scared for a reason – to avoid danger to ourselves and others. Fatigue may force us to rest before sustaining damaging injury. Even post-traumatic stress disorder may have a beneficial role. Moral scruples help soldiers to act as an effective team – in battle, troops will always say they are fighting for their mates before Queen and country.

Take away the humanity of the soldiers and there is a danger that the battles and wars we fight will become inhuman as well. Most of all there is, surely, a danger that these techniques, far from producing better soldiers, will actually produce a squad of zoned-out zombies, who will be no match for the determined, driven and highly motivated zealots of the Taliban.

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