Despair As Collapse Accelerates: “My Shotgun is Full and Well Equipped. I Hope I Don’t Need to Use It.”

Mac Slavo
SHTFPlan.com
Thursday, June 7, 2012

Our long time friend and regular contributor Manos has been keeping us abreast of the day-to-day goings on in Greece for the better part of  three years. Suffice it to say, it’s getting worse with very little hope of resolution to the economic and political woes facing the country, as well as its European neighbors.

The following is a first person perspective of the realities on the ground, and what it looks like in the midst of a truly frightening economic collapse that threatens to not only wipe out the financial wealth and life savings of an entire nation, but may potentially lead to a breakdown in the rule of law and civil war between extreme political factions trying to fill the vacuum of power.

This is real, it’s happening right now, and it’s coming to America in due time.

Received via email from Manos June 6, 2012

Hi guys,

The daily life is still the same.

Things keep going because some divine hand still help us.

You wake up in the morning having no mood at all. And it’s this heat which destroys your brain cells. Today, it’s 34 degrees Celsius.

I’ve kept a small amount of around 250 euros, to buy some final provisions. Mostly meat cans, vitamins, and dried bread. I will store them to my parents’ basement, in order to have alternative escape plans.

The rumor about a power shortage is more and more been discussed around people, and alternative media.

It’s being said that the Power Company is no longer having the money to purchase coal and diesel.

We don’t have a generator for home use, so in case of a failure, we must consume all refrigerator food first.

My wife bought two big camping gas devices, with many spare bottles of gas. We can cook all meat and veggies, and then share them with the rest of the family.

My shotgun is full and well equipped. I hope i don’t need to use it.

My car had a small steering wheel failure last Friday, and i had to fix immediately. I don’t know if we have to leave the town in a rush.

I tried to find a small hut in the property but nobody sells at all.

Prices are so low, that they don’t want to sell their properties for nothing. I’m considering to buy a caravan and put it in the biggest olive-field. A small one with 2 beds, light enough to be dragged by my car, costs around 5.000 euros.

Today the stock market is going upwards, but soon enough the final collapse will occur. Spain is going down rapidly.

I’ll keep posting as long as I can. Don’t worry, I’m fully equipped and prepared.

Just take care of yourselves and families.

When the things reach to your neighborhood, you will have to fight.

Your fellow citizens are still living in their utopia. When they realize the danger, they will turn into ruthless beasts.

I pray for you all.

God Bless you

We wish our friend Manos the very best, as his family and countrymen are on the frontlines of an economic collapse that is about to affect every developed nation in the world.

Take his warnings to heart and prepare, because once the final phase of the breakdown begins it will be too late.

Spanish government credit denied as country’s fiscal woes worsen

June 5, 2012 – MADRID – Spain’s Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro on Tuesday urged euro-zone partners to act faster to help support its enfeebled banks, saying that the government has effectively lost access to capital markets because of steep risk premiums demanded by sovereign bond investors.

In making this dramatic admission, Mr. Montoro joined recent calls by the Spanish government for direct aid from European Union institutions for Spanish banks as the government hopes to avoid a full-blown bailout package. The matter has gained urgency after Madrid was forced into a €19 billion ($23.75 billion) rescue of lender Bankia SA, while the government’s borrowing costs have surged to record highs with yields on Spanish 10-year bonds staying above the 6% mark for the third straight week. Midday in Europe, the yield was at 6.37%. By comparison, the yield on the German 10-year bond, considered a haven for investors, was at 1.20%.

“What this premium tells us is that the state, and Spain as a whole, has a problem when it comes to accessing markets, when we need to refinance our debt,” Mr. Montoro said in a radio interview. “What that premium says is that Spain doesn’t have the market’s door open, as such, the challenge is to open that door and regain the confidence of those markets, our creditors.” The warning from Madrid was reminiscent of similar alarms over prohibitive borrowing costs sounded by Greece, Portugal and Ireland before entering into bailout talks with such international lenders as the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. However, Mr. Montoro indicated that Europe should allow its institutions to directly recapitalize banks, stressing that a wider rescue plan is an unfeasible and unnecessary option for the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy. Under existing agreements, the euro zone’s bailout funds cannot be used to directly recapitalize banks. “Spain can’t really be bailed out, from a technical point of view,” Mr. Montoro said.

Unregulated global derivatives debt market hits $647 trillion mark

June 5, 2012 – GLOBAL ECONOMY – The hits just keep coming and with $647 trillion reasons to worry, aka, the total notional derivatives now outstanding as of Q4 in 2011 per the Bank of International Settlements just released this afternoon and published officially on Monday. Of course the problem is that as one can see in the graph above, the amount of Gross Credit Exposure has returned to 2008 levels, something the world might want to pay attention to. Once the lessons of the mistakes of the past are ignored, the risk factor increases proportionally and with Europe teetering on the edge of a Lehman event, the increase in interest rate derivatives might well indicate a new risk that has not been accounted for: A sudden collapse of the Euro currency below the 1.20 or even parity level. Such an event would make Lehman look like a picnic but there is more bad news beyond that as it is not just interest rate derivatives that have increased past 2008 levels as the chart above demonstrates, but some idiots placed bets on the currency markets which means that a collapse of the Euro creates an irreversible game of dominoes and destruction: Unfortunately for us common folk, no one has taken the time to explain the implications of a 10, 20, or even 30% decline in the value of the Euro versus the US Dollar in a compressed time period. This is one warning sign of many from the report but the other one is more mundane and ties to the Federal Reserve’s mandate, er, unwritten mandate to support the U.S. equity markets by laundering money through its member banks to purchase stocks and give the illusion of a strong economy.

Estonia: what happens when countries bite the austerity bullet and cut up the credit cards?

June 6, 2012 – ESTONIA – It’s the euro zone Jim, but not as we know it. Sixteen months after it joined the struggling currency bloc, Estonia is booming. The economy grew 7.6 percent last year, five times the euro-zone average. Estonia is the only euro-zone country with a budget surplus. National debt is just 6 percent of GDP, compared to 81 percent in virtuous Germany, or 165 percent in Greece. Shoppers throng Nordic design shops and cool new restaurants in Tallinn, the medieval capital, and cutting-edge tech firms complain they can’t find people to fill their job vacancies. It all seems a long way from the gloom elsewhere in Europe. Estonia’s achievement is all the more remarkable when you consider that it was one of the countries hardest hit by the global financial crisis. In 2008-2009, its economy shrank by 18 percent. That’s a bigger contraction than Greece has suffered over the past five years. How did they bounce back? “I can answer in one word: austerity. Austerity, austerity, austerity,” says Peeter Koppel, investment strategist at the SEB Bank. After three years of painful government belt-tightening, that’s not exactly the message that Europeans further south want to hear. At a recent conference of European and North American lawmakers in Tallinn, Koppel was lambasted by French and Italian parliamentarians when he suggested Europeans had to prepare for an “inevitable” decline in living standards, wages and job security, in order for their countries to escape from the debt crisis. While spending cuts have triggered strikes, social unrest and the toppling of governments in countries from Ireland to Greece, Estonians have endured some of the harshest austerity measures with barely a murmur. They even re-elected the politicians that imposed them. “It was very difficult, but we managed it,” explains Economy Minister Juhan Parts. Everybody had to give a little bit. Salaries paid out of the budget were all cut, but we cut ministers’ salaries by 20 percent and the average civil servants’ by 10 percent,” Parts told GlobalPost.