Fryzo Nieuwsheadlines crisis van woensdag 12 juni 2013 21:39:12

In België werden vorig jaar minder ondernemingen opgericht en gingen er meer failliet dan in 2011. Dat blijkt uit een studie van de Nationale Bank, zo schrijft De Tijd.

De deflatie in Griekenland duurt door de aanhoudende zware economische crisis voort. In mei zijn de verbruikersprijzen er met 0,4 procent gedaald in vergelijking met een jaar eerder.

Hommeles in de trojka. De Europese Commissie bestrijdt de kritiek van het IMF dat de Griekse crisis verkeerd werd aangepakt. ‘Achteraf kan je altijd zeggen hoe de zaken in een ideale wereld zouden zijn verlopen, maar de omstandigheden waren wat ze waren.’

Thinktank says employees have sacrificed pay to keep their jobs during the longest and deepest slump in a century

Britains workers have suffered more financial pain since 2008 than in any five-year period of the modern age, according to research by a leading tax thinktank that shows employees have sacrificed pay to keep their jobs.

Describing this downturn as the longest and deepest slump in a century, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says workers have suffered unprecedented pay cuts of 6% in real terms over the last five years.

Historically, real wages rise by about 2% a year. This suggests that people are more than 15% worse off than they would have been if the pre-crisis wage trends had continued.

Analysing downturns going back to the great depression, Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, said: "This time really does seem to be different … it has been deeper and longer than those of the 1990s, the 1980s and even the 1930s. It has seen household incomes and spending drop more and stay lower longer."

The report finds that since the start of the recession real wages have fallen by more than in any comparable five-year period. It also highlights an "unprecedented" drop in productivity as output has tumbled faster than employment.

Official figures on Tuesday brought little comfort for ministers looking for a manufacturing revival to turn the tide on productivity. Hopes that a pick-up in industry would lead to better balanced growth in the UK were dented by data for April showing the first decline in factory production in three months.

The Office for National Statistics said factories were producing 10% less than they were in 2007, before the onset of the recession in early 2008.

David Kern, chief economist at the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "Our manufacturing exporters are still overly focused on the weak eurozone, but low domestic demand has also limited progress."

The service sector was facing its own challenges from demand being sucked out of the economy by the squeeze on wages, economists warned.

"This period has seen the biggest squeeze of real pay in decades," said Michael Pearce, at Capital Economics. "Were not expecting this damage [to households real pay] to be reversed any time soon, highlighting one reason not to get too carried away by recent signs of economic recovery."

The IFS says much of the sharp drop in pay is down to widespread nominal wage cuts for workers staying in the same jobs, rather than being driven by inflation outpacing pay growth or people losing high paid jobs and taking worse paid roles.

One-third of workers experienced nominal wage freezes or cuts between 2010 and 2011, and 70% experienced real wage cuts, the thinktank says, blaming in part a drop in the number of unionised workers.

A new TUC campaign for pay rises this week chimes with that finding. It launched with the claim that the UKs annual pay packet had shrunk by £52bn since the start of the financial crisis.

The IFS said the silver lining was that employment had held up and so there was no repeat of the policy errors of the 1980s when millions were allowed to "leave the labour force altogether and receive disability benefits or lone-parent benefits, or move into early retirement".

Claire Crawford, programme director at the IFS said: "The falls in nominal wages that workers have experienced during this recession are unprecedented, and seem to provide at least a partial explanation for why unemployment has risen less �" and productivity has fallen more �" than might otherwise have been expected.

"To the extent that it is better for individuals to stay in work, albeit with lower wages, than to become unemployed, the long-term consequences of this recession in terms of labour market performance may be less severe than following the high unemployment recessions of the 1980s and 1990s."

A Treasury spokesman said: "As the IFS says, the UK is recovering from the longest and deepest recession in a century. Despite this, the labour market has remained strong: one-and-a-quarter-million private sector jobs have been created and more people are in private sector employment than ever before."

Waar was eurocommissaris Ollie Rehn op uit toen hij Nederland vorige week de aanbeveling deed om komend jaar het financierings­tekort wat extra terug te dringen? Gaat het hem echt om een lager tekort of was hij uit op een psychologisch effect? Dat laatste lijkt op z’n minst een bij-effect van Rehns aanbeveling. De weerstand richtte zich vooral daarop, met als gevolg dat het iets hogere tekort van drie procent nu meer als ‘van ons’ en minder als door Brussel gedicteerd voelt en er ook minder aandacht is voor de andere aanbevelingen van de eurocommissaris.

Waar blijft het protest, waar is de tegencultuur? Het waren maar twee van de vele vragen waarmee de jonge journalisten van de Postacademische Dagblad Opleiding Journalistiek (PDOJ) van de Erasmus Universiteit het land introkken, op zoek naar door de crisis getroffen lotgenoten.

Lees verder... ‘De Prins van Filletino’ inspirerende roman over de eu-crisis

For Jillane Hixson and her husband Dave Tzilkowski, the huge financial loss to their land, Hixson Farm four miles south of Lamar, caused by the 60 mph hurling ‘dust devil’ has left them ‘shellshocked’ and depressed’.

The couple were trapped in their home for about 15 hours from May 24 as the punishing storm rolled around them.

‘You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window,’ Hixson told The Denver Post.
‘You know that it’s your crop that’s hitting the windows and blowing away, and it’s not just affecting you, but also everyone else.

‘You can’t stand to look at it. It’s like a train wreck, looking a disaster full in the face.
‘At one point, the sand was pounding on the glass so hard, I didn’t know if it was hail or dirt.

As the fog of dirt seeped through cracks in the house, the couple was forced to cover their faces with handkerchiefs.

‘It was in your nose, on your tongue, in your eyes,’ Hixson said.

They went to bed at 11 p.m, putting their heads under the blankets to shield them from the noise and the dirt.

The storm had passed by the next morning, but three-foot drifts of dirt covered everything.

Twenty-seven vehicles slammed into each other during a sandstorm in rural Northern Nevada, killing one person, seriously injuring several others and sapping already-thin emergency resources Monday evening, officials said.

Humboldt County sheriff’s dispatchers called in virtually every medical, law enforcement and fire worker in the sparsely populated area after drivers reported “near-apocalyptic” conditions on Interstate 80 three miles west of Winnemucca, according to officials at the Humboldt General Hospital.

The amount of dust being blown across the landscape has increased over the last 17 years in large swaths of the West, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The escalation in dust emissions �" which may be due to the interplay of several factors, including increased windstorm frequency, drought cycles and changing land-use patterns �" has implications both for the areas where the dust is first picked up by the winds and for the places where the dust is put back down.

Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That’s all we can do.

5. According to a recent National Geographic article, the average depletion rate of the Ogallala Aquifer is picking up speed…

Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has dropped more than 150 feet.

6. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is now the driest that it has been in 500 years.

7. Wildfires have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the central part of the United States in recent years. For example, wildfires burned an astounding 3.6 million acres in the state of Texas alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the future.

8. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it would be normal for extremely dry conditions to persist in parts of western North America for decades. The following is from an article in the Vancouver Sun…

But University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.

St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.

“What we’re seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don’t last a decade�"they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they’ll be semi-continental in expanse,” she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.

“So it’s like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That’s what scares those of us who are in the community studying this data pool.”

9. Experts tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar in the coming years. It is being projected that repairing and expanding our decaying drinking water infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next 25 years, and as a result our water bills will likely approximately triple over that time period.

10. Right now, the United States uses approximately 148 trillion gallons of fresh water a year, and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.

11. According to a U.S. government report, 36 states are already facing water shortages or will be facing water shortages within the next few years.

12. Lake Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.

13. It has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20 year supply of fresh water left.

14. It has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10 year supply of fresh water left.

15. Approximately 40 percent of all rivers in the United States and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
So what happens when there is not enough fresh water to support our rapidly growing cities in the western half of the country?

Today, Lake Mead supplies approximately 85 percent of the water that Las Vegas uses, and it provides electricity for tens of millions of Americans (including much of southern California). But Lake Mead is drying up. Since 1998 the water level in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons, and when Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet the turbines of the Hoover Dam start to shut down.

So what is everyone going to do once the water is gone?

Big changes are happening folks. It looks like Dust Bowl conditions are returning with a vengeance, and this is going to be much, much more than just a minor inconvenience.

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new novel entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

Enter Your Email To Receive Our Daily Newsletter

Close

BE THE CHANGE! PLEASE SHARE THIS USING THE TOOLS BELOW

3:11p ET Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Mike Kosares of Centennial Precious Metals in Denver compares the chart of the gold price with that of reserve bank credit and finds a glaring anomaly since Aprils smashing of gold in the futures markets.

Kosares writes: "The gold price, as a result of its recent plunge, has crossed decisively under the reserve bank credit trend line. The two developments together have made for an interesting chart divergence -- the sort of thing that catches the attention of technicians and value investors alike, particularly if it defies logical explanation.

"This latest correction, more than any I can remember, has the experts scratching their heads. When an upward or downward spike in the market proceeds sans logical underpinnings, a snap-back rally or correction often follows. The last such incident in the gold market occurred in 2008. The market sold off roughly 30% at the height of the financial crisis, and then regained and superseded those losses before 90 days had elapsed. From there the market climbed to all-time highs in 2009."

Kosares commentary is headlined "The Connection Between Quantitative Easing and the Gold Price" and its posted at Centennials Internet site, USAGold.com, here:

http://www.usagold.com/cpmforum/2013/06/11/the-connection-between-quanti...

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

IN THE years leading up to the financial crisis, household debt soared in most rich countries. There were a couple of notable exceptions. See chart here.