Members of the European Parliament are set to endorse a raft of measures which they hope would enable the European Union to recover more quickly and strongly from the negative impacts of the global financial crisis, while ensuring greater financial and economic stability in the future.

The proposals to be debated by the Parliament next week (20 October) include the idea of appointing a 'Mr. or Ms. Euro', who would be in charge of coordinating the bloc's economic policies. This person would take over the responsibilities that are currently shared by three people.

"The status quo is not going to be an option for the European Commission," the bloc's financial services chief Michel Barnier told a news conference.

"We are happy in 2011 to produce legislation in this respect," Barnier said as he launched a two-month consultation on his ideas to change the sector.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov told journalists yesterday (13 October) that he will seek to renegotiate the country's "unfair" gas agreement with Russia when he meets his counterpart Vladimir Putin on 27 October.

...Ukraine and Russia signed a 10-year agreement on gas supplies in January 2009 after a price dispute between the two neighbours left the European Union without fuel for two weeks amid freezing temperatures.

"Russia doesn't want to revise [the gas agreement]. Why? Because it's profitable for them. Why do we want to revise it? Because we believe this is an ill-profitable agreement for us," Azarov said.

"How much time should an agreement live for, if one party sees it as profitable, and the other as highly unprofitable? Something needs to be done with this agreement. Quite obviously, it is not viable."

The Ukrainian prime minister also spoke against the planned South Stream gas pipeline project, led by Gazprom, which is designed to bypass his country.

While strikes affecting French transport systems have lost momentum since Tuesday, the ongoing protests in the country's oil refineries are raising the possibility of an acute fuel shortage.

Long-awaited negotiations between opponents and supporters of the Stuttgart 21 rail renovation project began Friday morning, with some in the strong and vocal opposition saying they were optimistic.

Speaking to reporters before the meeting, Baden-Wuerttemberg State Premier Stefan Mappus said he wanted to make the debate over the project "more transparent."

"We want to show people why we see Stuttgart 21 as an important project for Baden-Wuerttemberg, why it's a project that will last for generations," he said. "We also want to back everything up with facts and move beyond emotions, so that everyone can understand it based on concrete arguments."

Two hours into the discussions, project opponents broke them off to confer with each other before resuming them later in the afternoon. Sources close to the talks said both sides disagreed on the conditions for how to proceed.

SPAIN: High speed services are due to start running from Madrid to Cuenca and Albacete on December 15, and to Requena-Utiel and Valencia on December 18, Development Minister José Blanco has announced.

...Investment of €5·12bn by the ministry in building the new route over the period from 2004 to 2010 had generated turnover of €10·37bn and had created 105 720 direct or indirect jobs. A further 136 226 jobs and €9·06bn are expected to be generated by the new line in 2011-16.

High speed services are expected to carry 3·6 million passengers in their first year of operation, with four in 10 journeys between Madrid and Valencia made by rail. As well as 800 000 new journeys, 55% of passengers currently travelling by air are expected to transfer to rail, compared to 25% of those travelling by private car and 5% of coach passengers.

Cotton prices soared to a nominal record high on Friday amid heavy buying in China, the world's largest importer, and disappointing crops in major producing nations including Pakistan.

The rise in the price of cotton will reverberate through the textile industry, forcing clothing companies to either pass the increase on to the consumer or face lower margins. While the impact is likely to be muted on high-priced clothes, it could be more noticeable in cheaper items such as t-shirts and underwear.

Clothing companies including UK-based Next and jeans maker Levi Strauss & Co have already announced price hikes due to rising cotton costs.

In New York, ICE December cotton futures surged to a record high of 119.80 cents per pound, surpassing the previous record set in 1995. Later, cotton traded up 3.13 cents to 118 cents per

Germany's leading economic research institutes have thrown their weight behind Berlin's drive to persuade eurozone partners to agree on an insolvency mechanism for member states that are in effect bankrupt.

In a report to the government published on Thursday, the institutes said that merely reinforcing the rules of the eurozone's stability and growth pact - as proposed by the European Commission - would not be enough to prevent speculation against debt-laden member states from destabilising the currency union.

EU finance ministers are attempting to draft regulations to prevent any repetition of the recent crisis in the eurozone, triggered by Greece's debt problems.

The arguments from the heart of Germany's academic-economic establishment are likely to be used by Berlin in its efforts to persuade the rest of the European Union to set up a "crisis resolution mechanism" - an insolvency procedure in all but name - even if it means amending the EU's Lisbon treaty.

Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, has delivered a bleak prognosis for the US economy, suggesting that he supports a new monetary stimulus to battle high unemployment and head off the risk of a downward spiral in prices.

The increasing likelihood of hundreds of billions of dollars of further asset purchases by the Fed - a strategy known as quantitative easing - will heighten tensions in international currency markets by weakening the dollar further. That may prompt other central banks to follow suit with currency intervention or QE of their own.

Mr Bernanke on Friday also marched the Fed another step closer to adopting a formal inflation target - a politically contentious goal he has pursued since becoming chairman - saying that most of the body's officials think that price rises should be "2 per cent or a bit below".

Thus, in 2000, Lawrence Summers, then the Treasury secretary, declared that the keys to avoiding financial crisis were "well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective corporate governance and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of contract enforcement." By implication, these were things the Asians lacked but we had.

We didn't.

The accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement -- in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.

What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1 per cent interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.

Finance is the new form of warfare - without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? All that is required is for central banks to accept dollar credit of depreciating international value in payment for local assets. Victory promises to go to whatever economy's banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world's resources. The key is to persuade foreign central banks to accept this electronic credit.

For four months Belgium has been without a government, its public debt is approaching 100% of GDP and the spread of Belgian 10-year bonds over the German benchmark is today three times as high as at the beginning of this year. Is Belgium the next country with a sovereign debt crisis?

So far the country has managed to stay off the radar screens of most international investors, who focus on Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. But that may change if the political crisis - which has been going on for more than two years - is not resolved soon. At the June general elections, the separatist NVA emerged as the strongest party in Flanders, while in French-speaking Wallonia, the Socialists came out first. In the ensuing coalition negotiations, the N-VA has chosen to get a federal reform agreed first before building a government, in a complex bargaining process between the seven parties that currently participate in the negotiation talks. The result is a political stalemate that risks paralysing the political system for months.  

A world where over-spending countries need to reduce domestic demand and boost net exports, while over-saving countries are unwilling to reduce their reliance on export-led growth, is a world where currency tensions must inevitably come to a boil. Aside from the eurozone, the US, Japan, and the United Kingdom all need a weaker currency. Even Switzerland is intervening to weaken the franc.
...
The trouble, of course, is that not all currencies can be weak at the same time: if one is weaker, another must, by definition, be stronger. Likewise, not all economies can improve net exports at the same time: the global total is, by definition, equal to zero. So the competitive devaluation war in which we find ourselves is a zero-sum game: one country's gain is some other country's loss
...
If China, emerging markets, and other surplus countries prevent nominal currency appreciation via intervention - and prevent real appreciation via sterilization of such intervention - the only way deficit countries can achieve real depreciation is via deflation. That will lead to double-dip recession, even larger fiscal deficits, and runaway debt.

If nominal and real depreciation (appreciation) of the deficit (surplus) countries fails to occur, the deficit countries' falling domestic demand and the surplus countries' failure to reduce savings and increase consumption will lead to a global shortfall in aggregate demand in the face of a capacity glut. This will fuel more global deflation and private and public debt defaults in debtor countries, which will ultimately undermine creditor countries' growth and wealth.

Hat tip naked capitalism

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

The absurdity of illegal activity, criminal conduct, rampant fraud has reached a point where the nation much declare "No More." We must begin the process of identifying criminal actors -- and prosecuting them.

The latest twist on the criminality/foreclosure fraud: The hiring of untrained, incompetent burger flippers to act as lawyers or paralegals in the processing of foreclosures....(Barry cites the Florida examples)....This is a degree of recklessness previously unseen in American jurisprudence.

My advice: If you have been in any way personally harmed by the illegal actions of any bank, law firm, process server, or loan servicing agency, you MUST file criminal charges. If your home was broken into by a firm to change the locks illegally, that is breaking and entering, and conspiracy. If the wrong bank filed a foreclosure action, if the wrong house was foreclosed upon, its time to go criminal prosecution route.

....

Corporations that get free speech rights also have liability for their own criminal actions. Its way past time we start forcing those responsibilities to have some meaning.

This is not about keeping deadbeats in their homes, as a few idiots and liars have asserted. The corporate sympathizers who are too busy fellating the bank to recognize what is going should be ignored. This is about fundamental property rights and the Rule of Law in the United States -- nothing less.

It would seem that this should be done in some state where the judges are not so corporate friendly, such as South Carolina. There are attorneys in such states that are defending clients against bogus foreclosures. The best defense might be a good offense. I am surprised it is not already happening. Nothing benefits a civil case like a prior criminal conviction.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."