10/24/2011 - Armageddon for Europe!

Source: Reuters/NY Times

Today is the great summit conference at which the leaders of France and Germany had promised to propose a final solution to the worst sovereign debt crisis of all time.
But last week, even before the summit began, they had ALREADY failed — by AGAIN postponing a decision.
Right at this very moment, while Germany's Sarkozy and France's Merkel hurl subtle insults at each other in thinly veiled rage, Greece has collapsed into chaos with riots on the streets, the country has been shut down by general strikes, and its economy is in shambles.
With Greece in chaos, France's megabanks — loaded with bad Greek loans — are on the brink of bankruptcy. But if Sarkozy bails them out with French money, France loses its triple-A credit rating, and it's game over for Europe.
Why? Because Europe's bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, REQUIRES its donors to maintain a triple-A, and France is one of the biggest donors. So if France is disqualified, the entire European bailout scheme falls apart.
On the Germany side, Merkel's megabanks may not be on the brink of bankruptcy — yet. But Merkel's public support IS. If she helps bail out French banks, her political career is history ... the new German leadership bows out entirely, and the European bailout scheme collapses just the same.
Never before in the 40 years since I founded Weiss Research have I seen anything like this singular convergence of forces. We have:

• Major Western democracies on the brink of default for the first time in modern history ...
  
  
• The world's largest economy — the EU — coming unglued at the seams ...
  
  
• And the world's largest banks in de-facto bankruptcy, kept alive by little more than a fiction — that their bad loans are worth "full value."

Meanwhile, Europe's political leaders are in paralysis and hundreds of thousands of people are pouring out onto the streets in protest.
Yet strangely, despite all this, Wall Street is in dreamland, sleepwalking through earnings season.
That's fine by me — because it gives you one last opportunity to protect yourself, or better yet, to turn this unique situation into an equally unique profit opportunity.

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