In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Mish Shedlock discuss:
- The World's Baking System Is On The Precipice
- It's as vulnerable (or more) as during 2008
- Stocks & Bonds Hit All-Time Highs
- We're in a chimera market right now
- Central Control Is Tightening
- Dissent is being squashed wherever possible
- Real Wages Are Declining
- Good luck squashing that dissent when folks can't feed their families…
Fresh from separate trips to Las Vegas where they marveled at the lengths people go to distance themselves from reality, Chris and Mish highlight a similar immersion in fantasy being displayed by those conducting the recent "stress tests" on European banks.
The initial numbers indicated "all is well", which anyone with a brain and access to Google can quickly disprove as patently untrue. Indeed, in just the past few days, corrections are trickling in that indicate Europe's banks are instead very, very ill (take this example of Deutsche Bank, which has been found to have a capital gap larger than its current market capitalization). And this vulnerability is not just limited to banks in Europe. As Chris puts it:
Assuming the recent stress test of European banks include Italy, we already know that Italy has non-performing loans on the books that are in excess of 300 billion Euros all by themselves. I can’t imagine the non-performing loans are going to do all that great no matter how 'stress free' of a test you come up with. But, under any reasonable definition of stress, we’re
by aggrivated 
