Mme Lagarde

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9200173/Time-to-put-the-doomed-euro-out-of-its-misery.html

Jeremy Warner calling it like it is. All Euro-Pols have to toe the line and live up De Nile. Worshiping Kant trumps all. Like bankers, we’re doomed to pay Europols and Eurocrats huge sums of money to make things ever worse. Where’s that Jack Delors when we need to lock him in a pillory at Tyburn?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9203771/Turmoil-in-global-markets-as-Spanish-bank-borrowing-from-ECB-doubles.html

The Spanish Bolsa takes another tumble and 10 year bond yields sprint past 6%. The Spanish banks are into the ECB up to their eyeballs with no possible way out. The Italians strike against Mario’s well-tempered austerity. No news in other words. Merkozy has/have gone to ground. The less said about Psychozy’s reëlection, the better his chance of not coming in third in the first round. What fun it will be to have a full red-blooded Bennite Socialist triumphantly climbing the steps of L’Élysée while M. & Mme Carla Bruni exit out the tradesmens’ door into oblivion. At least they can let Francois the Dutchman suffer the ignominy of bailing out the French banks cuando la mierda empiece a salpicar.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9201253/Neil-Heywood-mystery-Bo-Guagua-the-student-playboy-who-earned-contempt-of-tutors-and-forced-Chinese-diplomats-into-pleading-his-case.html

Meanwhile the gripping Anglo-Sino theatre of the Bo family is rattling the entire Politburo and twitterings of coups d’état roil the placid waters of the Beijing administration. Balliol, Oxford, the Oxford Union, Oxford Tory Club and Harrow all with egg on face for giving succour to a rich Commie brat with money to burn. Neil Heywood, OH, dead for his pains. Now it’s Harvard’s turn in the barrel.

Makes Christina Fernandez de Kerchner look like a wise guy.

I spoke way too soon about the lovely silver-haired lady in DC and her French coup at the IMF. She’s back to calling the sky as falling. I guess she’s had her buddies at the French Finance Ministry on the horn daily yelling “Au Secours”! Why, Oh Why doesn’t she just stuff that expensive Hermès foulard as an amuse bouche every time she feels the urge to talk to the press. We all know she’s shilling for the EZ – which is why she’s at the IMF in the first place. Flashing come hither looks at little tax cheater Geithner.

Here’s a treat for you all. A lovely picture of Christine (not Christina), replete with vivid Hermès to offset her winter tan.

Stephen Lewis at Monument Securities comments on other challenges facing the IMF:

Mme Lagarde earlier this week reiterated her call for the USA and Japan to fashion credible plans for reducing government debt over the medium term. [She] has been taking a different line with hard-pressed sovereign debtors in the euro zone. Though economic demand in these countries has typically been weaker than in the USA or Japan, the IMF has backed EU authorities in insisting on immediate action to effect swingeing cuts in government deficits.
Mme Lagarde is far from willing her prescription as a universal rule, however, probably because she is well aware that if all countries with large government deficits and rising public debt were to act as the peripheral euro zone nations have been coerced into doing, the global economy, or at least the advanced sector of it, would be locked in a prolonged downturn. Clearly, then, the IMF’s priority in enforcing fiscal restraint on euro zone member-states is the preservation of the euro arrangements. Though we may suspect that political motivations lurk behind the position the IMF has adopted, that need not be the case. It could be that the IMF genuinely sees significant benefits for the world economy from keeping the present euro currency system alive in Europe.