I’m not any place where I can blog easily but I had to post this paragraph from Jim Willie’s newsletter on a possible dollar debacle in the coming week/weeks…

I’m hearing that US embassies are being instructed to buy the local currency (?) –

Is this really in the works, is it scare-mongering, gossip, disinformation…?

Who knows, but it’s worth posting.

Be alert.

I note that gold, after looking like it would correct, now seems to have gone back up and the dollar is teetering again…as it’s done many a time.

I’m ready to move if I have to.

Down here in the pampas, swine flu is rampant. People go in and out of Buenos Aires with masks. The portenos don’t have the best reputation on the continent, and this is making it worse. Everyone is holding their breath anyway – with or without masks.

The winds are beginning to blow in from the delta, as they always do at this time of year. It feels like brisk spring weather in the US. Prices in the city are high but everyone is waiting for something to happen. Don’t buy now, says an expat blogger who watches real estate. Everything’s about to come down. People are pushing up the prices to squeeze out the last penny before things crash.

Don’t have anything to do with them, says a Brazilian businessman. “Them” means Argentines – who are said to be arrogant…touchy….corrupt…drama queens…

One the other hand, everyone likes the Brazilians. They’re the Italians of South America.

In Argentina, they have farms and food…and they cry, goes a Brazilian saying. In Brazil, they don’t have food. And they dance.

It’s true.

I had lunch at a restaurant on the banks of the Rio dela Plata with an American  – a just-retired attorney from Virginia – who is down here looking for property. He was talking about vaccinations. Some of his theories were definitely paranoid – but it’s the kind of paranoia that’s plausible these days. He wanted to drop his American citizenship, but was afraid it would raise a red flag. He talked about the exit tax and how it prevented the wealthy from leaving. It was the first time in my life I was grateful for not being a financial success.

I suggested that the purloined letter strategy might be the best. Hide right out in the open, in the most obvious place. We discussed what that would be. It was a toss up between getting a job at Goldman Sachs, working for the Pentagon, or emigrating to some member of the Axis of Evil.

He had fish. I had a salad – an odd choice in this meat-saturated culture. But I’m on a budget. Wandering the globe on your own steam would be ruinous without one. For me, a night at a restaurant means a couple of days of rice and beans to make up for it. I haven’t couch-surfed yet, but it may yet be in the cards, if this trip gets prolonged.

Jim Willie:

“The globe is losing patience with leadership and management of the USGovt ship at sea. They simply refuse to offer a credible solution to the primary keynote crack in the hull, falling housing prices and cratered mortgages, each of which work their destructive magic to wreck the banks. The home loan modifications are a farce, a travesty not designed to modify but rather to frame a series of loan forbearances. The motive for not fixing the mortgage mess is mysterious to the masses, but not here. Jackass claims have been consistent, that effective loan modifications would alter the underlying mortgage bonds drastically. The Powerz wanted enough time delay to rejigger as many mortgage bonds as possible into new securities, thus rendering impossible any legal challenges to the original mortgage package process that was loaded with fraud to the hilt. Any drastic alteration of mortgage bonds would reveal vast fraud of two types. Many mortgage bonds did not have clearly certificate property titles with careful registrations. And then the coyote ugly part, that many mortgage bonds were simply counterfeits sold into a frenzy filled credit market designed to process the most vile vermin on paper. The USDollar is vulnerable here and now, as a new wave of bank losses is imminent from numerous types of mortgages along with some basic types. Let’s see if the grapevine is correct, that the USDollar will begin to see a trashing initiative starting this weekend, out of Asia. They must be impatient beyond description. This autumn is expected to see some rather tumultuous events unfold, as the US financial structures are breaking across most of its ramparts even as loyalty to it is fading like a mist. There will be no return to the US of yesteryear, only a tragic march.”