Several articles and much media coverage over the past few days are pointing to what appears to me to be inexorable progress toward an escalating problem with the Euro. In a nutshell as I have been reading things, concern over the fiscal situation in Greece has continued to deteriorate over the past week. Even more to the point, the elections held in Spain late last week have brought to the fore what are said to be understated Spanish State and Municipal debt in a country that is reported to have overbuilt housing, and an employment rate of about 20% (with about 40% youth unemployment). Spain is a much bigger economy than either Greece or Ireland, and if Spain's economic problems continue to worsen what I am reading and listening to may well lead to serious escalation of the EuroZone debt problems. Physical gold sits at U.S.$1,525 as this morning, allegedly up significantly on Monday and yesterday as a result of increasing EuroZone concerns. As an aside, I think there are so many things that currently affect the day/day price of physical gold that to attribute gold price increases/decreases to specific, individual factors has to be simplistic in what is increasingly an ever more complex world.
Some articles you might want to read dealing with EuroZone (and Spain) issues include:
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Blanchflower: The Euro Crisis Is Headed For Disaster - 1 minute read with accompanying 4 minute video. David Blanchflower currently is a professor at Dartmouth College, formerly with the Bank of England;
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How Spain could rip the eurozone apart - reading time 3 minutes;
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The Euro Doom Scenario Starts With What's Happening In Spain Right Now - reading time 4 minutes; and,
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All For One Euro And One Euro For All? by John Maudlin - reading time 8 minutes;
The more I read and think about the EuroZone, the more I conclude any investor in equities, physical gold, or physical silver owes it to themselves to read each of these four articles, think carefully about their content, and then in the context of their respective investment strategies read and listen to everything else on the EuroZone financial issues they can find.
