News and Prophecy Staff

“At least 100,000 people took to the streets of Madrid on Saturday (31 January) to show support for anti-establishment party Podemos, one week after Greek voters almost gave Syriza, a party with similar objectives, an absolute majority” (EU Observer, February 2, 2015). The Podemos party estimated the crowd to be three times this size, while the Spanish paper El Pais estimated 153,000 protestors (ibid.). Spain is scheduled to hold national elections by the end of 2015.

“More than 25 years after the Berlin Wall’s fall, Russian lawmakers are mulling a proposal to condemn West Germany’s 1990 ‘annexation’ of East Germany as Moscow’s answer to Western denunciation of its seizure of Crimea” (The Local, January 28, 2015). Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, under whose leadership the Berlin Wall came down, “called the contention ‘nonsense’” (ibid.).

“Under the Bundesbank’s new gold storage plan in 2013, [Germany]  decided to bring back 674 tonnes from abroad by 2020 and store half of its gold in its own vaults… Since the transfers began in 2013, the Bundesbank said it has relocated a total of 157 tonnes of gold to Frankfurt—67 tonnes from Paris and 90 tonnes from New York” (AFP, January 19, 2015).

“Just hours after bringing his far-left Syriza party to victory in the Greek elections, Alexis Tsipras has been appointed PM and shown that he is prepared to play hardball with eurozone fiscal hawks...” (EU Observer, January 26, 2015). Tsipras, age 40, “is the youngest Greek PM in modern times” and was elected to bring an end to austerity (ibid.). Greek debt is mounting and deadlines for repayment are looming in the next couple of months. While Mr.

The “European Experiment” appears to be reaching its end, at least in its present form. With the fiscal turmoil in the south, the European Central Bank just issued its own quantitative easing program, excluding Greece because it is too great a risk for default (Stratfor, January 27, 2015).