Because New Year's Day fell on Friday this year and today is only Jan. 3, real news has not yet started happening again after the Christmas break. This gives us a chance to catch up on some significant events towards the end of last year that were skimmed over by the mainstream as the print and broadcast media went into hysterics over climate change before and after the Copenhagen Climate Change summit.

Most significant of these events was the downgrading by credit agencies of the rating given to the Greek government. What this means is that international credit agencies think Greece, a Eurozone nation, will not be able to service it's debts.

One of the best decisions Britain's last Conservative government made, although they did it for all the wrong reasons, was to stay outside the Single European Currency. The rigourous economic controls imposed by an unnatural linking of weak and strong economies was only ever going to be sustainable in an era of vigorous economic growth. Many poorer nations were struggling even in the days before recession kicked in. Now membership of the single currency is having disastrous consequences across Europe. Even the stronger economies, Germany, France, Holland and Sweden are feeling the bite of the recession as they face the prospect, under Eurozone regulations, of having to prop up the failing nations.

Greece is the first Single Currency zone nation to be weighed down by the cost of debts it has incurred through membership but it is likely not to be the last. And the expense of higher interest rates demanded by bond holders in the international currency markets is not the only problem. Lack of industrial investment due to the exporting of jobs to low labour cost Asian nations is creating massive unemployment particularly among the young. The welfare benefits EU members must by law pay to the unemployed are having to be financed by borrowing thus swelling the debt. At the moment in Greece the rate of unemployment in the 16 - 24 age group stands at 25%. Other troubled nations, Ireland, Italy and Spain have youth unemployment rates of 28, 27 and a startling 42 per cent respectively. (figures from Eurostat the official EU statistics source)

Outside the single currency group thanks to John Major's prescient decision to hold off sacrificing Britain's economic sovereignty for the sake of being a good internationalist, our Labour government can fall back on the traditional response to global downturns by letting the currency depreciate thus reducing the real cost of servicing the crippling debts they have incurred. It is ironic that the party of centre left internationalism that derided Major as a Little Englander and an economic reactionary for his reluctance to commit to the European leg of the New World Order project should now be benefiting from from his economic caution. The significant fact is that unlike Gordon Brown who went from full timed education straight into politics and thus is well equipped with theory and short on life experience, John Major, before he went into politics, was an accountant. He did not attend a University full time, getting his higher education through the accountancy profession's own system while he held down a job as a trainee. Studying one day a week and at night and weekend meant he combined the theory with real world experience. Through that, by instinct, intuition or observation he became aware of the perils that lie in wait when nations surrender the right to manage their own affairs.

It is even more ironic that while in a position to benefit from Major's decision is too committed to pipedreams like internationalism and globalisation to take advantage of the opportunity.

We may ten expect 2010 to be the year cracks emerge in the structure of the Eurozone.

Another internationalist chicken that will come home to roost is the decision by the USA's terminally PC Democratic Party to grab the opportunity presented by widespread disillusionment with the outgoing Bush administration to shoehorn a black candidate into The White House. Politically Correct Thinkers are seldom clear thinkers and the chosen candidate Barack Obama was not only painfully inexperienced and the proud possessor of an ego far larger than any talent a single human being could hope to be granted.

Not only did Obama, immediately on being elected, start to behave as if he had been elected President Of The World, he also revealed an almost complete failure to understand basic economics by embarking on a lonytoons policy of printing money to fund the handouts he had pledged in return for campaign support. The result was inevitable. America's debts that had driven the economy for so long suddenly did not seem like such a good investment to developing nations like India, China and other emerging economies. This has sparked a gold rush as nations and banks return to doing business in gold because the US$, the only remaining reserve currency is not considered reliable. Nobody wants to be caught holding dollars when the USA defaults on its interest payments.

The state of the western economies was made clear when China's Prime Minister gave Obama a lecture on the unsustainability of America's deficit spending and told the President quite bluntly he could not rely on China buying US Treasury bonds to fund deficits any more. China had already ceased to accept interest payments on dollars, demanding that the US pay its obligations in gold.

OK, so forget the talk of recovery and a return to growth, the only growth happening is due to governments creating electronic money to pump into their economies, The Daily Stirrer has set out exactly how much trouble the western powers are in. The recession may be technically over but the slump is just beginning. Isn't it great to live in interesting times.

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