Greece is fully funded by a 110 billion euro ($160 billion) bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund until about the middle of 2012. However, there is an impetus emerging to restructure some of the privately held Greek debt. This motivation is coming from Berlin, which wants to see investors accept the responsibility of the bailout — potentially as soon as the end of 2011, if not this summer — for political reasons.

Ultimately, the greatest danger to the eurozone is if Germany’s voters decide that this is a problem. This is why the impetus for restructuring this summer is coming from Berlin. Finnish voters have spoken, but Helsinki does not really get a say in these matters. It is a smaller economy than even Greece, and ultimately Finland needs the European Union more than the European Union needs Finland due to the Finns’ geopolitical insecurity created by their close proximity to Russia. STRATFOR never paid much heed to the idea that Finland would halt the Portuguese bailout or the ESM. Finland has succumbed to the pressures from core Europe — from Germany — and decided to agree to a Portuguese bailout before forming a new government, thus allowing the True Finns to save face.

The real question is whether the “True Germans” will emerge — a development that would actually threaten to reverse perhaps all of the financial stability achieved thus far, and even the stability achieved beyond Europe’s borders. This explains Merkel’s wanting investors to suffer losses sooner rather than later, and why it could happen long before Athens’ bailout program ends. (Stratfor)

Read more: The Political Logic of a Greek Bailout | STRATFOR

The move in Eur during the past 2 days is brutal. Coming into the weeks trading, net Usd shorts was big, now these “speculators” have decided to average down…What could possibly go wrong?

Apart from the Crisis meeting rumours, there are multiple other posible news for the weekend;

Of course everybody is trying to deny this, until it is a fact. Another question is what ECB will do with all the crap it is holding, write down to zero? Watch out for Deutsche Bank next.

Enjoying the weekend….

On April 11 the price of silver was trading 50% above its corrective low to $26.00 per ounce dating back to late January. It was also a big day for options trading on the iShares Silver Trust (Ticker: SLV) that saw the birth of one massive bearish play that generated a ton of media attention.

As many options observers noted at the time, without knowing the motivation of the investor, it was hard to fully interpret the trade. Sure, it was a massive 100,000 lot naked options trade that predicted a one-third correction in silver’s value before July, but none of us are privy to whether this investor was already long to the eyeballs of silver futures, shares in the silver exchange traded fund or plain-old mining shares.

The market absorbed that bearish options play on April 11 with shares in the SLV narrowly escaping the attention from technical traders of a potential “reversal top.” That same day this trader made his million-dollar bet against silver, the share price closed only marginally lower.

http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2011/05/05/would-the-silver-medalist-please-stand-up/

Oil and Silver up on the Day. Vvol is huge. Goldman called the top, and the bottom. Nicely done guys.

Unemployment isn’t just blighting the lives of millions, it’s undermining America’s future. The longer this goes on, the more workers will find it impossible ever to return to employment, the more young people will find their prospects destroyed because they can’t find a decent starting job. It may not create excited chatter on cable TV, but the unemployment crisis is real, and it’s eating away at our society.

Yet any action to help the unemployed is vetoed by the fear-mongers. Should we spend modest sums on job creation? No way, say the deficit hawks, who threaten us with the purely hypothetical wrath of financial markets, and, in fact, demand that we slash spending now now now — which might well send us back into recession. Should the Federal Reserve do more to promote expansion? No, say the inflation and dollar hawks, who have been wrong again and again but insist that this time their dire warnings about runaway prices and a plunging dollar really will be vindicated.

So we’re paying a heavy price for Washington’s obsession with phantom menaces. By looking for trouble in all the wrong places, our political class is preventing us from dealing with the real crisis: the millions of American men and women who can’t find work. (NYT)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/opinion/06krugman.html?_r=1&hp

After reaching the 100 day moving average, Silver ETF is rebounding. The Fibo level we wrote of yesterday, gave the first big support. http://www.thetrader.se/2011/05/05/silver-fibo-reached/

Let’s see how volatile the snap up will be.

Great figures, but don’t forget McDonalds added 50k jobs…..

http://http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/04/news/companies/mcdonalds_jobs/index.htm

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 244,000 in April, and the unemployment rate
edged up to 9.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
Job gains occurred in several service-providing industries, manufacturing,
and mining.

Household Survey Data

The number of unemployed persons, at 13.7 million, changed little in
April. The unemployment rate edged up from 8.8 to 9.0 percent over the
month but was 0.8 percentage point lower than in November. The labor
force also was little changed in April. (See table A-1.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men
(8.8 percent), adult women (7.9 percent), teenagers (24.9 percent),
whites (8.0 percent), blacks (16.1 percent), and Hispanics (11.8 percent)
showed little change in April. The jobless rate for Asians was 6.4 percent,
not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)