07:40 – Illustrated Guide to Home Forensic Science Experiments is officially complete and off to O’Reilly’s production folks. I’ve already issued several purchase orders for the forensics kits, and will be putting together and issuing more of them over the next few days.
10:08 – I’ve enabled registration for this site, which I’m hoping will allow registered users to edit their own comments, at least for a short time after they post them. If you’re a regular here, please go ahead and register and let me know if you can edit your own comments.
16:44 – That loud sucking sound you hear is the sound of people withdrawing their money from Spanish banks. The MSM hesitates to call it a bank run, but what else would you call a net withdrawal of about $125 billion for the month ending today? Like all other eurozone banks, all Spanish banks are not just bankrupt but zombiefied. Their net worth is so far into the red that there’s nothing to be done. The Spanish government, bankrupt itself, can’t help them. The EU can’t help them. The IMF can’t help them. The ECB has already put more than $1 trillion in funny money into the EU banking system. As I predicted, that’s actually done more harm than good. It delayed the final collapse, of course, but at what a price. Spain is very close to following Greece down the tubes, and there’s nothing anyone can do now to stop it. Expect severe capital control measures to be implemented, possibly as soon as tomorrow. Not that those will do any good.
Even EU, ECB, and IMF officials are now speaking openly about the collapse of the eurozone, and “collapse” is one of the kinder words they’re using. This is a real train wreck, not just for Greece and Spain, but for the rest of the eurozone. The UK, Sweden and other EU nations that are not members of the eurozone will also suffer heavily, but nowhere near as badly as those in the eurozone. Germany has to be very near the point of abandoning the euro, if only in self-preservation.