You made me look it up… and found this very interesting article by a former presidential speech writer:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/so-help-me-god/3/

Actually the phrase “so help me God” is not required for the oath of office to be legal, even though the President is free to add it him/herself – the chief justice, when prompting the oath never says it, or should never say it as there have been a few accidents.

“Rights come from God, not the State…the state exists to administers His laws”

Your argument is specious and highly offensive. You’re spitting on and trampling the definition of a secular state, for which many Europeans died. Learn some history before you come here spouting your religious fervour.

Kings and dictators used to hide their absolute power behind the useless term “by the grace of god”. A prime minister in a secular republic should be guided by the phrase “we the people” and the president should be enforcing that part of the constitution, instead of grovelling in front of the man in white.

[Daphne – The US president when taking the oath of office: So help me, God.]

Kev, new debt kills old debt. It is technically known as “rolling-over.” Then, as a last resort, there is always the Easy-Credit Bank.

Ciccio, if house prices doubled, that can only reflect easy credit – unless construction stopped, which is not the case. But it still is a bubble and it can either collapse or self-adjust through (hyper)inflation.

What I see today is more of the same, which does not bode well for the future. You cannot keep creating money out of thin air without offsetting with real wealth and real savings – and certainly not with more bank-created credit. It has not yet spiralled out of control only because our computerised world is producing more at less costs – but this is all syphoned off by banks (interests) and currency inflation (printing of money, which they call ‘quanitative easing’).

The ECB is very cautious on quantitative easing, not so the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve (which is privately controlled by global bankers – and this is official. A very good book on how global bankers created the Federal Reserve is ‘The Creature from Jekyll Island’ by G. Edward Griffin).

Well abortion is arguably a different case to divorce because many people believe (I happen to be one of them) that abortion directly affects (by killing) a child.

Actually I do not agree we should legalise divorce because everyone else does it (although that implies something)

Divorce is a right, civil or otherwise, and that is the only reason it must be introduced!

kev you said the Polish Zloty has been the strongest currency in the EU since the beginning of the crisis

Poland is a very big country with a large potential for growth. Its economy was stunted to nothing during the soviet occupation. Their economy should be growing simply to correct those 60 years. We are a small island with nothing but human resources so we need to plug into the most favourable economies we can and the Euro was great for that reason.

@Kev
Glad to see you feel better with the low rate of foreign ownership of our debt. Good to be happy when the news is good.
You say “while of course the population as a whole would still need to service this debt to the benefit of the very few.”

Actually, graph 4, which is the one you link to very specifically, shows that Malta has the EU’s highest rate of non-financial resident ownership of the government’s debt – in other words, private persons hold a higher percentage of the Maltese government’s debt here in Malta than our counterparts in Europe.

So your statement above should not be of a major concern either. Unless we get into a sovereign debt crises, of course (read about Japan here).

My comment about house prices should be taken in the context of comments you made about hyperinflation and the Euro (which has been in use since 2000). What I mean is that when central bankers keep interest rates low as they are doing right now and as they did in the early part of 2000s, real asset inflation may be higher than CPI inflation – which in Europe (and beyond) usually has a target of 2%.

Unfortunately, I have to turn to the UK (which is a non-euro country) for statistics, but then it is not very different from Europe. A recent Halifax report shows that, despite the bubble and the crisis, home prices in the UK doubled over the past decade – after including the period of the financial crisis of 2007-2010. Borrowing from Leonard Ellul Bonici’s maths above (which I think is right), it means that home prices compounded at an average of about 7% p.a. That surely was not the rate of CPI inflation, or target inflation, was it?

See Halifax report here:
http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media1/research/halifax_hpi.asp
See “27 January – Halifax – UK House Prices Doubled During the 2000s”

Allow me to stick to the subject by using abortion as an analogy.

As you know, in the US, abortion was introduced not by means of a law, but as a consequence of a Supreme Court judgment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade).

As you also know, the American people have never really accepted this judicial imposition, as it were. Killings of abortion doctors are not uncommon in the US.

Also, the judicial “imposition” hardened Christian fundamentalists.

When such controversial issues – e.g. divorce, abortion – are resolved heavy-handedly, and not through debate, the reaction is always strong, and conservative. Not compassionate conservative, but irrational conservative.

Let us see in advance the backlash to impositions done in the name of progress.

Ciccio – concerning point 1, < 3% does seem to be the case, but hard data is not really available. Here’s the Eurostat link which includes data on debt held by non-residents (< 5% in this case): http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Structure_of_government_debt

That does help a little, even if it has sponged out potential productive investment (the intake from government bonds hardly ever goes towards healthy investment), while of course the population as a whole would still need to service this debt to the benefit of the very few.

Here’s the relative graph: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Breakdown_of_Debt_by_Debt_Holder,_2007.PNG&filetimestamp=20090430095957

As for the Smolensk affair – I am not suggesting anything, full stop.

Concerning point 2 – you are referring to the housing bubble, which is hardly a measure of price or currency inflation (I had missed the word ‘home’ in your comment). House prices go up when a lot of credit is available – lots of money chasing fewer houses, offset by building booms, again offset by more credit (credit – money – created out of thin air as a consequence of fractional reserve banking, might I add; in other words, money which never really existed – good for banks for they receive interest on money they never really had, hence the house of cards effect).