Christopher Layne in the American COnservative.

The dollar's vulnerability is the United States' geopolitical Achilles' heel. Its role as the international economy's reserve currency ensures American preeminence, and if it loses that status, hegemony will be literally unaffordable. As Cornell professor Jonathan Kirshner observes, the dollar's vulnerability "presents potentially significant and underappreciated restraints upon contemporary American political and military predominance."

BBC report.

It comes a day after data showed a worse-than-expected budget deficit of 13.6% of gross domestic product.

Credit rating agency Moody's also cut its rating on Greek debt on Thursday.

From Ellen Brown's Web of Debt.

HFT rigging helps explain how Goldman Sachs earned at least $100 million per day from its trading division, day after day, on 116 out of 194 trading days through the end of September 2009. It's like taking candy from a baby, when you can see the other players' cards.

Telegraph report.

Spiralling sovereign debt in Europe, the US, and Japan has emerged as the top threat to the world economy and risks setting off a fresh financial storm, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

Times report.

The cost of Greek borrowing reached a record level this morning suggesting Athens will soon have to call on an extensive bailout to ensure that it does not default.

The yield on Greek ten-year government bonds rose to 7.807 per cent, more than double the level for German debt and far beyond the level that Greece can afford to pay if it is to get through its debt crisis.

Telegraph report.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble has pleaded with his country's citizens to back a joint EU-IMF bail out for Greece worth up to €45bn (£40bn), warning that failure to act risks a financial meltdown.

"We cannot allow the bankruptcy of a euro member state like Greece to turn into a second Lehman Brothers," he told Der Spiegel. "Greece's debts are all in euros, but it isn't clear who holds how much of those debts. The consequences of a national bankruptcy would be incalculable. Greece is just as systemically important as a major bank," he said.

Bloomberg report.

Germany might consider exiting Europe's current monetary union to create a smaller bloc as the Greek crisis threatens to turn the euro area into a region of "fiscal profligacy," Morgan Stanley said.

Reuters report.

Railway porter-turned-billionaire financier George Soros delivered a stark warning last night that the financial world is on the wrong track and that we may be hurtling towards an even bigger boom and bust than in the credit crisis.

The man who 'broke' the Bank of England (and who is still able to earn a cool $3.3 bln in a year) said the same strategy of borrowing and spending that had got us out of the Asian crisis could shunt us towards another crisis unless tough lessons are learned.

CNBC report.

George Soros has warned that the joint European Union/IMF rescue package for Greece may not be enough.

The legendary investor who forced the pound out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 believes that the rescue package is only "a little step" that may not stop Athens falling into a "debt spiral".

Telegraph report.

Euphoria over a joint EU-IMF rescue deal for Greece worth €45bn (£39.8bn) has given way to caution after angry reactions in Germany and continued concerns among bond investors that any bail-out merely delays the day of reckoning.

[...]

Professor Ekkehard Wenger from Würzburg University said the aid for Greece is "another step on the slippery slope downwards. All rational economic rules are being thrown out of the window. This is a bottomless pit." "In the short-term this may calm things but within 10 years the eurozone is not going to exist any longer in its current form," he told Handelsblatt.

Niall Ferguson in the FT.

Last week Moody's Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers' killer question (posed before he returned to government): "How long can the world's biggest borrower remain the world's biggest power?"

On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in Greece, the birthplace of western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Guardian report.

Finance ministers from the 16 countries in the eurozone have thrashed out the details of a potential last-minute bailout for Greece.

Officials from Spain, which currently holds the EU presidency, are understood to have brokered an agreement on a rate at which the eurozone countries would lend money to the debt-ridden country and the mechanism for making the cash available.

The intention is to set the interest rate below the current market rate and allow Greece to raise crucial funding without having to resort to the financial markets, which have become increasingly jittery about its sovereign debt in recent days. But ministers are keeping exact details of the fund secret until Greece asks for the money.

From CNBC.

Attempts to rescue Greece are simply making matters worse and the quicker the crisis comes, the better for the world. This is what John Taylor, the founder of FX Concepts, one of the largest currency hedge funds in the world, wrote in a recent article.

"If the political actors in this tragedy-comedy play their roles well -- staving off collapse -- our suffering will be worse," Taylor wrote.

He is shorting the euro and sees the single currency hitting $1.20; he also believes longer term the euro will collapse - and the sooner the better.

Jon Moulton in the Independent.

The debt that Britain faces is monstrous, and neither Tories nor Labour will admit it. They prefer to quibble about the small change than admit that they are taking part in, in effect, a conspiracy on the British people. To make it worse, much of the media is allowing them to get away with it, presumably because they think -- as the politicians seem to believe -- that the public doesn't want to hear the bad news. In short, we are complicit in a con.

[...]

In 1975 the UK had government interest-bearing debt of about 45 per cent of the total economy (GDP) and the debt was rising at about 8 per cent per year. We then had to crawl to the IMF in 1976. Today, that interest-bearing debt is about 65 per cent of GDP, rising nearly 13 per cent a year. A degree in economics will not be necessary to spot that things are a lot worse than in 1975.

Bloomberg report.

Billionaire investor George Soros said the next U.K. government after the May 6 election should decide whether to allow a further devaluation of the pound to rebalance the economy and assist the recovery.

From Business Insider.

Fitch has downgraded Greek debt to triple-B-minus from triple-B-plus.