ZeroHedge points out today that Australia, the world's 12th-ranked economy, has now joined a growing list of nations that have agreed to bypass the dollar in bilateral trade with China. China, ranked 2nd behind the US, also has similar agreements with Japan (3rd), Brazil (6th), India (9th), and Russia (10th).

Although unilateral agreements have been in place for some time between China and the countries listed above, last week the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) agreed to set up a development bank to compete with the IMF, indicating it's gearing up to compete in a post-dollar world.

In a sign of the prime minister's growing isolation in Europe after his decision to promise a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, Paris and Berlin have decided jointly to boycott the British "balance of competences" review. The decision by France and Germany is a particular setback to Cameron, who said in his long-awaited speech on the EU in January that nothing should be off the table in the review, which will examine every area of EU lawmaking.

But France and Germany, who form the EU's "big three" with the UK, have decided to steer clear of the review because they see it as driven by British politics. A French diplomat said: "This is a British domestic political exercise. We have therefore decided we would not participate."

Berlin's decision to ignore the British "balance of competences" review follows a clear private warning from Merkel that, if re-elected in September, she would grant little of substance to Cameron in his demands for a renegotiation of the terms of Britain's EU membership before the UK's referendum, which the prime minister has said would be held by 2017 at the latest. Hollande has been publicly dismissive of Cameron's speech.

Among the questions he asked was about US exports and wages, but the question itself was not nearly as important as the response he received from this senior administration official. In fact, this single, seven word response clarifies everything, explains everything, and leaves little else to discuss: “We’re just going to kill the dollar.”

There it is, the entire agenda in one short sentence. It explains everything we have been seeing domestically and globally. That one statement makes every other question irrelevant, or otherwise answers all economic questions and explains everything. Nothing else matters. I urge you to ponder that statement and all that it implies. Doing so will provide you with the clarity to understand not only what is taking place today, but what is yet to come.

The ultimate objective is to implement an international currency in tandem with a system of global governance. The problem is that most people are not thinking large enough, nor do they understand the magnitude of the lie.

America has become a captured operation - captured from within. Think of the Vichy French, internal collaboration with the enemy, or softening the ground for a full takeover from within. The takeover of America has already happened, the collaborators have already been installed, and we are now on a path to complete subjugation of a larger global system of governance. If you continue to doubt this, how else would you explain the numerous examples of our dual-party governmental acquiescence of self destruction?

To catch up to all that technology, the FBI is working with other members of the intelligence community to propose new legal snooping rules by the end of the year, Weissman said at the National Press Club in Washington last week. Weissman mentioned not just the ability to watch Gchat in real-time, but also the chat function in online games like Scrabble, as well as online voice chat programs like Skype and cloud storage services like DropBox (a noted favorite of former CIA spymaster David Petraeus.)

It's a broad goal, and it's likely criminals will adapt faster than the FBI can catch them. Such is the history of crime.

Easter is the most important festival in the Christian calendar and pilgrims have attended church across the world. But our correspondent says that, after Easter, the Pope will have to begin tackling the key issues facing the Catholic Church, such as reforming a Vatican bureaucracy riven by infighting and allegations of corruption, and tackling the issue of clerical sexual abuse.

Vatican watchers will also be keeping a keen eye on new appointments to key positions.

In his Easter homily, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, invited the Pope to visit. The patriarch, the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, also urged the international community to take "concrete and effective decisions to find a balanced and just solution for the Palestinian cause, which lies at the heart of all the Middle East's troubles".

Launched earlier this month following public donations of €6,000, www.rechtesland.de is the latest attempt to stem what is seen by some as growing far-right activity in Germany. Last year 900 armed police stormed 150 neo-Nazi premises in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the country has been rocked by allegations that a neo-Nazi cell in the eastern city of Zwickau called the National Socialist Underground committed 10 murders between 2000 and 2007. According to a study last year by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a German political foundation associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, 9% of all Germans hold far-right views, up from 8.2% two years earlier.

The map, which shows the locations of extreme-right groups, their associations, murders, attacks and current projects, was the idea of data journalist Lorenz Matzat, although the raw information comes from a collaboration with Apabiz, a Berlin-based nonprofit organisation that runs one of the country's most extensive archives on neo-Nazi activity.

In the first two days of operation, Rechtes Land was visited by 48,000 users.

Soon to be augmented with Wikipedia-style detail, the online map will include historical information from the second world war, memorial sites and everything people want to know, past and present, about extremism where they live. The data already shows 120 marches by fascist organisations in Germany in 2012 alone, says Matzat. "I decided we should use the web to show how much fascism is still alive in Germany," he says from his office in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. "The problem is shifting and not to talk about it doesn't make it go away."

The bank's chief financial officer said after the earnings were released on Thursday that it was "quick in recovering ground in March" on the lost deposits in February. The figures highlight the scale of the problems at Italy's third-biggest lender, which received a 4 billion euro ($5.1 billion) state bailout last month, according to Reuters. The news of Monte dei Paschi comes as a deal to rescue Cyprus banks from financial collapse has renewed fears about Europe’s shaky financial system.

Many banks across Europe have been struggling for more than three years as losses on government bonds and bad loans piled up. Some governments, meanwhile, have taken on more debt trying to prop up their lenders to the point where they have needed bailing out themselves.

In Cyprus's case, its banking sector became much bigger than the country's government could afford to rescue — seven times the size of the country's economy. When the banks were hit by large losses and Cyprus could not afford to bail it out on its own, the country turned to the other 16 European Union countries that use the euro.

Rather than making Europe's taxpayers foot the entire bill for bad banking, Cyprus and the other eurozone countries agreed to make the banks' bondholders and big depositors contribute to the rescue. One bank, Laiki, is to be split up, with its nonperforming loans and toxic assets going into a "bad bank." The healthy side will be absorbed into the Bank of Cyprus. Savers with more 100,000 euros in both Bank of Cyprus and Laiki will face big losses — possibly as much as 80 cents on the euro.

"Underwater" is a good description of the crisis in a country where large parts of the territory are below sea level. Ironically, the Netherlands, once a model economy, now faces the kind of real estate crisis that has only affected the United States and Spain until now. Banks in the Netherlands have also pumped billions upon billions in loans into the private and commercial real estate market since the 1990s, without ensuring that borrowers had sufficient collateral.

Consumer debt amounts to about 250 percent of available income. By comparison, in 2011 even the Spaniards only reached a debt ratio of 125 percent. The Netherlands is still one of the most competitive countries in the European Union, but now that the real estate bubble has burst, it threatens to take down the entire economy with it. Unemployment is on the rise, consumption is down and growth has come to a standstill.

Meanwhile, in the latest spillover of the Syrian conflict Israeli tanks fired into Syria Tuesday after shots were fired at troops in the occupied Golan Heights region. A mortar shell landed in the Israeli-controlled section of Golan Heights earlier in the day, although it was unclear if the projectile was fired intentionally.

“Shots were fired at an IDF patrol on the border,” a spokeswoman told Reuters. “No injuries or damage was caused. In response, IDF forces returned precise fire at the source and reported a direct hit.” Last week the United Nations Security Council warned that violence from the Syrian conflict could spillover across the Israeli border. That concern was related at least in part to the sporadic violence in the region. Two Syrian soldiers were wounded recently after IDF troops launched a missile into the area.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry reports that 446 South Korean workers have been stranded at the facility, waiting to cross back into home territory since the early hours of Wednesday. Normally, daily entry clearance is given via telephone. There are a total of about 860 South Korean workers in the Kaesong zone. One hundred and seventy-nine South Korean staff showed up at the border on Wednesday morning, but North Korea also refused to let them in.

North Korea could be making good on an earlier promise to close off the complex as part of the increasingly bellicose rhetoric exchanged between the two countries, also involving Washington. In response South Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said that all options are being considered, including military, if safety of South Koreans in the North is at risk, Reuters quoted Yonhap news agency as reporting.

South Korea claims to have contingency measures in place for dealing with hostage situations in Kaesong, but their administration is keeping silent on what those might be. The Kaesong industrial zone is a jointly-operated facility established in the 2000s, and is considered to be among the major sources of income for the destitute North, as well as the only true joint venture between the warring neighbors.

The children are not enjoying it. Some, such as the Cypriots and Greeks and many Italians and Spaniards, are openly resentful of "Mutti" (mum), as Berlin officials privately call Chancellor Angela Merkel. Others, such as the French, are sulking.

The mood among German politicians and officials is one of economic self-confidence tinged with a sense of parental duty to provide the euro zone with stiff-backed leadership, even if that makes them unpopular in Europe. "German policymakers have taken to their new found status with something close to gusto," Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, said in the latest edition of the London-based think-tank's bulletin.

"They routinely tell other euro zone countries how to run their economies, citing Germany as a model for the currency union as a whole." The view from Berlin, set out by a range of policymakers who spoke on condition of anonymity, is that Germany has a unique responsibility for the survival of the single currency area as its biggest and most dynamic economy.

The subtext is that since the Germans are the main bailout contributors and have most to lose in any collapse of monetary union, they must ensure that their partners cut their deficits, implement reforms and avoid mistakes that could sink the euro. German confidence in the ability of the European Commission and the European Central Bank to hold to a firm course without yielding to political pressure is limited.

In an essay published yesterday in the New York Times (NYT), Stockman wrote that the Fed’s quantitative easing policies following the credit crisis have flooded stock markets with cash even while the “Main Street economy” remains weak. The combination, he wrote, is “unsustainable.”

“When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008,” wrote Stockman, a former senior managing director at Blackstone Group LP (BX) and a former Republican congressman from Michigan. “Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.”

Stockman, 66, is the author of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,” which will be published tomorrow.