The BCC surveyed 4,000 businesses and found 64% of those who responded said they favoured making adjustments to the UK's agreements with the EU. Employment law was the number one area they wanted opt outs from. However, the survey also found that almost one in five, 18%, favoured a full withdrawal from Europe.

The BCC tested five scenarios for the UK's future relationship with the EU. Respondents were asked to give their view on the potential impact of each scenario on Britain's business and economic prospects. The main focus of business unhappiness was employment law, followed by health and safety law, and regional development polices.

Many Roman Catholics will want a reform of the Church's structures to give bishops more power to affect its policy. Although Pope John Paul II made some changes to the Vatican's civil service, or Curia, the last major re-organisation was under Pope Paul VI during the 1960s.

Responding to the priorities of the Second Vatican Council, the reforms gave bishops from around the world the chance to participate in governing the Vatican, introduced limited five-year terms, and specified regular inter-departmental consultation.

Gradually the devolving effect of those reforms has been eroded and the Curia has re-centralised power in the Church. Pope Francis' thinking will become more apparent in the next few weeks as he makes key appointments - especially that of Secretary of State, in effect his deputy.

The people of Pope Francis' Rome diocese - and far beyond it... will now be waiting to see humility and simplicity matched by action in reforming the Church.

Mario Soares, who steered the country to democracy after the Salazar dictatorship, said all political forces should unite to “bring down the government” and repudiate the austerity policies of the EU-IMF Troika.

“Portugal will never be able to pay its debts, however much it impoverishes itself. "If you can'’t pay, the only solution is not to pay. When Argentina was in crisis it didn'’t pay. Did anything happen? No, nothing happened," he told Antena 1.

The former socialist premier and president said the Portuguese government has become a servant of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, meekly doing whatever it is told. “In their eagerness to do the bidding of Senhora Merkel, they have sold everything and ruined this country. "In two years this government has destroyed Portugal,"” he said.

Dario Perkins from Lombard Street Research said a hard-nosed default would force Portugal out of the euro. “It would create incredible animosity,” he said. “Germany would be alarmed that other countries might do the same so it would take a very tough line.”

Mr Perkins said all the peripheral states are “deeply scared” of being forced out of EMU. “They fear their economies would collapse, which is ridiculous. But in the end voters are going to elect politicians who refuse to along with austerity as we are seeing in Italy, and the EU will lose control,” he said.

Established in the 1980s, dark pools are electronic Alternative Trading Systems, often run by big banks, which function similarly to the NYSE, except that traders buy and sell without knowing the bids of others involved. Participants aren'’t the only ones left wondering what exactly transpires in dark pools. Federal regulators have had a tough time knowing if these deals are proper or in the best interests of the market.

A few years ago dark pools made up only a small percentage of all trading. But, recently, there have been days when these shadowy transactions comprised nearly 40% of all deals, up from 16% in 2008. In January, daily dark pool trading actually surpassed the New York Stock Exchange with 920 million trades to 900 million for the NYSE.

The eight cardinals will help him put into place changes in an administration which has been held responsible for some of the mishaps and scandals that plagued the eight-year reign of Pope Benedict before he resigned in February.

The eight prelates come from Italy, Chile, India, Germany, Democratic Republic of Congo, the United States, Australia, and Honduras, indicating that Francis intends to take seriously calls by bishops from around the world to have more say in Vatican decisions that affect their areas.

An Italian archbishop will act as secretary of the group, which will hold its first formal meeting in October in Rome. Francis, who was elected exactly one month ago, has already been in contact with each of them, the statement said.

The group will also study changes to a constitution by the late Pope John Paul II called "Pastor Bonus", which gave the Curia, the name by which the various departments that run the Church is known, its current structure in 1988. The last major reform of the Curia was carried out by Pope Paul VI in 1967.

The IMF said accommodative measures adopted by the Bank of England and other central banks, such as low interest rates and quantitative easing, had helped to stabilise the financial system. However, it warned that the longer these policies –dubbed "MP-plus" –were in place, the greater the risk that negative effects could spill over to other parts of the economy.

"Financial stability risks may be shifting to other parts of the financial system, such as shadow banks, pension funds, and insurance companies," the IMF said in a chapter of its Global Financial Stability Report. "Despite their positive short-term effects for banks, these central bank policies are associated with financial risks that are likely to increase the longer the policies are maintained."

The fact that they are doing it over 7 years rather than 7 weeks, is just an indication that gold probably isn'’t in the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Reserve doesn'’t want to have to go out and buy it overnight to fulfill the German demand. They are trying to stretch it out as long as possible in order to keep gold prices controlled. I mean you can do 5 tons at a time on an airplane shipment. A few hundred shipments and you can have that (1,536 tons of) gold back (in Germany) in a matter of weeks. The only possible conclusion you can make is the gold isn'’t there.

You can do what France did back in the 1960s... “You send over a couple of ships and bring the gold back to your country that way. When Charles de Gaulle asked for his gold out of the Federal Reserve back in 1962, it didn’t take 7 years. He got it right away. But back then the gold was in the Federal Reserve because it wasn'’t going out in the leasing and lending program that governments have been using in recent years in order to keep the gold price suppressed.

It will be interesting to see whether this leads to other central banks also asking for their physical gold. And more importantly, since there are so many paper (claims on gold) in the various gold ETFs around the world, it will be interesting to see whether the institutional investors are starting to recognize what the central banks are doing, and take some of that GLD and all of the other ETF paper and start saying, ‘"Look, I don'’t want shares, I actually want ounces. Deliver me the physical metal."’

“Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation.”

Similarly, Larry Edelson wrote an email to subscribers entitled “What the “Cycles of War” are saying for 2013″, which states: Since the 1980s, I’ve been studying the so-called “cycles of war” — the natural rhythms that predispose societies to descend into chaos, into hatred, into civil and even international war.

I’m certainly not the first person to examine these very distinctive patterns in history. There have been many before me, notably, Raymond Wheeler, who published the most authoritative chronicle of war ever, covering a period of 2,600 years of data. However, there are very few people who are willing to even discuss the issue right now. And based on what I’m seeing, the implications could be absolutely huge in 2013.

The people of Cyprus first learned about this from a Reuters leak of the working documents for the Eurogroup meeting on Friday. It is tucked away in clause 29. "Sale of excess gold reserves: The Cypriot authorities have committed to sell the excess amount of gold reserves owned by the Republic. This is estimated to generate one-off revenues to the state of €400 million via an extraordinary payout of central bank profits."

This seemed to catch the central bank by surprise. Officials said they knew nothing about it. So who in fact made this decision? Cypriots are learning what it means to be a member of monetary union when things go badly wrong. The crisis costs have suddenly jumped from €17 billion to €23 billion, and the burden of finding an extra €6 billion will fall on Cyprus alone.

The government expects the economy to contract 13 percent this year as full austerity bites. Megan Greene from Maverick Intelligence fears it could be a lot worse. She says the crisis has reached the point where it would be “less painful” for Cyprus to seek an “amicable divorce” from the eurozone and break free. Quite so, and while we’re at it, lets seek an amicable divorce for everybody, for Portugal, for Ireland, for Spain, for Italy, and above all for Germany, since they are all being damaged in different ways by the infernal Project. All are victims of their elites.

It is an interesting question why Cyprus has been treated more harshly than Greece, given that the eurozone itself set off the downward spiral by imposing de facto losses of 75 percent on Greek sovereign debt held by Cypriot banks. And, furthermore, given that these banks were pressured into buying many of those Greek bonds in the first place by the EU authorities, when it suited the Eurogroup.

Furthermore, the northern powers skip lightly over their own responsibility for what has happened. They seem not to recognise that EMU was a joint venture. The creditor states were entirely complicit. They flooded the South with cheap debt. They failed to understand the ruinous implications of monetary union just as badly as the southern states. Eurozone citizens still have a touching faith in the euro and the EMU Project. They blame their own leaders, their own bankers, even the head of statistics office in Greece. But most still refuse to blame monetary union itself.

And once again, it’s using them to shuffle off risks through the filters of Wall Street to people who might never know. What bubbled to the surface is that Citigroup is selling synthetic securities that yield 13% to 15% annually — synthetic because they’re based on credit derivatives. Apparently, Citi has a bunch of shipping loans on its books, and it’s trying to protect itself against default. In return for succulent interest payments, investors will take on some of the risks of these loans. The first deal of this type was negotiated privately with Blackstone Group and closed last December. This second deal will be open to a broader group of institutional investors. Soon, similar synthetic securities will be offered to the treasurers of small towns in Norway.

But shipping loans are a doozy. After its bubble, the shipping industry fell into a deep crisis. It’s such a problem that Andreas Dombret, member of the Executive Board of the Bundesbank, listed it as one of the four risks to overall financial stability in Germany — in Hamburg alone, there were over 120 shipping companies. He fingered two causes: shipping rates that had plunged during the Financial Crisis and never recovered, and continued overbuilding of ships of ever larger sizes, driven by “cheaply available financial means,” a direct reference to the easy money handed out by central banks.

And then he waded into the bloodbath in Germany: retail funds that blew up and were shuttered, banks whose shipping portfolios suffered heavy hits, an industry that was breaking down... Capital destruction, the inevitable consequence of central-bank passion to create bubbles. Now, the Bundesbank was looking at it from a “broader perspective,” he said, with an eye “on the stability of the entire financial system.” The US-centric balance of economic power has been destabilized by the crumbling of EU welfare states and the rise of the state-sponsored capitalist BRICS, eager to seize the opportunity to attack the dollar’s preeminence.

Such an idea, should ministers back it, could further rattle the confidence of lenders, already nervous about draft legislation to determine who alongside shareholders should suffer losses when a bank gets into trouble. EU finance ministers, gathering in Dublin this Friday, will discuss how to shape this law that could take effect from 2015, covering what is known as bank recovery and resolution.

Well, their warnings might be more credible if the central banks of the world were not hoarding gold like crazy. During 2012, central bank gold buying was at the highest level that we have seen in almost 50 years. Meanwhile, insider buying of gold stocks has now reached multi-year highs and the US Mint cannot even keep up with the insatiable demand for silver eagle coins. So what in the world is actually going on here?

Right now, the central banks of the world are indulging in a money printing binge that reminds many of what happened during the early days of the Weimar Republic. When you flood the financial system with paper money, that is eventually going to cause the prices for hard assets to go up dramatically.

Could it be possible that the banksters are trying to drive down the price of both gold and silver so that they can gobble it up cheaply? Do they want to be the ones sitting on all of the “real money” once the paper money bubble that we are living in finally bursts? Over the past few weeks, nearly every major newspaper in the world has run at least one story telling people that it is time to sell their gold.

Even “secured” creditors, including state and local governments, may be at risk. Derivatives have “super-priority” status in bankruptcy, and Dodd Frank precludes further taxpayer bailouts. In a big derivatives bust, there may be no collateral left for the creditors who are next in line. Shock waves went around the world when the IMF, the EU, and the ECB not only approved but mandated the confiscation of depositor funds to “bail in” two bankrupt banks in Cyprus. A “bail in” is a quantum leap beyond a “bail out.”

When governments are no longer willing to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that have gambled away their capital, the banks are now being instructed to “recapitalize” themselves by confiscating the funds of their creditors, turning debt into equity, or stock; and the “creditors” include the depositors who put their money in the bank thinking it was a secure place to store their savings.

The Cyprus bail-in was not a one-off emergency measure but was consistent with similar policies already in the works for the US, UK, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. “Too big to fail” now trumps all. Rather than banks being put into bankruptcy to salvage the deposits of their customers, the customers will be put into bankruptcy to save the banks.

Speaking in New York ahead of next week’s IMF Spring meeting, Ms Lagarde launched a broadside against the financial services industry for resisting urgent reform. “In too many cases – from the United States in 2008 to Cyprus today – we have seen what happens when a banking sector chooses the quick buck over the lasting benefit, backing a business model that ultimately destabilizes the economy. We simply cannot have pre-crisis banking in a post-crisis world.

“We need reform, even in the face of intense pushback from an industry sometimes reluctant to abandon lucrative lines of business.” Almost five years since Lehman Brothers collapsed, she claimed: “The 'oversize banking’ model of too-big-to-fail is more dangerous than ever. We must get to the root of the problem with comprehensive and clear regulation.”

Regulators have forced banks to increase significantly their loss-absorbing capital buffers since the crisis, but are still working on "resolution" mechanisms that will allow giant lenders to fail without hitting the taxpayer and threatening financial stability.