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.

Some 81 percent of MPs surveyed for the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) said that banks and building societies should have to make it clear to savers when their deposits exceed the £85,000 compensation limit that anything above this amount is not protected.

There was also widespread backing among the population generally for the idea of financial institutions being forced to do this, with 76 percent of consumers surveyed also agreeing that this should happen. The FSCS is the UK's savings safety net, which is funded by an industry levy and covers up to £85,000 for single accounts and £170,000 for joint accounts if a financial institution goes bust.

The body, which has previously acknowledged that its own publicity efforts have not increased awareness to the levels it had hoped, wants to see financial institutions doing more to increase awareness about compensation limits in their routine dealings with customers, such as in their advertising.

As the economy crumbles, poverty in the United States is absolutely exploding and so is homelessness. In addition to the thousands of “tunnel people” living under the streets of America, there are also thousands that are living in tent cities, there are tens of thousands that are living in their vehicles and there are more than a million public school children that do not have a home to go back to at night.

The federal government tells us that the recession “is over” and that “things are getting better”, and yet poverty and homelessness in this country continue to rise with no end in sight. So what in the world are things going to look like when the next economic crisis hits? When I heard that there were homeless people living in a network of underground tunnels beneath the streets of Kansas City, I was absolutely stunned. I have relatives that live in that area. I never thought of Kansas City as one of the more troubled cities in the United States. But according to the Daily Mail, police recently discovered a network of tunnels under the city that people had been living in…

“Below the streets of Kansas City, there are deep underground tunnels where a group of vagrant homeless people lived in camps. These so-called homeless camps have now been uncovered by the Kansas City Police, who then evicted the residents because of the unsafe environment. Authorities said these people were living in squalor, with piles of garbage and dirty diapers left around wooded areas. The saddest part is the fact that authorities found dirty diapers in the areas near these tunnels. That must mean that babies were being raised in that kind of an environment.”

The European Commission on Wednesday published a report on "macroeconomic imbalances" on 13 EU countries, including Britain, singling out Spain and Slovenia for warnings over "excessive" failings. Both countries faces EU sanctions including massive fines - unless they step up structural economic reforms and take additional measures to cut debt by the end of May.

"In two member states, Spain and Slovenia, imbalances can be considered excessive," said Olli Rehn, the EU's commissioner for economic and monetary affairs. "In Spain, the very high domestic and external debt levels continue to pose serious risks for growth and financial stability. In Slovenia, the risks for financial sector stability are substantial, including through inter-linkages with public finances."

The commission used unprecedentedly strong language to criticise France in a stinging assessment that covered Francois Hollande's first year as French President.

A report from the Church’s doctrine watchdog urged priests to devise “pastoral accommodations” for gay couples and to be “flexible”. It said the aim was to enable them to enjoy a “closer approximation” to marriage.

The senior bishop who drafted the missive to priests insisted that it did not amount to a policy u-turn and that an official ban on formal "blessings" for civil partnerships remained in place. But he said it was clear there was a need for committed same-sex couples to be given recognition and “compassionate attention” from the Church, including special prayers. Liberal priests, who already conduct unofficial dedication and thanksgiving for gay couples who are not allowed to marry, said it amounted to the first official endorsement for what they do.