וA return to crisis conditions?... Why I watch UniCredit... China will collapse... Caution with commodities... Why another leg down in stock and bond prices is likely... "New American Socialism"... Congratulations, Mr. Hunt

וWe"re about to see a return to crisis-like conditions in the world"s credit markets. This will devastate financial stocks. It should also hit commodity prices and commodity-related stocks hard. In today"s Digest, I"ll show you why I believe this will happen.
As longtime readers know, I write Friday"s Digest personally. In general, I try my best to teach our subscribers something useful. I"ve always run my research company with a few simple principles in mind. Among them, I strive to provide you with the information I would expect if our roles were reversed. You should know... abiding by this principle often requires me to share information with you before I can be 100% certain it"s correct
:וThat"s the case with today"s Digest. I want to show you the warning signs as I see them, right now. I want to guide you through my thinking process. And while I"ll give you my predictions about what these things mean, I hope you"ll realize that, as Yogi Berra famously said, predictions are tough – especially about the future

(וThe next stage in the ongoing global financial crisis will feature the collapse of both the Spanish and the Italian economies. This should occur within the next six months. Concurrently, I believe the "Chinese miracle" will be unmasked as mostly a fraud powered by a huge increase in bad lending from state-controlled banks
:וI expect this next "down leg" in the world"s markets to be more severe than the crisis of 2008, because the balance sheets of the Western democracies are now less prepared to manage the losses

וFinally, I believe the euro will simply cease to exist

(וThe first thing I want to show you is the share price of UniCredit. You have probably never heard of UniCredit, but it is a major European bank, with significant operations in eastern and southern Europe. UniCredit is based in Italy. I"ve been keeping my eye on UniCredit for years, for reasons I"ll explain below. UniCredit is the ultimate "canary in the coal mine" of the world"s global currency system
Most people don"t know that UniCredit is the direct descendent of Oesterreichische Credit-Anstalt, the largest bank in Eastern Europe before World War II. Translated the name means: Imperial Royal Privileged Austrian Credit-Institute for Commerce and Industry. It was a Rothschild bank. The family founded it 1855, and it became one of the most important banks in Europe
Credit-Anstalt held assets and took deposits from all over Europe. In 1931, the bank failed as a direct result of the U.S."s Smoot-Hawley tariff. The act crippled Germany"s economy and led French investors to redeem all the capital they"d lent to the bank. The failure of Credit-Anstalt caused Austria to abandon the gold standard, which set off a series of economic dominoes. Germany left gold... then Great Britain... and finally, in 1933, so did America

:וThe failure of Credit-Anstalt is what really kicked off the Great Depression. I have long been convinced the failure of its successor bank – now called UniCredit – would presage the next global monetary collapse
:וI first began warning investors about UniCredit"s likely collapse and its historic role in the world"s monetary history back in March 2010. (You can read that issue of my newsletter for the full story.) Since then, the bank"s shares have grown weaker and weaker. And since March, the shares have fallen off a cliff, hitting lows not seen since March 2009