By John Browne
Senior Market Strategist

Productive, private-sector jobs - the lifeblood of a sound economy - are under assault by politicians in the United States and Western Europe, who have unwittingly taken a number of steps that make future job losses a foregone conclusion.

In the 1980s, as a Member of the UK Parliament and elected Chairman of the Conservative Small Business Committee, I led discussions on the issue of job creation. At that point, the British labor market was dealing with technological advances that threatened traditional industries and an influx of highly competitive Eastern European workers who drifted westward in the waning days of the Cold War.

By John Browne
Senior Market Strategist

The bad news for Greece is that despite some help from abroad, and some attempts at internal reform, investors are still leery of the troubled state. The good news, if you can call it that, is that they will soon have company in the penalty box.

Now that investors have come face-to-face with the reality of sovereign default in the developed world, greater scrutiny will befall those countries with fiscal conditions similar to Greece. The United Kingdom is a cause of great concern, with a debt ratio rapidly approaching Greek levels.

By Peter Schiff
President of Euro Pacific Capital

It is astounding how many economists, government officials, and Wall Street strategists construe the current economic conditions as evidence of a bona fide recovery. It is a testament to the power of the rose colored glasses handed out by our nation's leading universities that such a feeling could be widely held despite the clear and present danger that compounds daily. The myopia leads us to enact policies that actually exacerbate our problems. The "remedies" are postponing, perhaps indefinitely, a true recovery.

By John Browne
Senior Market Strategist

The world is currently in the eye of an economic hurricane. The leading edge of the storm, which made landfall in the second quarter of 2008, raged until the first quarter of 2009, and nearly demolished the world's financial system. By sand-bagging with trillions of freshly-printed paper currencies, fudging accounting rules, subsidizing key financial houses and markets, and calming the masses with half-baked rhetoric, a worldwide collapse was averted. But the calm is deceptive.