To whom would you be willing to trust with all of your financial and tax information: 1) close family members; or 2) the U.S. government and foreign governments, including Russia?

For the last several decades, global liberty-haters have dreamt that all financial privacy would be eliminated. They have sought out a variety of excuses to act as Peeping Toms peering into your bank accounts.

In the 1980s, their big push was to enact "anti-money laundering" legislation, with the claim that it would make catching drug dealers and other assorted criminals easier. The United States passed its first anti-money laundering law in 1986 -- despite the fact that no one could objectively define "money laundering", because it is not an action but an "intent" to act unlawfully.

As a result of all the global anti-money laundering regulations, total compliance costs for financial institutions are now in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Basic banking and other financial services have been reduced and even eliminated for tens of millions of people around the world. Have all of these regulatory costs done any good?

I am expecting a lot of things to happen in 2007.  Things that I won't be surprised by if they do happen.  2007 will be a wonderful year for the death of dictators - Castro croaking at last, Saddam hung at last, and with any luck Hugo Chavez will get himself assassinated.

Iran's Ahmadinutjob is not a dictator, as he serves at the whim of the ayatollahs.  Their whim seems to be now that he is no longer useful, so we may soon be rid of him.  With any luck, that will not prevent the Israelis from taking out Iran's nuclear facilities.  With even more luck, the Israelis will be smart enough to accomplish this via sabotage rather than airstrikes.

China should be on its best behavior for 2007 with no saber-rattling at Taiwan.  The Chicoms don't want anything to spoil their coming-out party at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

However... I'm going to stop now and turn the tables.  What I want is to ask you for your predictions.  What do you think will happen in the world and in America in 2007?

France may look like the sick of man of Europe, but Germany's woes run deeper, rooted in mercantilist dogma, the glorification of saving for its own sake, and the corrosive psychology of ageing.

"Germany considers itself the model for the world, but pride comes before the fall," says Olaf Gersemann, Die Welt's economics chief, in a new book, The Germany Bubble: the Last Hurrah of a Great Economic Nation.  (Released last month in a German edition, hopefully an English edition will soon follow.)

Mr. Gersemann says the Second Wirtschaftswunder - or economic miracle - from 2005 onwards has "gone to Germany's head". The country has mistaken a confluence of exceptional events for permanent ascendancy. It cannot continue to live off exports of capital goods to China and the BRICS as they hit the buffers, or by stealing a march on southern Europe through wage compression, a zero-sum game.

Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), makes a parallel critique in his new book, Die Deutschland Illusion, no translation needed.

It is the self-deception of a country "resting on its laurels," prisoner of the "household fallacy" that economies are like family budgets, and falsely reassured by the misplaced flattery of foreigners who rarely look under the bonnet at the German engine below.

The Russian economy is highly dependent on oil and gas exports, and reducing Russian oil and gas exports would be the most direct way to cause pain to the Russian leadership. However, Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil, particularly gas.

The countries in the EU did not need to be in this position, because the EU has plenty of gas reserves that could be economically tapped using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Because of the environmental lobby, though, the EU has allowed itself to become dependent on foreign energy sources -- particularly Russian.

Perhaps Peter Foster said it best in Canada's Financial Post on March 8:

"Europe's alternative-energy policy is in a shambles. The EU would be even more vulnerable but for a typically unanticipated example of free-market ingenuity: hydraulic fracturing and the boom in oil shale gas. But guess what: Greens are everywhere resolutely opposed to fracking, and nowhere more than in Europe. [L]ike their peace march colleagues half a century ago, they are ultimately dupes for an authoritarian agenda."

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