Spiegel is a single German newspaper, not “Germany’s Newspaper”. It’s also a privately owned newspaper. Further, the article you quoted is actually the staff editorial – and most of their ideas, as you can see, are spouted by Joschka Fischer, the former (key word there) foreign minister, whose green party-SDP coalition was thoroughly rejected by voters in 2009. The editorial in no way is indicative of the attitude of the average German. In fact, most continental media takes a positive view of the EU (Le Monde in France, for example). That brings up the 2nd point: Your article about the asian debt selling was telegraph – a noted conservative and euroskeptic newspaper. BBC and the Guardian, both british, range from moderate to significantly pro-EU, respectively, and neither of them had this strange Telegraph report. How one known-euroskeptic paper in Britain somehow represents the entirety of the “British Media” doing Cameron’s “will”, is quite frankly beyond me.

If you want to understand why Germany acts the way it does, look at it’s experience with expansionary monetary policy between World War 1 and World War 2. Old fears die hard.

Our aim has always been to make it as transparent a benchmark as possible – every datapoint issued by every contributing bank every day is published along with the daily benchmarks by all the main financial data providers. We held a market-wide consultation in 2008 on our scrutiny and governance processes, and keep these under constant review.

And for a quick primer on LIBOR and how it is calculated and governed, please see our factsheet at http://www.bba.org.uk/media/article/understanding-bba-libor/press-pack/.

“Over the weekend, we observed the perplexing sell off of $56 billion in US Treasurys courtesy of weekly disclosure in the Fed’s custodial account (source: H.4.1) and speculated if this may be due to an asset rotation, under duress or otherwise, out of bonds and into stocks, to prevent the collapse of the global ponzi (because when the BRICs tell the IMF to boost its bailout capacity you know it is global). We also proposed a far simpler theory: “the dreaded D-day in which foreign official and private investors finally start offloading their $2.7 trillion in Treasurys with impunity (although not with the element of surprise – China has made it abundantly clear it will sell its Treasury holdings, the only question is when), has finally arrived.” In hindsight the Occam’s Razor should have been applied. Little did we know 5 short days ago just how violent the reaction by China would be (both post and pre-facto) to the Senate decision to propose a law for all out trade warfare with China. Now we know – in the week ended October 12, a further $17.7 billion was “removed” from the Fed’s custodial Treasury account, meaning that someone, somewhere is very displeased with US paper, and, far more importantly, what it represents, and wants to make their displeasure heard loud and clear. (Source)

Undoubtedly, the Chinese and other countries have recently discovered that Italy and Greece, with smaller debt to income ratios than the United States, are less riskier and carry a higher rate of return. This is because, unlike the US, the Rothschild/Rockefeller bond rating agencies have trashed their country’s debt ratings, forcing them to pay a much higher interest rate than U.S. Treasuries. Hey, if you take the risk, you might as well earn the reward!