Although the Footsie 100 was up 0.6% last week, the 250 was down 3.1%. At the start of the that week – and most of the week before – the IT/hitech bubble sector was deflating rapidly….in some cases by a staggering 65%. Nazdaq, Dow and S&P futures in the US were all negative yesterday. In the light of this – and new evidence of China’s problems – Asian stocks struggled overnight.

The flight to safety, as I’ve written before, is on. Starting at the top, smart bourse money is reducing risk and paying off debt. Top-end property sales in London were reportedly slower in London last week. Sotheby’s shares plummeted by 27%. French properties in the glitzy hotspots at over €1.5m are flatlining.

The élite has its safe homes, its debts down to near zero, and its directionalised mug-stocks sold. There’ll be some further tidying up and a few small-scale scams, and then Janet Yellen will suddenly be faced with a difficult decision: more QE or take the hit? Her speech at the weekend was described by one analyst as “short, and devoid of anything to trade off” – an opinion shared by most.

One lady who made her decision last February is Hillary Clinton. Sources close to her campaign told me around that time that she felt “all bets are off after May”. She too is expecting a collapse….after which, she will announce her candidature and start ripping into Obama and the GOP for being soft on Wall Street.

ECB president Mario Draghi dropped a brick into the pool a few days back when he said the EU’s central bank was up for some easing action in June, so the markets are expecting some sort of stimulus package will be announced. My own feedback, mind you – albeit small scale – was that few serious investment MoUs now give much credence to what Supermario says.

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that Mark Carney doesn’t believe any of Chancellor George Osborne’s bollocks. Barely a day passes now without the central banker either threatening to cap mortgages, announcing further stress tests, or putting off rate rises because of what he thinks is “spare economic capacity”. Carney also knows, of course, that a run to raise interest would destroy Britain’s banking system. The silence of the UK’s Right Wing press on the now wide-open split between Mark Carney and George Osborne is deafening.

One thing we’ve seen for the first time this week is a bank pleading guilty to tax evasion, rather than merely reserving this, refusing to admit that, and setting aside the other. Credit Suisse pled guilty to some horrendous counts; but the bottom line, as Attorney General Eric Holder pointed out, was the admission that CS had engaged in an “extensive and wide-ranging” scheme to help wealthy Americans hide assets. Nobody’s going to jail (natch) but the fine – said to be in excess of $2.5bn – is enormous. It’s also somewhat ironic given that a senior CS team was in the forefront of nailing several senior Greeks for evading tax there.

Holder added that the bank “destroyed account records sent to the U.S. for client review, concealed transactions and failed to take even the most basic steps to ensure compliance with tax laws”, a staggering admission for any bank to make, especially when you consider the scam seems to have been ongoing since the days of Nixon. Credit’s CEO  Brady Dougan said “we deeply regret the past misconduct that led to this settlement” – a wary use of the past tense if ever I saw one.

Whether this means anything at all is open to debate, but what I was particularly struck by was the open acceptance by the prosecution that the last thing they wanted was the bank to find itself in difficulties. These extracts from this morning’s Wall Street Journal reporting I find very instructive:

‘….Prosecutors took steps to limit the potential ripple effects from a guilty plea by winning assurances from state and federal regulators not to take punitive measures that would cripple the bank, such as stripping Credit Suisse of its ability to operate in the U.S….In extracting a guilty plea, prosecutors are gambling that the criminal charge won’t harm the bank in unanticipated ways….clients may simply choose to steer clear of a bank perceived to have trouble’.

This serves only to remind us yet again that Lehman changed everything in the States. ‘Too big to fail’ was the immediate conclusion, but the long-term outcome has become ‘too big to face justice’. The level of fear involved in this case tells you just how scared sh*tless the US corporatocacy is right now.

And of course, this Thursday Europe goes to the polls. My suspicion is that a lot of Americans will be shocked at just what a caning the euro-Establishment is going to get, but the ramifications go much wider than that. Last time out (2009) Britain’s anti-EU Party UKip got 16.6% of the British vote. This year they’ll get at least 28%, and be the largest UK Party in the European Assembly. In France, the same goes for the Far Right FN of Marine Le Pen. In Holland, Geert Wilder’s anti-EU PVV will be joint winner on around 17% of the vote. 22% will vote for Jobbik in Hungary, 24% for 5-Star in Italy, and around 1 in 5 Greeks will vote for Parties with one level or another of anti-Brussels sentiment.

Politically, there’s likely to be a Left/Right stalemate, but whether one cares about that depends on whether one thinks democracy has any kind of real existence in the EU. Neither the stalemate nor the anti-Establishment vote will change anything in the Union, because the people calling the shots are either have their ample bottoms sitting on huge majorities, or never have to face the voters.

The real danger is that the markets will see a deadlocked Assembly and an activist wrecker-presence making rapid further treatment of the eurozone’s weakness less and less likely….followed by rather more of the truth coming out in ClubMed. As Open Europe’s top man Mats Persson said recently, loss of faith in the normal operations of the EU, the EC and the ECB could have dire consequences in the City.

So, there we have a confluence which could undermine such confidence as remains. What must happen will happen anyway; but after Friday this week, there’s every chance events will accelerate.

Last night at The Slog: Dirty Tricks in Number Ten