Stunning news from Western Europe today…

The government of Belgium has collapsed. For years now, the French and Dutch speaking citizens have been at odds concerning autonomy and local governance. Back in July, the government announced its resignation. Officials from several of the elected parties could not reach an agreement on how much separation should be between its French-speaking citizens (in Wallonia) and its Dutch-speaking citizens (in Flanders).

But since the global economic crisis, things have come quickly to a head. The government made a controversial move to bail out the belleaguered financial group, Fortis (FORB:Brussels) back in October 2008. It cost investors a lot of money and has lead to the unravelling of the entire government.

Today, the Belgian king accepted the resignation of the government. Yes, the entire government.

So what does this mean?

It means a new “coalition” will step in and deal with all the problems the old government couldn’t handle, from the down-and-dirty autonomy discussions to the immense financial problems that no one in the world can get a jump on. (Right now, anyway.)

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Yesterday, I told Taipan Insider readers that Argentina’s penion nationalization left much to be desired in the way of transparency. On Monday, a federal judge froze assets here in the U.S. in connection with the pension.

Read my full Taipan Insider article (available to all Taipan Publishing Group members) for all the details.

But that’s not the end of the nationalization trend.

Actually, it’s not the beginning either. The timeline can get a bit confusing, so try and stick with me…

On May 25, 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected president of Argentina. He was elected by default, however… The main candidate, former President Carlos Menem, withdrew from the race for fear of a run-off election that he felt he could not win.

He was a popular president, though, with one of his notable acheivements being the renegotiation of Argentina’s massive debt from defaulted loans with the IMF. He successfully dropped the payback amount to about one-third of the original amount.

But in the background, President Kirchner was creating state-owned companies and nationalizing a number of industries: energy, railways, water companies, and telecoms.

The Economist wrote about him on August 10, 2006, “By founding state-owned enterprises and re-nationalising privatised ones he has expanded the executive’s power over employment and prices… His biggest triumph came on August 3rd, when Congress gave him authority to reallocate government spending as he sees fit.”

That’s in line with some of Kirchner’s closest allies, like Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. Even the leftist Lula da Silva, president of Brazil has some nationalization tendencies. (Read my blog post from Nov. 12 for more info.)

So with so much of the countries infrastructure under the State’s belt, what’s left for private investors?

Not much, and dwindling everyday, it would seem.

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Last Tuesday, I told Taipan Publishing Group subscribers in Taipan Insider that one Middle Eastern country was injecting massive amounts of cash into international markets.

That’s not really news nowadays, though, is it? Everyone’s heard of the $7.5 billion Citigroup bailout by Abu Dhabi back in November 2007.

But things have noticably been slowing down. When billions of dollars worth of investments get halved in value in less than a year, it makes you think.

Yet for some regions, this credit crunch is an opportunity of a lifetime.

Think about it. You’re an oil-rich nation with foreign currency reserves well into the hundreds of billions. Major global institutions are searching desparately for cash. Their fellow financial institutions are equally cash-strapped.

Suddenly, your country has a lot of power.

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More than a million foreign nationals have crept into the costal regions of Mexico already… but that number is growing.

They are seeking cheap, easy access to the 2,000-mile border with the United States, and the Mexican government is helping them, even creating laws to aid them. Why? Because these people pump $5.3 billion into the country’s economy every year.

Mexico’s being paid off, and certain U.S. agencies are joining in. They want to make it even easier for foreign nationals to creep into our southern neighbor’s towns and cities.

In one popular nest, the wave of zealots has reached 60 people a day. That’s about 15% a year as the size of this camp has grown to over 200,000. The state government in the area is allowing this group to run rampant; the incoming cash is too hard to resist.

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