Blackstone is doubling down on housing...

  One of my favorite trades to speculate on the ongoing crisis in Europe is going long Greece and going short France.

This isn't a trade for your rent money. But I (Porter) like this idea... And you can make this trade easily with exchange-traded funds in the U.S.

You can hold a basket of Greek stocks with the Global X FTSE Greece 20 Fund (GREK) and short French stocks with the iShares France Fund (EWQ).

 More specifically, I like this trade because everybody already knows Greece is broke. As a result, everything bad has already happened in Greece... It's priced in.

Interest rates have already soared. (One-year interest rates hit 1,000% last year. That's not a typo.) Stocks have already crashed. It looks like Greece is at a blood-in-the-streets bottom. (But we can't be certain. Things can always get worse.)

 France, on the other hand, is still expensive. It's trading like a free-market country, when it's actually a socialist paradise. And they always end the same way: bankrupt.

So I like the idea of hedging a European collapse by buying the economy that's already collapsed and shorting the economy that hasn't collapsed yet.

– Porter Stansberry with Sean Goldsmith

 Porter's favorite way to profit from the European crisis...

In today's Digest Premium, Porter shares his favorite way to trade the ongoing crisis in Europe. We doubt you've heard about this trade anywhere else...

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Porter's favorite way to profit from the European crisis...

In today's Digest Premium, Porter shares his favorite way to trade the ongoing crisis in Europe. We doubt you've heard about this trade anywhere else...

To subscribe to Digest Premium and access today's analysis, click here.

 Back in November, Steve Sjuggerud made a bullish bet.

He told his True Wealth subscribers to buy shares of private-equity giant Blackstone. At the time, the company had called the bottom in the housing market. And it had spent $1.5 billion buying houses that year. (It bought 10,000 homes for an average price of around $150,000.)

Blackstone was buying the houses, fixing them up, and renting them out. It fit perfectly with Steve's bullish housing thesis... And the stock was cheap.

Here's what Steve wrote at the time...

As you can see from the chart below, Steve nailed the call. True Wealth readers are up 57% since November. 

 To date, Blackstone has spent $5 billion on more than 30,000 houses – it's the largest housing investor in the U.S. It has said it will slow its home purchases... But Blackstone is still bullish on housing, so it's getting into lending.

Blackstone created B2R Finance to offer minimum loans of $10 million to landlords looking to expand their portfolios. Blackstone would loan 75% of the value of the homes for a pool of leased properties and 65% of the value without tenants. The debt would have floating interest rates between 5% and 7% for up to five years, according to Bloomberg.

 Blackstone is stepping in to take the place of regional banks (the traditional lenders in these instances)... According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., more than 475 banks have failed since the 2008 credit crisis. The remaining banks have tightened lending standards. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which buy loans from originators, pool them together, and sell them with a government guarantee – limit loans for landlords to 10 properties and four properties, respectively. (And banks are less likely to make loans they can't pass on to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac... making Blackstone's service more valuable.)

 Investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates the rental housing market is already worth $2.8 trillion. Financing other landlords also helps Blackstone's exit strategy... It can loan money to other folks to take properties off its hands.

 I asked Steve Sjuggerud this morning for his thoughts on Blackstone's latest foray into the housing market. Here's what he told me...

 In the July 3 Digest, we discussed the latest shoe to drop in the European financial crisis... The Portuguese stock market fell 6% after Foreign Minister Paulo Portas resigned, citing waning support for Portugal's austerity plan. The plan – which requires Portugal to cut government spending by 5.3 billion euro – is a core requirement of the 78 billion euro bailout the country received in 2011 from the European Union and International Monetary Fund. The country was due to meet its obligations under the plan by 2015.

Today, the country is struggling to solve its political issues so it can regain access to the bond markets.

 As we explained, there's a structural flaw in the European Union...

 And according to Jens Weidmann, chief of Germany's central bank Bundesbank, the European Central Bank (ECB) can't solve the eurozone crisis.

Weidmann spoke at an economists' conference days after the ECB announced it would keep interest rates at record lows. Reuters quoted him saying...

 Weidmann also said the European Union had to distance itself from the banks, as European banks hold too many of their own governments' bonds...

"This is because banks do not have to hold any capital against their government debt, as the risk-weight assigned to sovereign bonds is zero," he said.

 We've seen time and time again... If you create incentives for a bank to make more loans, it will make more loans. These incentives – and the resulting loans – enabled by the European currency are now bringing down the region's entire economy.

Now, Germany, the beacon of European fiscal responsibility, is laying the problems bare... Weidmann knows the Germans will be on the hook for bailing out their less responsible brethren.

We believe the situation in Europe will play out exactly as it has in the U.S. and Japan... Europe will continue to print money and inflate its debts away at the expense of taxpayers.

But as we've been warning this year, eventually, the printing will stop... The world will lose faith in central banks' ability to simply paper over problems.

 As Porter wrote in his latest issue of his Investment Advisory...

We're not there yet, but perhaps we'll soon find out...

 Not many people agree with our view that the government's money printing is reckless and the outright theft of citizens. But one outspoken multimillionaire repeatedly hammers the government, the Federal Reserve, and anyone else involved in perpetuating these loose fiscal policies...

He even wrote a new book about the problems happening in America today... And essentially lays out a blueprint for protecting yourself from most these problems. And it's not just talk. He sold his $16 million Manhattan townhouse a few years ago and moved with his family to Singapore. He's positioning his portfolio to protect his wealth and hopefully profit from the economic crisis we're heading toward.

 As you may have guessed, I'm talking about Jim Rogers – one of the greatest investors of our time. He co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1973.

In addition to making a fortune in the markets (and being a proponent of sound fiscal policies), Jim has also written some of the greatest investment books in history, like Investment Biker and Hot Commodities.

When Jim speaks, we listen. It's a gift to have such a brilliant man walk you through the problems happening today in our country and the steps you can take to protect yourself.

 In his new book, titled Street Smarts, Jim exposes how a law that took effect on January 1 is essentially a sneaky form of currency control. This law will make it nearly "impossible for Americans to open bank accounts outside of the country," he writes.

He tells readers the single indicator he uses to evaluate a foreign country's economy, and he shares the two most exciting economies in the world today.

And most important, Jim tells readers specific assets they can buy to profit from government money printing... In the book, he explains two real assets you can buy today that could quadruple over the coming years... He calls one of the assets "one of the more important assets of any kind." And it's a great investment today, thanks to a recent advancement in technology.

 Porter's favorite way to profit from the European crisis...