All your euros are belong to Greece. - Page 7

Sigur Ros pays for their universal healthcare system

All kidding aside my only point is that maybe there is a different path foward not in doing austerity measures. It appears in my opinion is that austerity has spectacular failed in an epic way. Now on a small scale level in Iceland their anti-austerity measures have worked very well so maybe giving Icelandic economic polices a chance might be the better way foward. I don't know I feel it's worth a shot. Draconian cuts have demolished Greece, Spain and put Britian and France in dreadful recession causing their credit to get downgraded. Austerity dosent work.
Edited by Arturo RJ - 2/27/13 at 1:10pm

Okay, gotcha.  USA is facing it's own Austerity with the sequester this Friday.

Ugh don't remind me. So stupid. Both sides are against it and totally avoidable yet no one will do anything about just dumb. It dosent do anything to fix the defecit and just hurts people who need services and makes it harder for the government to do their job. I don't mind the cuts to the milatary as defense spending is out of control and needs to be reigned in. But the rest? Just awful. Social security and Medicare don't do anything adverse to the economy but milatary spending and medical costs do. If we had a single payer health care system we'd be perfectly fine.

Article in The Economist about whether Austerity is working and if the opinion on it is changing. I'm super against Austerity but the data seems to show it has in fact not worked.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2013/03/austerity

 

It always fails, but the right wing never tires of invoking it. 

Good call EU! Yeah instead of thinking of ways to improve the economy of the Eurozone, worrying about pornography way more important! What are you Arkansas or Mississippi? Just stupid.

http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/next-tuesday-the-european-parliament-votes-to-ban-all-your-porn-yes-really-take-immediate-action/

Portugal, still an economic disaster:

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-06/fancy-footwear-and-austerity-won-t-save-portugal.html

The terms of Cyprus' EU Bailout?  A seven to ten percent 'fee' on all savings accounts in the country:

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/16/us-eurozone-cyprus-idUSBRE92E02220130316

 

That's unconscionable.

 

Edit, the outrage gets worse:

 

 

 

 

No vote on it either.  So the people are being stolen from DIRECTLY to bail out the banks.

Edited by MrBananaGrabber - 3/16/13 at 4:24pm

Serious question:

 

If you're in any EU country, what's the point of having your money in the bank, now that the precedent has been set for the EU central bank to take whatever they want from your account, with no input from the people?

 

Boom goes Europe?

Well now Europeans get a sense why IMF/World Bank are so hated in Unindustrialized nations. They've been doing this to the Americas and Africa for decades. Unfortunately now it's creeping to Europe. They really have to be stopped they have no justification to do this.

This whole Cypress thing is interesting. Whether what they are doing is 'proper', there definitely seems to be more backstory to this issue.

 

from Krugman

 

from the Mohamed El-Erian link

http://blogs.ft.com/the-a-list/2013/03/17/a-muddled-and-dangerous-approach-to-cyprus/#axzz2Nql1CeIu

Jesus if I found out that over the weekend the Government had just taken X% of my money from my Checking and Savings accounts I'd be looking to fucking immigrate to Australia or Canada stat. This is really disturbing.

Holy shit.  That's blatant theft. 

 

Would a similar action in the USA be constitutional?  I'd have to think that it would never come to pass, but who knows anymore.

 

FYI - I'm just being rhetorical here....

 

theft...   investment....

 

The line between those have become blurred thanks to the likes of Jamie Dimon and the big 'investment' banks.  I'm not saying what what the Euro Zone has demanded is morally correct, but there is some serious wonky shit happening in the financial markets all around the world. It would seem that it's all about hiding money to avoid taxes.

It's like the world banking industry has become infected with Gordon Gekko disease and I really wonder if the patient(s) are terminal?

A few things to bear in mind:

1 deposits in banks are loans, liable to be lost if the bank gkes bust. There has clearly been a weighing exercise.

2 taxing deposits gets around the EU deposit guarantee. Sucks for the smaller depositors.

3 why did they hit smaller depositors as well? To hide the fact that they weren't prepared to underwrite money laundering. Note that public denials are coming out all over the place on the Russian connection, but there's enough of a stink in the press for it to have come from somewhere.

4 the tax isn't uncompensated. Depositors get bank shares in return (it's a debt for equity swap essentially) with options for gas-revenue tied bonds in a few years. YMMV on whether that's pound-for-pound eventually.

The average Cypriot has every right to be pissed, but the question remains how much worse would it have been had their banks gone bust. Of course, the other question is how much damage will this do to their financial sector, which makes the previous question academic.

What I find interesting is how sympathy has clearly settled with ordinary Cypriots, despite a significant part of their economy having survived on ill gotten gains. I wonder how keen we'd be to voice our support for the citizenry of Cayman, BVI or Aruba?

What'll be interesting to see is how the other Euro countries take that news.  Sure, they mitigated the theft with those measures described above, but the newspaper headlines alone from that will be pretty bad and worse, inflammatory.  It just sounds so bad to the Average Joe (jose, jacque, gio?) over there that it could have a pretty big impact, none of it particularly good.

 

Edit: Well, that was fast, hard to tell how bad it is over there, but the new "tax plan" is not off to a good start http://www.npr.org/2013/03/18/174598781/e-u-bailout-tax-causes-bank-run-in-cyprus

Edited by Costco Mike - 3/18/13 at 2:31am

It's also worth pointing out that, if I've understood the Western monetary policy response to the financial crisis correctly, the combination of low short term interest rates, and quantitative easing lowering longer term rates, has done the self-same thing as the tax on deposits. Except it's more of a slowly boil the lobster approach to shifting the liability on to depositors.

 

The more I think about it, the more I'm coming to the view that every 60-year old who worked in the financial services sector or professional service industries for the last thirty years, and/or who has seen their land use related wealth increase disproportionately as the majority of the world slipped into hunger and poverty, should be taxed 100% and made to volunteer for the rest of their lives for room and board. It may not be economically sound, but it would make me feel a whole lot better.

 

Part (note I say part) of that is media hype though. I've read the reports on most of the "serious" English language newspapers and they're all being economical with the detail for the sake of the story. Some cooler heads are suggesting this will be a few days of nerve-testing then it will pass. I hope so. Last thing we need right now is another sovereign and currency crisis.

 

What upsets me more than anything is that recognition of the massive benefits the EC and later EU have had, and would continue to have, for the majority of the population of the continent is being pissed away. People, especially those we foolishly put in charge, are really quite rubbish. The survivors of WW2 who put together the original deal in Rome must be throwing their hands up in despair. The fact we now have narratives saying pull out of Europe and reinstate in the name of progress and freedom (!) all the dodgy working practices, protectionist war-mongering economic policies, and unequal treatment the bureaucrats and judges in Brussels and Luxembourg (for all the democratic deficit) spent forty years overcoming just makes me want to sit down and cry.

Sounds like they're renegotiating the lower band levies. May turn out to have been the mother and father of all "flag pole runs".

 

I'm amused to see how snarky everyone is about Putin's interjection, even amongst those who have been appalled by the intial reports on the deposit tax. He really has zero credibility outside his home country.

Today's Krug

 

 

That's a good point.  Huge psychological difference between the two. 

 

One the one hand: "I expect to earn this much less on my deposits (savings, retirement, etc)"

 

On the other: "I just bounced a check, and am being charged fees because of the haircut, or a small business can't make payroll because of the haircut, etc."

If memory serves, foreign depositors (perhaps even local, I can't remember) took a bath in Iceland when their banks collapsed, leading to half a decade of litigation and counting. They probably figured it would be marginally cleaner this way, savings losses would be crystallised immediately and banks wouldn't go bust.

 

Also? Less chance of a porn ban.

Man Cyprus is totally screwed! A 100 Euro limit for withdrawals that a terrible sign. This could be the spark to ignite the Eurozone financial explosion this could get ugly fast.

http://rt.com/business/cyprus-bailout-withdrawal-banks-756/

Yeah, that's not going to calm the bank runs in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and maybe even France.

 

Of course the US markets are doing great, as more investors look to them as a safe haven.

 

Globalism!

And not to mention their was a bombing of a Cypriot bank over the weekend.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2013/03/24/bank-of-cyprus-bomb-explosion_n_2945637.html?icid=hp_search_art

 

Just a guess, but it may be a really cold winter in eastern Europe this year.

There's a larger geo-political game being played, quite apart from the issue of insolvent finance sectors and who pays the piper. Russia and the EU are currently engaged in a slow burning wrestling match over gas supplies to the continent. Russia thought they had it sown up, but the EU is now getting on board the fracking bus which is bothering Gazprom, Rosneft and their joint CEO, Vlady Pu.