Jose Manuel Barroso urged the EU to take “a very big step” towards deeper integration to avoid a repeat of the European debt crisis. “I think now we have conditions to go further that, frankly, we did not have before [...] There is now a much clearer awareness among European member states about the need to go further in terms of integration, especially in the euro area. This is one of the lessons of the crisis,” he said. The plans would include an EU-wide deposit guarantee scheme, which has already been proposed by European leaders including Italian prime minister Mario Monti, together with a bail-out fund paid for by levies on financial institutions. Mr Barroso told the Financial Times that the union could be created without treaty changes. However, such a union would likely be challenged in Germany, which has insisted that such measures can only be implemented with treaty changes. UK Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to protect Britain from a eurozone superstate with common banking and political systems. Speaking last week in Berlin, he said that the UK would not participate in a banking union because it is not part of the euro....
"I think now we have conditions to go further that, frankly, we did not have before [...] There is now a much clearer awareness among European member states about the need to go further in terms of integration, especially in the euro area. This is one of the lessons of the crisis. "
A crisis they very much help create and keep hammering on the people. Integrate with us and our technocratic unelected, un-audited, un-balanced, over regulated, over populated, over the top nittwittery will cure you. Of course they failed to tell us muggles that they possesed a magic money tree. It will all come right as sooon as we hand over our sovereignty, gold, and taxes. Merge with us. Ahh ha ha, ha ha, bwaha ha ha........
Unite we will take care of you. The check is in the mail, Trust me...yada yada yada
Basel III....uh...we can work up to 1 %.......3 percent maybe in 2018.
A crisis they very much help create and keep hammering on the people. Integrate with us and our technocratic unelected, un-audited, un-balanced, over regulated, over populated, over the top nittwittery will cure you. Of course they failed to tell us muggles that they possesed a magic money tree. It will all come right as sooon as we hand over our sovereignty, gold, and taxes. Merge with us. Ahh ha ha, ha ha, bwaha ha ha........
Unite we will take care of you. The check is in the mail, Trust me...yada yada yada
Basel III....uh...we can work up to 1 %.......3 percent maybe in 2018.
13 comments:
Italy even in the future will not need aid from the European Financial Stability Fund," said Mr Monti in an interview with the German Public Radio ARD.
The former EU commissioner, who has been working hard to deny rumours that Rome is at risk of contagion, called on the markets and financial observers "not to be governed by cliches or prejudices."
"I understand that Italy could have been associated with the idea of an undisciplined country in the past" but "now it is more disciplined than many other European countries," he said.
"Our country pays through its financial contribution ... to support Greece, Portugal, Ireland and now Spain. And now it also pays through extremely high interest rates because of tensions on the markets," he added.
Rome is struggling to allay market fears that it may be next in the debt-crisis firing line in the wake of a bailout for Spain this weekend and ahead of a Greek election Sunday which could force Athens out of the eurozone.
George Osborne has floated the possibility that Greece might need to be sacrificed to save the euro after a fresh day of jitters on the world's financial markets saw Spain's long-term borrowing costs hit their highest level since the launch of the single currency.
In a highly unusual step, the chancellor suggested that Greece may have to leave the eurozone so Germany could convince voters that it was worth pouring more money into the troubled currency. Speaking at a summit of chief executives organised by the Times newspaper, Osborne said: "I ultimately don't know whether Greece needs to leave the euro in order for the eurozone to do the things necessary to make their currency survive.
"I just don't know whether the German government requires Greek exit to explain to their public why they need to do certain things like a banking union, eurobonds and things in common with that.
"I would suspect that if you had a eurozone finance minister here, they wouldn't really know the answer to that."
The cabinet was again briefed on the state of UK contingency plans, an issue that Osborne is likely to address in his annual Mansion House speech on Thursday.
Lawmakers to Grill Rajoy on Spain Aid
Spanish lawmakers on Wednesday will get their first chance to grill Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy over the terms of a €100 billion ($126 billion) bailout from the European Union for local banks, as doubts rise about the aid's effectiveness.
Thousands of Russians Rally Against Putin
Tens of thousands of Russians marched in Moscow to demand that Putin step down, defying a crackdown on opposition leaders a day earlier and heavy new fines for violations at protests.
The World Bank has advised developing countries to prepare themselves for a long period of economic volatility by stepping up the pace of reform and boosting spending on long-term infrastructure projects.
In its Global Economic Prospects, the bank said that 2012 had begun on a positive note for developing countries, with upbeat market sentiment and cuts in interest rates leading to stronger economic activity. But this progress had been put at jeopardy by the "re-igniting of Euro Area jitters", which had affected financial markets in both rich and poor nations.
The report said the emerging world was being hit by weaker inflows of foreign investment and should reduce its vulnerability to problems emanating from the rich-country core of the global economy.
"Global capital market and investor sentiment are likely to remain volatile over the medium term – making economic policy-setting difficult. In this environment, developing countries should focus on productivity-enhancing reforms and infrastructure investment instead of reacting to day-to-day changes in the international environment," said Hans Timmer, director of development prospects at the World Bank.
The bank said it expected growth in the developing world to be a "relatively weak" 5.3% in 2012, down from 6.1% in 2011 and 7.4% in 2010. With output from the eurozone expected to decline by 0.3%, the World Bank said growth in high income nations would slip from 1.6% in 2011 to 1.4% this year. Syndicated bank loans led by European banks were 40% lower during the six months to March 2012 than they had been a year earlier.
Andrew Burns, lead author of the report, said: "Where possible, developing countries need to move to reduce vulnerabilities by lowering short-term debt levels, cutting budget deficits and returning to a more neutral monetary policy stance. Doing so will provide them with more leeway to loosen policy, should global conditions take a sharp turn for the worse."
The Two Step Plan to National Economic Reform and Recovery
Step 1: Directs the Treasury Department to issue U.S. Notes (like Lincoln’s Greenbacks; can also be in electronic deposit format) to pay off the National debt. Step 2: Increases the reserve ratio private banks are required to maintain from 10% to 100%, thereby terminating their ability to create money, while simultaneously absorbing the funds created to retire the national debt.
These two relatively simple steps, which Congress has the power to enact, would extinguish the national debt, without inflation or deflation, and end the unjust practice of private banks creating money as loans (i.e., fractional reserve banking). Paying off the national debt would wipe out the $400+ billion annual interest payments and thereby balance the budget. This Act would stabilize the economy and end the boom-bust economic cycles caused by fractional reserve banking.
"Many countries continue to subsidise polluting energy systems. These subsidies are costly for the budget and costly for the planet. Countries should reduce them. But in doing so, they must protect vulnerable groups by tightly focusing subsidies on products used by poorer people, and by strengthening social safety nets."
tell that to the greek people you comndemned to death last week.
she is part of the 1% and fronts an organisation that demands huge public spending cuts in return for financial aid. she is despicable.
"Over the past four years, we have been mired in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And we are not out of it yet.
"In fact, tensions are on the rise again, and financial stability risks have once more moved front and centre. Great uncertainty hangs over global prospects."
am i the only one to think she has absolutely zero idea about how to sort this mess out. she is starting to sound like one of the preachers in the life of brian..."and there shall in that time be rumours of things going astray, and there will be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work base, that has an attachment…at this time, a friend shall lose his friends’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before around eight o’clock..."
Capitalism has become sovietised (you can say that USA is now a SovetisedNeoCapitalist Hyprastate)
or perhaps MarxoCapitalism
...the economic cold war has been lost albeit..20 years after the Berlin Wall came down...you have heard of delayed timer IEDs havent you?
It was a roadside IED, laced with Finacial AIDS virus..there is no cure...with many (not all) investemnt banks as parasitical benign tumors
We are ape-ex preditors,let the games begin or be more responsible for your actions and stop shirking because we really are miracles of the Omniverse.The planet will survive without us and the thousands of species we're killing, so go on make an honest,courageous stand get cultivated and help the innocent and vulnerable,you only have one life.La vie ne vaut rien mais rien ne vaut une vie.
People like Lagarde are part of the problem.
It's really very simple, the rich have conquered democratic government, and have bent it toward their own interests.
The 'free-market' is just a device, legitimised by neoclassical economics, to justify and then reinforce existing power structures. The banks are a prime example, so powerful they can bend the will of political institutions.
Deregulation and privatisation do not level the playing field, they simply remove the borders and controls which prevent monopolies of power manifesting, unbalancing the structure of society itself in the process.
There is no such thing as a free market, there never can be as interest groups jostle for power with similar interests coalescing and agglomerating, consolidating their influence in a quest for power. It's human nature, this is how things work.
The 'free'-market is an illusion, and just gives free reign to powerful private interests to warp democracy, trampling the needs of the people in the process.
This is what we see happening throughout the West, and most pointedly in the USA and UK, the most liberalised of all the Western nations.
- This is why our jobs went overseas, and we were told there is no alternative
- This is why our wages are stagnating in real terms and politicians say they cannot intervene in the market to do anything about it
- This is why banks provide credit to supplement living standards, creating billions in profits
- This is why the government are marketising our public services, which corporations then run for private gain
- This is why social mobility is stalling; whilst Westminster is increasingly populated by the upper classes
- This is why our media support economic liberalisation; whilst the media owners attend the same restaurants and clubs as the politicians and the CEOs of multinational corporations
- This is why our communities are decaying, inequality grows and we are told we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Its not a conspiracy, its simply what happens when safeguards to prevent the concentration of power are removed, and then that concentration of power is allowed to freely exercise it's influence over wider society, agglomerating more and more power in the process.
The 1930s were supposed to be a lesson against the danger to civilisation inherent in untrammelled economic liberalism; if they ever were a lesson they have obviously been forgotten.
So, the Banksters gambled our money and lost. We had to pay them back through our governments (our money again - more than once) but they find loaning the money to start new business or expand existing ones too risky lol. But we had to borrow the money so we now all share debts which we are told that we have to pay off as soon as possible (although in fact private debt is the problem not public debt). So, we have forced austerity which is slowing growth and the quality of life.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, countries are seriously threatening to default on debts, and the vultures are circling because there are succulent opportunities to make money out of misery. Although countries can't go bankrupt, the financial systems which are owned by the very people who shouldn't have control of them are leveraging them to ensure a systematic stripping of assets from countries one by one.
This is leading to greater social problems and environmental issues (most of which haven't even been seen yet) and our government is selling our family jewels at knock down prices to their friends to pay back the debt which is not a major problem but has been sold as one.
Meanwhile, as Leonard Cohen says,
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes"
Then the head of the IMF says, "she said the rich should restrain their demands for higher incomes while there are still 200 million people worldwide looking for a job and poverty is on the rise". In effect simply telling the banksters and thieves not to be so greedy isn't a solution - more a suggestion for a respite for a while.
How wonderful ... NOT!
Triple crisis? It's a quad crisis, she forgot "peak oil"
Lagarde may have her heart sort-of in the right place, but her approach is totally wrong. She's of the neo-classical view. And like most of the IMF, EU and even the UK's Torys and Labour she is demonstrably wrong.
If neo-classical ecomonics were sound then these crises could have never have happened. But they did happen, and so neo-classical economics is wrong. QED.
Lagarde simply ignores the evidence, and this reminds me of a quote from Bertrand Russell that I just picked up from the "Geek Manifesto":
"A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which this world is suffering"
But Lagarde is just like the global waring deniers, she disregards the evidence that the IMF ecomonic model is false.
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