I am afraid that Capitalism and Communism as with our left and right parties
have all failed. we need a new "ism"!!!!
The Chinese do understand one thing we have forgotten and that is you need to
make stuff to create wealth. They still have huge problems, like the debt for this development which is
largely un paid and just floating, like our fiat currencies. They also have a
population problem, as have far to few females to breed the next generation, so
will be in the same old age situation as Japan in the future. Unfortunately what you say about the poor is not true as they are really
suffering, it is the well off middle class workers that now want to consume and
get higher wages.
The rich seem to have creamed off billions like Russia and there are more
Rolls Royce sold in china today and property in Shanghai has gone out of the
roof and flats now cost millions of dollars. Corruption is rampant and the
Triads are firmly entrenched. So not all a rosy future for China, as the rest of the World is now broke and
can not afford to by Chinese goods. But they seem to have a lot of gold, but their US bonds will crash in value
soon, mas the USA can not keep interest levels down for long and has to inflate
their debts away... If a politician is anything useful, it is as a device to deliver and oversea,
as an elected representative, the welfare and security of their constituents.
What then for Europe, as it is manifestly failing to deliver that with its
unelected decision makers and a powerless Council neither of which is
delivering their basic function. If Europe is achieving anything, it is its
ability to explore the depths of crass incompetence and waste. Unemployment and
despair are now the norm in several member states with just a few being forced
to pay to keep others afloat to satisfy a corrupted vision. These vast numbers
of unemployed youth are a powder-keg and heaven help us when the millions of
people who have no chance of getting any kind of work in the foreseeable future
decide it is time to pop down to their Parliament as and ask why.
13 comments:
"I know many parts of our societies attribute the current difficulties to European Union level and this is not fair because it was not the European Union that created the problems," Barroso told reporters at Dublin Castle.
Barroso was speaking at a joint press conference with Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny in Dublin to coincide with the beginning of Ireland's tenure of the six-month rotating EU presidency, AFP reported.
"I want to make this clear because there is a myth that it is the European Union that imposes difficult policies. It's not true," Barroso said.
"The cause of the difficulties some countries are facing is excessive public debt created by national governments and irresponsible financial behaviour, that also accumulated excessive private debt including financial bubbles that happened under the responsibility of national supervisors," he added.
"This is why now countries have to make painful adjustments. Britain is having a very tough budget and Britain is not a member of the euro."
Is Mr Barosso not the former Portugese politician whose country is dependent on wine, olive oil and cork (which wineries no longer use) and whose educated young people don't want to work on the land so go first to Lisbon and if there's no work, head off elsewhere in the EU?
The only new construction development you see in Portugal is the new symbolic highway from the south to the north that takes them to Lisbon but the country can't afford the payments for its construction.
The great bond racket is in full swing. The only big money made last year in the great casino was on Portugese bonds, which went up in value by 75%. No products were made, nothing was created, just money going around and around, like the ball of a roulette wheel. The cash pot got bigger in size with no value being added.
Apocalypse soon?
He washes his hands of the terrible plight of Europes youth, so terribly let down by their leaders. Offering no hope, no vision, no future, he stands smugly smiling, unable to face the chaos that surrounds. Reject this Pontias Pilot! there is hope - just not with the EU as it currently is.
Cheap money offered to nations that did not deserve it protected as they were by the ECB/German umbrella, allowed nations to borrow at rates way below that to which they were deserving.
Massive influx of Euro money to economies that could not afford to make efficient and profitable use of it, so it got spent on superfluous infrastructure and property only the poor could buy, but could not afford.
All this masked by a central inflation rate that ignored the realities within these states. The bubbles occurred because money was cheap, inflation was a lie, and a single currency allowed politicians to do what they always do, spend more than they raise and to them, seemingly without consequence.
The single currency is to blame, and this was always a European commission objective which eventually they managed to convince nation states, was a good idea.
Clearly, it was not.
Mr Barrossa, take your chunks, blame is rightly being apportioned to where it is deserved.
They may not have created the global financial crisis, but they sure as hell built an edifice that couldn't withstand it.
Recommended by 4 people
Recommend
Report
.
same_old_dog
49 minutes ago
Delusional to the last, the final quackings of an unelected duck.
Recommended by 13 people
Recommend
Report
.
simon88
Today 04:53 PM
Proof that if you spin a fib often enough it might become a truth.
Recommended by 18 people
Recommend
Report
.
team_realistic_uk
Today 04:38 PM
This guy is unreal...so the fudged entry criteria for pretty well all of the countries entering the Euro at its introduction, the persistent breach of the Growth and Stability Pact criteria during the last 10 years, inappropriate setting of the interest rate for all countries by the ECB and the unsigned EU accounts over err 14 years are not signs that the EU cannot even enforce it's own rules never mind manage itself properly....Jose wake up and smell the coffee...or is that the gravy....toot,toot all aboard!
Looks like the start of an EU campaign.
This lie will be repeated from now on by various EU politicians.As another nazi once said 'if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth"
Media please note that any future reports of this from other eu apparatchiks should imply and accuse them of lying.
He appears to be overlooking the fact the austerity policies have really arisen out of the ashes of the farce that passes for Eurozone policy on govt debt. Overall the Eurozone debt is better than most in the world and yet in parts of the Eurozone they have the most severe fiscal policies in the world. It didn't have to be that way.It was a choice and it was primarily made by the Northern part of the Eurozone. Moreover the scale of the blowout was in direct proportion to the failure of the Eurozone to monitor it's constiutuent parts and of course the sheer lunacy of having a currency that was unable to reflect the large variations in competitiveness that existed in Europe.
Dream on Barosso.
Central bankers are in the spotlight today, with the European Central Bank and the Bank of England both holding their monthly meetings to set monetary policy.
We're not expecting any rate cuts (although you can never be sure), but the ECB's press conference at 1.30pm GMT (2.30pm Frankfurt time) will dominate attention.
Mario Draghi will give his views on the state of the European economy, and probably field a few telling questions about the eurozone crisis. Will he agree that the worst is over, or renew his pressure on leaders to take decisive action now before panic returns?....
Otherwise, we'll be watching the situation in Cyprus after German politicians warned yesterday that its bailout could be in jeopardy.
And Spain is holding a bond sale this morning -- the results will indicate whether Madrid can keep staving off a request for financial help.
Just in: Spain has held a successful bond auction, selling more debt than expected at sharply lower borrowing costs.
The Spanish Treasury raised a total of €5.8bn, beating its own maximum target of €5bn.
And the significant falls in the yields (or interest rates) on the various flavours of bonds showed traders were keen to get their hands on Spanish debt.
Here's the details:
• €3.397bn of two-year bonds at a maximum yield of 2.587%
• €1.95bn of five-year bonds, at a maximum yield of 4.033%, down from 4.769% in November 2012
• €470m of 13-year bonds at a maximum yield of 5.569%, down from 6.218% in July 2011
That's a decent result for Madrid, and shows that the bond-buying programme announced by Mario Draghi last summer is still boosting confidence.
need for PSI (the ECB was dead against, because they couldn't predict the contagion / confidence effects). Which makes is a bit cheeky and hypocritical for them to then turn around now and complain about money-laundering.
But they'll do it anyway. Germany has a federal election coming, Steinbrück and the SPD need issues to fight and weaken Merkel. And the cyprus bailout is a perfect fit for Steinbrück. He made a big push on tax evasion cooperation back when he was finance minister.
And if you (and I) think that Wolfgang Schäuble has the diplomatic talent of a brick, you just wait till you see what Steinbrück comes out with. He's about the least diplomatic politician on the german scene. Him, on Cyprus? He hasn't even opened his mouth yet, and I'm already bloody cringing!
And for some added, extra irony. It was the german government that leaked the BND report on money-laundering, that handed the issue to the SPD.
One minor quibble:
I don't think they "took one for the team" deliberately. Judging from the very public mud-slinging going on between President Christofias and former Central Bank Head Orphanides, the President was unaware that cypriot banks had billions of euro exposure to greek sovereign bonds. So he agreed to PSI back in 2011 in ignorance of the effect on his economy.
And the reason he was unaware? He was refusing to communicate with his own Central Bank Head, for long before that decision.
Incredible, but true.
need for PSI (the ECB was dead against, because they couldn't predict the contagion / confidence effects). Which makes is a bit cheeky and hypocritical for them to then turn around now and complain about money-laundering.
But they'll do it anyway. Germany has a federal election coming, Steinbrück and the SPD need issues to fight and weaken Merkel. And the cyprus bailout is a perfect fit for Steinbrück. He made a big push on tax evasion cooperation back when he was finance minister.
And if you (and I) think that Wolfgang Schäuble has the diplomatic talent of a brick, you just wait till you see what Steinbrück comes out with. He's about the least diplomatic politician on the german scene. Him, on Cyprus? He hasn't even opened his mouth yet, and I'm already bloody cringing!
And for some added, extra irony. It was the german government that leaked the BND report on money-laundering, that handed the issue to the SPD.
One minor quibble:
I don't think they "took one for the team" deliberately. Judging from the very public mud-slinging going on between President Christofias and former Central Bank Head Orphanides, the President was unaware that cypriot banks had billions of euro exposure to greek sovereign bonds. So he agreed to PSI back in 2011 in ignorance of the effect on his economy.
And the reason he was unaware? He was refusing to communicate with his own Central Bank Head, for long before that decision.
Incredible, but true.
Your post sums up the mindset which got Spain into the mess it's in. You have 26 per cent unemployment, 56 per cent youth unemployment, a completely collapsed economy, a landscape littered with thousands of now-worthless housing developments, unused airports and high-speed train services, and other exhibits attesting to the criminal misallocation of public and private capital that has been going on in your country over the past decade. But seemingly this is all ok, because at least you can take solace in having proved "Anglo-Saxon" economists wrong re. the timing of the bailout.
It's not a question of surviving from one bond auction to the next; the question is how on earth is Spain to generate the wealth that would enable it to pay down the huge burden of debt it's just saddled itself with? All this bond auction stuff is just the white noise in the background. What Spain really needs is to reform and rebalance its economy, thoroughly reform its governance model, and invest in education and R&D so that it can compete internationally and so that the economic follies of the past decade can never again be repeated. Rajoy's government seems as far away from getting on top of these issues as that of the hapless Zapatero.
Germany has a minimum wage for specific trades and the rest is covered by collective bargaining and enforced by law.
to suggest it has low wages and little interest in workers rights is deeply disingenuous.
Germany industrial strength is closely tied to how closely integrated its unions are with management (much like Japan).
a happy worker is a more productive worker.
measured and applied fact.
Post a Comment