As a topic of debate, the Greek economy certainly seems to attract more than it's share of people keen to testify to their fervent belief in the heavenly mandate of the rights of property.
And the constant attempts to blame the economic situation there on the likes of taxi drivers, barbers and waiters certainly qualifies as one of the shabbier sophistries dragged into play.
It really needs to be stressed: they get the blame for the tax gap because otherwise the light would be shone on the real tax cheats - professionals and business owners large and small, in comfortable complicity with the Greek state. And that can't be allowed because it would undermine the moral authority of everything that the Greek people are being sacrificed to protect. Taxi drivers, waiters and barbers all come across as essentially plebeian -- so blaming them fits comfortably with the received wisdom that the rightful lot of the little people is externally-imposed discipline and obeisance to their betters. ...Blaming them solves any number of issues of cognitive dissonance - if we can speak of 'cognition' when referring to the beliefs of those whose world-view doesn't stray beyond kneejerk loyalty to the status quo....Over the past few weeks, Athens' top brass have been trying to convince the world that happy days are here again. Prime minister Antonis Samaras now talks of the Greek "success story". The boss of the central bank and the finance minister say Greece has turned a corner. Editorialists in the national press and parts of the international financial press dutifully nod their assent. And those with Greek or European assets to sell clap along: "Forget Grexit – it could be Greecovery instead," ran one particularly bone-headed "research" note I received on Friday....What's at stake here is a much bigger prize than whether an economy worth 2% of Europe's annual GDP really is on the mend. It's about justifying the shock therapy imposed on distressed members of the eurozone.
This was frankly put by Maria Paola Toschi, a market strategist at JP Morgan, in the FT last week. "If Greece can present itself as a recovering economy, having taken the medicine of fiscal austerity and supply-side reform, then the reform agenda of the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund will be given a further boost." If the elites of Europe and Washington can claim to have "healed" Greece, then they can shrug off criticisms of eurozone austerity. And they can also defend an economic model that just three years ago looked as if it had crashed into a wall.
Yet the exhibits the boosters are using do not a case make. Athens shares doubled in the past year? Cheap money from central banks and investors desperate for returns can play funny tricks. Wages have fallen? Yes, but the business investment that was meant to follow on from that hasn't materialised. The public finances are back in some kind of order? Taking an axe to the welfare state and public services will do that; still, few think Athens could go a day outside the sovereign version of debtor's jail.
And no one is seriously disputing that the economy remains badly sick; the OECD predicts Greece will face its seventh year of recession in a row in 2014. More than one in four Greeks are out of a job; of young Greeks, nearly two in three. Around 60% of those out of work haven't been employed in more than a year. According to a recent piece by Nick Malkoutzis and Yiannis Mouzakis for Ekathimerini, there are 400,000 families in Greece without a single breadwinner.
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e the Spartans, Thebans, and Thespians at the Pass of Thermopylae, the Greeks were sacrificed to buy time for the alliance. Instead of applause, they were then vilified for their heroic efforts by ill-informed and self-interested Dutch, Finnish, Austrian, and German politicians.
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Indeed, the Greeks were part sacrificed to buy time. But not for the Dutch, Finns of Austrians but for the German, French and US banks. The first Greek bail-outs went straight to these banks to pay for Greek debts. Especially the role of France is underexposed in this article. Germany and France never had to bail-out a German or French bank, as did the Dutch with their banks. Why not? Because the German and French bank bail-outs were paid by the whole of Europe inter alia through Greece.
The Commission now argues that the return to calm after the Draghi `Put’ has lowered the multiplier again, so there is no real need to change policy (other than letting the fiscal stabilizers do their work, avoiding the mistake of yet further tightening to chase missed deficit targets)
If no such resignation comes from Commissioner Rehn, we know the Rehn of Terror will go on. The regime will persist in destructive folly, adding 100,000 people to the jobless rolls each month.
Just a reminder of the scale of error, which I wrote about in this blog last year.
The Troika originally said that Greece’ economy would contract by 2.6pc in 2010 under the austerity regime, before recovering with growth of 1.1pc in 2011, and 2.1pc in 2012.
In fact, Greek GDP remained in an unbroken free-fall. It did not grow in either year. It contracted a further 7.1pc in 2011, 6.4pc in 2012.
Roughly speaking, the Troika misjudged the scale of economic decline over three years by 12pc of GDP. The total decline will be around 25pc, surely a Great Depression.
Printing money is a tax on existing money.
When central banks print money and give it to governments, it's just an additional tax on everyone else's money.
The E.U. (who are a farcical bunch by anyone standards) haven't actually engaged in printing money..... yet-ish.
I say yet-ish, because they have in a way, (but don't tell the Germans).
Ultimately printing money is just another tax. It's a way of keeping the Politicos in money and it doesn't work for the average Joe or Jane that well, because they get hammered with inflation.
This article purports to say is:
The ECB should have printed money and given it the Greek Politicos. And stuff the Northern EU savers and pensioners.
As regards Greece exiting the E.U., whats the diff tween 10 Drachmas and 1 Euro if they both have the same purchasing power.
Nobody has taken responsibility for the disastrous errors made by the EU-IMF Troika in Greece, where youth unemployment has just reached 58.3pc.
Nobody has resigned, or missed a day’s pay, or faced any kind of censure from an elected body, despite the withering indictment just issued by the IMF.
Worse yet, the basic conceptual policy errors that led to this tragic episode have not been fully corrected.
With a little trimming here and there, the eurozone is sticking to the same mix of self-defeating contractionary policies that have tipped the region back into a double-dip recession, with seven quarters in a row of falling GDP, soaring unemployment, and an ever starker divergence with the United States.
I cannot understand how the majority of people in this country cannot see what an appalling totalitarian machine the EU really is, and that having seen it they demand their elected representatives to act in the nations interest and withdraw from it." (Aureliusmarcus).
Yeah, true. It Is the fall of any sense of Democracy .
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karlyboy
Today 03:56 PM
They will until they are finally blue in the face. They cling to it like Mamma. That's the problem with Southern Europe, they cling too much to things and lack the independent backbone to handle things. Family always rallies around, brother and uncles lend and bail, the EU is just another one of these with a big set of apron strings! However when the apron strings are cut there are going to be some very angry and upset people and blood will run on the streets. Meanwhile Barroso keeps bellowing the Euro is a success.
A one size fits all will not work and Greece is not Germany just like king Canute trying to push back the sea, eventually it overwhelms. It's not about having faith in the project or aspiration its about downright stupidity to begin with!
The EU is a giant vampire squid on the face of Europe.
Only when the EU gang have brought the entire continent of Europe to its knees will they finally be swept into the dustbin of history - to be yet another in a centuries-long line of French-conceived 'grande idee' onto which the entire political class of Europe has jumped to milk it for their personal benefits for all it's worth - which will end, as such stupid ideas always do, in unspeakable suffering for countless millions of innocent people.
The French Revolution was another such typical French-inspired 'grande idee' which was doomed to collapse in failure - but as usual, not before after torturing and murdering countless numbers, and grinding the population into the dust, before that happened.
Hopefully, the gang at the centre of this conspiracy - hijacked by the Germans to create a German-controlled federal Europe without the knowledge or consent of the peoples of Europe - will at the end of it be found decorating lamp posts.
That would be the very least these contemptible opportunists running the EU deserve.
The reality is, as well you know Ambrose, that the EU is a religion and the Euro is its credo.
I have said this before: there is no democratic institution too great, no line of desperate unemployed too long and no penny of peoples personal savings too small, but that this thieving crowd of unelected zealots will sacrifice it in the name of their religion.
Portugal will be next and Spain after that.
I cannot understand how the majority of people in this country cannot see what an appalling totalitarian machine the EU really is, and that having seen it they demand their elected representatives to act in the nations interest and withdraw from it.
I cannot understand how all those Scots who yearn for independence are prepared to listen for even a second to a treacherous little pork pie whose plan is to cheerfully deliver them into the maw of Brussels.
I cannot understand how the people of Cyprus allowed their economy to be utterly destroyed and their money stolen so they could remain within this pusillanimous club.
I cannot. But then I have ever really been able to understand religion; belief without proof, acceptance without question, prejudice without conscience. This sort of thing is dangerous enough when constrained to the realms of the spiritual, it is catastrophic when allowed any foothold in the real world of politics and economics.
The EU needs to die, it really does, and quickly - before it takes anymore countries to hell with it.
Latvia is ready to become the 18th country to join the eurozone, the EU's Economic Affairs Commissioner, Olli Rehn, has announced.
In a statement in Brussels on 5 June 2013 he said: "Latvia's desire to adopt the euro is a sign of confidence in our common currency and further evidence that those who predicted the disintegration of the euro area were wrong."
The country formally submitted its application in March, and its economic situation has been scrutinised by Commission officials in the intervening months.
Despite being the first EU country to ask for assistance from the EU and the International Monetary Fund in 2009, Latvia now has the EU's highest GDP growth rate and second-highest export rate.
Mr Rehn said that the country's experience was a sign that "a country can successfully overcome macroeconomic imbalances, however severe, and emerge stronger".
The report carried out by the Commission into the state of the Latvian economy found that its interest and inflation rates were well below the EU average, and that the deficit-to-GDP ratio had fallen from 8.1% in 2010 to 1.2% in 2012.
Joining the eurozone will mean that Latvia will also have to join a number of institutions created in the wake of the eurozone crisis, such as the European Banking Authority and the Single Supervisory Mechanism.
Following the Commission's recommendation a final decision will be granted by the Economic and Financial Affairs Council in July, subject to a positive opinion from the European Parliament.
It is expected that Latvia will join the single currency on 1 January 2014.
Markets will get a read on the U.S. job-generating machine with the release of May's payrolls report from the U.S. Labor Dept. at 8:30 a.m. ET. Economists are targeting two lucky numbers: 165,000 (jobs added) and 7.5% (unchanged unemployment rate).
The fallout from revelations about data mining undertaken by the U.S. government in the tech and telecoms space is continuing. Amid the debate, one question sticks out: Is government data mining necessary to keep us safe?
The Duke of Edinburgh, otherwise known as the significant other of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, is in the hospital to have an exploratory operation on his abdomen. It is a planned visit. The sprightly 91-year-old had been due to open the new $1.6 billion headquarters of the BBC.
Game 1 of the NBA Finals: San Antonio Spurs top Miami Heat. Miami's LeBron James had 18 points, 18 rebounds, 10 assists — and his team still lost.
It's over. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife of 30 years, Lyudmila, formally announced that they are separating. "Our marriage is over due to the fact that we barely see each other," the former flight attendant said.
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