FRANKFURT—The European Central Bank, which holds its monthly meeting
Thursday, is likely to hold back from new measures to revive growth in the
euro-zone economy amid mounting concern that governments are backtracking on
pledges to build a common safety net for their banks. European Union officials, including at the ECB, are pressing for the creation
of a central authority, backed by a single pot of money, tasked with "resolving"
or winding down stricken banks anywhere in the 17-nation currency bloc. But although the ECB and many analysts say such a step is a vital part of
stabilizing the euro zone... German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wasn’t exaggerating when he called youth unemployment a “catastrophe” for the European Union. As of March, 56 percent of Spaniards, 59 percent of Greeks, and 38 percent of Italians and Portuguese ages 16 to 24 were unemployed. Schäuble and French counterpart Pierre Moscovici are working on a “New Deal for Europe,” but it’s clear that Europe’s youth program is no such thing. The core of the effort is €6 billion ($7.7 billion) carved out of the EU’s budget. Some of that (it’s unclear how much) would go to the European Investment Bank, which would back loans to small and midsize enterprises in exchange for commitments to hire and train young people. Some would go to helping young people move to find training and jobs; Germany and other countries have 30,000 unfilled apprenticeships. Banks in Spain, Greece, and elsewhere aren’t lending, so this kind of subsidy makes sense. Yet the scale is far too small. Millions of new jobs are needed, and the initiative falls short.
Access Investments-Building Awareness - European Union-ROMANIA
Thursday, June 6, 2013
FRANKFURT—The European Central Bank, which holds its monthly meeting
Thursday, is likely to hold back from new measures to revive growth in the
euro-zone economy amid mounting concern that governments are backtracking on
pledges to build a common safety net for their banks. European Union officials, including at the ECB, are pressing for the creation
of a central authority, backed by a single pot of money, tasked with "resolving"
or winding down stricken banks anywhere in the 17-nation currency bloc. But although the ECB and many analysts say such a step is a vital part of
stabilizing the euro zone... German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wasn’t exaggerating when he called youth unemployment a “catastrophe” for the European Union. As of March, 56 percent of Spaniards, 59 percent of Greeks, and 38 percent of Italians and Portuguese ages 16 to 24 were unemployed. Schäuble and French counterpart Pierre Moscovici are working on a “New Deal for Europe,” but it’s clear that Europe’s youth program is no such thing. The core of the effort is €6 billion ($7.7 billion) carved out of the EU’s budget. Some of that (it’s unclear how much) would go to the European Investment Bank, which would back loans to small and midsize enterprises in exchange for commitments to hire and train young people. Some would go to helping young people move to find training and jobs; Germany and other countries have 30,000 unfilled apprenticeships. Banks in Spain, Greece, and elsewhere aren’t lending, so this kind of subsidy makes sense. Yet the scale is far too small. Millions of new jobs are needed, and the initiative falls short.
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Latvia's entry to the euro club comes four years since it took a €7.5bn bailout from the IMF and the EU.
The financial crisis of 2008 burst a credit bubble that had swelled over several years, triggering a real estate crash and anti-government riots in the country, and the resignation of the prime minister.
A new government installed in 2009 imposed tough spending cuts and wage reductions, helped to drive Latvia into a deep recession, with the jobless rate rising towards 20%.
The economy is now growing strongly again (as the EC was keen to point to this morning). Latvia's GDP increased by 1.2% in the first three months of 2013, defying the 0.2% contraction across the eurozone. The economy is 5.6% larger than a year ago.
But the country, of around 2.2m people, still suffers high poverty levels and income inequality.
According to the Baltic Centre for Economic Policy Studies, over 30% of the population is classified as “severely materially deprived,” in 2010. That means they can't afford to pay rent, food bills or utility costs. This is the worst figure in the EU.
Various gobbets of economic news from the US this afternoon.
1) 135,000 private jobs were created in America last month, a slight increase on April's reading but lower than expected. Economists said it was consistent with only slow employment growth (see graph above - more from Marketwatch here).
2) The US service sector grew faster last month, with its ISM non-manufacturing index rising to 53.7 in May, from 53.1 in April. However, the employment index component of the measure dropped.
Paul Dales of Capital Economics said the IMS reading was a "relief", but warned that when Monday's weak manufacturing data is included the US economy is probably slowing.
3) US factory orders rose by 1% in April, reversing March's 4.7% fall.
Following all this, shares are down across Europe's financial markets this afternoon after Wall Street opened in the red.
The FTSE 100 is down 118 points, or 1.8%, at 6439, with the Dow Jones off 72 points (-0.5%).
As my colleague Nick Fletcher writes here, markets were already weak on a growing number of comments from US Federal Reserve members that its bond buying programme - a key support for share prices - might gradually come to an end. The 3.8% drop on the Nikkei overnight also caused alarm - much lower and it will be an official bear market
It’s official: tourism, Greece’s biggest industry after shipping, is experiencing a renaissance. For the first time since the outbreak of the crisis, figures show the country being braced for a bumper year with some 17 million visitors due to fly in. In Athens, alone, industry figures are reporting a 10 percent increase – a huge boost for a capital that barely a year ago was associated solely with street riots and strikes. “It is going to be a bumper year,” said Andreas Andreadis, who heads the Association of Hellenic Tourism Enterprises (SETE). “The crisis has made Greek enterprises, everyone, much more aware. Greek society understands that tourism can help the country get out of the crisis, by first of all creating jobs,” he told me.
Tourism, which contributed around €32bn to economic output in 2012, accounts for almost 17% of GDP. Roughly 780,000 people are employed in the sector. Andreadis, who has been widely credited with innovatively bumping up the private sector’s role in marketing the country – previously promoted by lacklustre state bodies – wants to transform Greece into one of the ten best quality destinations worldwide. To that end, Greece must think outside the box by turning away from the mass market, where deteriorating competiveness has lessened its appeal, and tapping larger, long-haul emerging source markets such as the US, China and Russia. Moves are already afoot.
Thanks to a lifting of visa restrictions “13,000 visas in Russia are being issued for Greece every day,” he said. “The volume is so high that SETE has employed 20 of its own people just to help stamp visas.” Russian arrivals at regional airports, as a result, have already shot up by 230%.
The increase in arrivals is vital to helping austerity-hit Greeks, now blighted by the worst unemployment rate in the euro zone, survive the next year.
Last year, the 15.5 million tourists who visited Greece spent 650 euro on average. This year, the hope is that 17 million will spend an average €670. By 2021, Andreadis says, the aim is to attract 24 million tourists who will spend an average €800 – €50bn in total – thus ensuring jobs for around one million people.
“Better quality will be central to generating that demand,” he said adding that a new PR and branding strategy, focusing on luxury tourism, would also be vital to turning tourism – and the economy – around.
Breaking: the IMF report is out, and it admits that the Washington-based fund made a series of crucial errors over Greece's first bailout in 2010, including overestimating the impact of austerity.
The 50-page document admits that the programme created a much deeper recession than expected, driving unemployment higher than the Fund had forecast.
However, it argues that the bailout package was necessary and did achieve two key targets -- keeping Greece in the eurozone, and avoiding wider contagion.
The report cited several "notable failures" -- the long recession, the panic caused in the financial markets, and damage to Greece's banking sector as savers withdrew this money:
Market confidence was not restored, the banking system lost 30 percent of its deposits, and the economy encountered a much- deeper-than-expected recession with exceptionally high unemployment.
Public debt remained too high and eventually had to be restructured, with collateral damage for bank balance sheets that were also weakened by the recession. Competitiveness improved somewhat on the back of falling wages, but structural reforms stalled and productivity gains proved elusive.
The report reveals that IMF officials changed their criterion, to ensure that Greece passed its rules for "debt sustainability". Subsequently, Greece's fast-shrinking economy missed the macro-economic targets.
The Fund's report is also critical of the way the Greek programme was handled, saying "depth of ownership of the program and the capacity to
implement structural reforms were overestimated".
It also admits that it struggled to cope with a bailout programme within a currency union:
A particular challenge is to find ways to translate promises of conditional assistance from partner countries into formal program agreements.
And finally, the Fund pointed to political challenges -- and implied that the Greek government hasn't played straight with the IMF during bailout talks.
It said:
Greece’s recent experience demonstrates the importance of spreading the burden of adjustment across different strata of society in order to build support for a program. The obstacles encountered in implementing reforms also illustrate the critical importance of ownership of a program,
a lesson that is common to the findings of many previous EPEs.
Other lessons drawn concern the need to find ways to streamline the Troika process in the future and for Fund staff to be more skeptical about official data during regular surveillance.
Today in Brussels,...
...Rajoy and his "economic" ministers (Treasury, Economy and Competitiveness, Employment, Industry, Public Works, Foreign Office, Agriculture) are going to meet with President of the EU executive, Jose Manuel Barroso and his "economic" commissioners.
- A bilateral summit in which there will be a crossing of requests: Barroso will ask Spain to apply its EU recommendations ('obligations', according to Germany) and Rajoy, in his turn, will request the EU to fulfill its commitments, as the implementation of the banking union.
- After the traditional handshakings and smiles for the photographers, the hectic agenda for the bilateral summit meeting between Spain and the European Commission (the first of its kind to be held during this new electoral term of the Spanish PM) will begin around 11:30 am with a meeting between the two leaders.
- Only 30 mins later, at noon, there will be a plenary meeting of the Commission with Rajoy and his ministers. Here again Barroso will urge Spain to keep reforming and Rajoy will also repeat his demands for a banking union, as it was committed last summer.
- After hearing a short statement of the EU Commissioner responsible of one specific area, the corresponding Spanish "economic" minister will have 3 to 4 minutes to explain the reforms of his responsibility. Besides Rajoy, only the Minister of Economy, Luis de Guindos, will speak twice (a priori) and he will enjoy more time for his exposure, up to 12 minutes, according to Europa Press.
- After the plenary meeting, the summit is scheduled to finish, and they will bring in the working lunch.
When banks collapsed public money was forced to cover up the costs.Of course also then the PUBLIC ( tax payer ) did not have the
money in full so it was printed.And some point need it need to payed.
And there are two options
1) Tax increase
2) Austerity
So in one line : Your STIMULUS in the past.Payed now with AUSTERITY
This is the big lie the left keeps pushing. There is no truth in it.
To take Britain as an example, over the last 5 years the government has increased the national debt by about £600 billion. That doesn't include the costs of the bank bailout. That's added another £120 billion or so, but in true government fashion, it's being kept off book for the moment.
The net costs are likely to be close to zero because the government will sell the stakes they acquired in the banks for close to (or more) than they paid for them.
In other words, the banks themselves will pay the cost of the bailout. And a lot more, too, with the government taking tens of billions in taxes from the banking industry each year. They have already paid far more in taxes since 2008 than the bailout cost, even if the stakes in RBS and Lloyds had to be written off.
Austerity is necessary because the government has been running a deficit since 2002. The treasury themselves estimated the last government had built up a structural deficit of 7% of GDP before the financial crisis began.
Getting rid of that 7% structural deficit is the reason for austerity. It has nothing to do with the financial crisis, it was caused by the last government increasing public spending faster than any peace time government in history.
I'm confused. Drawing upon the accumulated wisdom of the sages who coalesce around EU-related stories, I had come to the conclusion that the EU is part of a diabolical socialist plot. Yet this news article - not to say the entire history of (post-1945) European integration - highlights that the EU is simply an appendage of highly concentrated interests. As such, it would surely be more appropriate to place the organisation upon the right of the political spectrum.
BRUSSELS—The International Monetary Fund has admitted to major missteps over the past three years in its handling of the bailout of Greece, the first spark in a debt crisis that spread across Europe.
In an internal document marked "strictly confidential," the IMF said it badly underestimated the damage that its prescriptions of austerity would do to Greece's economy, which has been mired in recession for the last six years.
The IMF conceded that it bent its own rules to make Greece's burgeoning debt seem sustainable and that, in retrospect, the country failed on three of its four criteria to qualify ...
Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.
Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.
These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities.
In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.
At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter."
Revolution is indeed the answer. Unfortunately, this may never again happen just as the New World Order "conspiracy theorists" predicted decades ago.
Since the beginning of humankind, violence has served as the currency of government. Fundamental political theory acknowledges that violence is the most base form of political power (hence terrorism). This is why governments monopolize the use of violence and instill it in institutions such as law enforcement and the military while simultaneously removing our right to use violence for the tool that it is (even Jesus, a sinless deity in the flesh, used violence to whip the moneychangers from the temple, so not all violence is bad).
However, there is a tripartite problem that prevents even a spark of revolutionary spirit at least in today's Western Anglo-Saxon societies. First, is the demoralization of society, second is the emasculation of men, and third, our reality is so propagandized and replete with entertaining amusements that keep us ever distracted that even revolutionaries would falter.
The demoralization of society has resulted in entire nations of people who stand upon no solid principled ground. When America was founded, Patrick Henry exclaimed, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" And her Congressmen were known to duel one another in the heat of principled and impassioned policy making. Merely two centuries later, Americans cannot comprehend the concept of giving their lives to defend principled beliefs. This is precisely why suicide bombers are such a foreign concept to Western Anglo-Saxon societies: There are little to no principles for which contemporary Western Anglo-Saxon's will give their lives. Indeed, in the U.S. it is socially acceptable to discuss all sorts of nonsense but there is an unwritten rule which forbids religious and political discourse in public - the two important conversations that should be and need to be had.
The emasculation of men has resulted in generations of men who act more like women and women who act more like men. These men are mere pusillanimous shadows of our forefathers, largely unable to make any significant decisions without the dominating guidance from their wife-mothers.
The propagandization of reality has resulted in nations of people who not only disagree regarding policy but who also disagree regarding objective empirical facts, i.e., reality. So long as people have more than one version of reality, they will continue to stumble and falter devoid of any guiding principles.
The entertaining amusements that keep us ever distracted allow for our emasculated societies to keep abreast of all manner of unprincipled and irrelevant trivia. Then we go to bed, get up, and do it all over again all while our tireless, never-sleeping governments lay foundations to implement pan-generational policies spanning decades.
Yes, revolution is the answer, but unfortunately, no one cares, and even if they did, they would be to cowardly to do anything about it. The New world Order has indeed arrived.
USA administration went past the law and order of civil rights
Official United States Government Definition of Terrorism
"[An] act of terrorism, means any activity that (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping."
(United States Code Congressional and Administrative News, 98th Congress, Second Session, 1984, Oct. 19, volume 2; par. 3077, 98 STAT. 2707 [West Publishing Co., 1984])
And
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which a government is ruled by an individual: a dictator. It has three possible meanings:
A Roman dictator was the incumbent of a political office of legislate of the Roman Republic. Roman dictators were allocated absolute power during times of emergency. Their power was originally neither arbitrary nor unaccountable, being subject to law and requiring retrospective justification. There were no such dictatorships after the beginning of the 2nd century BC, and later dictators such as Sulla and the Roman Emperors exercised power much more personally and arbitrarily.
A government controlled by one person, or a small group of people. In this form of government the power rests entirely on the person or group of people, and can be obtained by force or by inheritance. The dictator(s) may also take away much of its peoples' freedom.
In contemporary usage, dictatorship refers to an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state.
So based on the above definitions of terrorism and dictatorship spot the differences between any rogue country and history with USA current and past administration for example what is the difference between Hitler and OBAMA or Saddam and Bush
I was at a conference recently and the speaker suggested that the US was heading towards a police state. Controversial? It doesn't seem so now.
The reality that large areas of the US are in economic decline and have been for years. Detroit for example, and that these areas will never recover, especially now with the global economic shift to the east.
The threat from within, civil unrest was touted as a major issue looming on the horizon. The war on terror is, and always has been, a convenient excuse for these increasingly invasive methods and paranoia by the US Government against it's own people.
@Malkatrinho -
You'll need 200 million shipped by sub to the US and another 50 million gas masks for the UK. Then check out wiki EU - need a few extra billion for them. Remember when ordering, emails, mobiles are out...it's old quick ink on vellum bog paper I'm afraid and via Ecuador's diplomatic pouch. Oh, I'm not Mr Blueberry either - I'm under cover...."A.I." - high on the 'I" denegrade, clink the martini, wink wink...tape explodes in ten minutes. Whoops FBI rumbled key word 'explodes' - I'm a gonna ol' chap. I'm going down - blimey ol' boy, they're already here before I could say Brad....nice talkin'......bang! RIP
I can understand why you feel that way, so I will play the position of the US Government.
We did everything we needed to do to keep you safe. Secret and safe. You like being safe don't you? You don't want to have to worry about terrorists right? Or do you want America to die? Why do you hate America?
Here's the piece by a 'neutral journalist':
Check out the fancy new ties worn by NSA members!
Greenwald isn't being 'biased' against the US government, he regularly writes about injustices done by the government because they regularly do awful things
IMF chief Christine Lagarde. Greek media recently quoted IMF her describing 2011 as a 'lost year', partly because of miscalculations by the EU and IMF. Photograph: Stephane Mahe/Reuters
The European commission strongly refuted the withering criticism of the International Monetary Fund on Thursday, arguing that it had not mismanaged its handling of the Greek crisis.
Simon O'Connor, a spokesman for Olli Rehn, the commissioner handling the 2010 bailout, said Brussels "fundamentally disagrees" with the IMF on two of the central points raised by the Washington institution – that Greece's debt should have been restructured at the very outset of the crisis and that the commission failed to do enough about structural reforms in Greece.
Early debt restructuring, said O'Connor, could have triggered "systemic contagion" across the eurozone. On structural reforms, he added, "this is plainly wrong and unfounded."
In an internal report released on Wednesday evening, the IMF conceded that a catalogue of blunders had been made in the dealings with Greece by the "troika" of officials from the IMF, the commission and the European Central Bank.
The report charged that the Europeans were inexperienced and amateur in their approach.
But the IMF's findings were swept aside by the ECB's president, Mario Draghi, on Thuesday afternoon. Draghi told reporters he had not read the report, but was confident that any criticism were based on hindsight.
"Often these mea cuplas are a mistake of historical projection. You judge things that happen yesterday with today's eyes," said Draghi.
O'Connor, though, conceded that "lessons have been learned" from the chastening experience.
Early debt restructuring, said O'Connor, could have triggered "systemic contagion" across the eurozone. On structural reforms, he added, "this is plainly wrong and unfounded."
In an internal report released on Wednesday evening, the IMF conceded that a catalogue of blunders had been made in the dealings with Greece by the "troika" of officials from the IMF, the commission and the European Central Bank.
The report charged that the Europeans were inexperienced and amateur in their approach.
But the IMF's findings were swept aside by the ECB's president, Mario Draghi, on Thuesday afternoon. Draghi told reporters he had not read the report, but was confident that any criticism were based on hindsight.
"Often these mea cuplas are a mistake of historical projection. You judge things that happen yesterday with today's eyes," said Draghi.
O'Connor, though, conceded that "lessons have been learned" from the chastening experience.
"Of course, looking back we see what might have been done differently," he said, without highlighting where changes could or should have been effected. "This is a learning process."
Unlike the IMF report, there was no criticism from the commission of its own performance, although O'Connor said that a "full report" into the work of the troika over the past three years was being prepared. He did not say when it would be published. He also emphasised that the IMF criticism was contained in an internal IMF staff document and did not represent the official position of the IMF board.
In Athens, though, the IMF's admission was welcomed by finance minister Yannis Stournaras. He told the Guardian that the "good report" would help Greece to recover from the trauma of recent years.
"It is a good piece of self-criticism. It is an objective report reporting mistakes made by the international community and by Greece," Stournaras said.
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