Yep, the Greek bailout was - partly, and only partly - a fudge to save French banks, mostly (because the French being incapable of saving their own), and some German banks (Angie could have saved her own, but did not want to, and was possibly blackmailed by Sarkozy) - but the then Greek government was in - and could have refused. They did not, because they got more money from the EU, as they got untold and unmentioned billions of "structural funds" since the 1980ties. And they all vanished into the bottomless pit that is Greece, a rent-racketeering installation run by a couple of dozen of families..... highly corrupt to this day, without a land-register and other de minimis amenities of a functioning first world country. None of the 209 reform steps are successfully implemented, some in part, one hears; according to Bloomberg the “chief of tax collection” tried to look at the tax of 300 high-net Greeks and was promptly fired over the summer…. And so on, and so forth. Unmitigated disaster is a diplomatic, circumspect way to describe what is going on. And now, with the last bailout money being used up, and the populace badly suffering, they want “more gifts”. Which puts the Troika into an unenviable position – let the Greeks go bust – to avoid moral hazard in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Dublin, the lot – and implode the euro this way; or – to fall over time and again, and thus rendering the “austerity path” into a figment of imagination (the pipe dream it always was), or better a nightmare, Berlin edition. I guess it is time to pull the plug, now that the chicken have come home to roost, or in other words – nobody can defy gravity forever, and the delusion of “everybody gets rich without working for it, while creating a world reserve currency out of thin air into the bargain” will fall apart. The irony and saddest aspect – all the fear mongering from Brussels and Berlin tell me only one thing – nobody seems to have grasped the gravity of the situation – the markets are not alone in their oblivious ignorance. Unfortunately for us all. Rant over.

Right now, Europe has a currency and an economic union that exists in a kind of fantasy land, with no underlying political unity. Until the Germans start acting more European (meaning creating a consumption society and realizing that they’ll have to do some fiscal transfers to struggling peripheral nations in exchange for the huge export benefits they get from the euro), and countries like Spain, Italy, Portugal and France start making the changes they really need (all the usual stuff—labor market reforms, cutting red tape, fighting corruption, opening up service markets), the debt crisis won’t go away.

Indeed, the challenge now is for countries is to use the breathing room that the ECB has given them to really come together over the next 18 months and make those reforms happen while committing to a truly integrated Europe. Germany should say it will unequivocally back peripheral nations financially in exchange for a promise of real reforms in those nations. (There should also be tough penalties for failure on both sides of the bargain.) That will be tough for sure, but Europe will find itself in an even worse place come September 2016 if it doesn’t take action now. Post QE, without any real structural reform, the EU will simply have an even more bloated balance sheet, and the market will exact punishment for it. The ECB has called policy makers’ bluff. It’s time to create a real United States of Europe to match the common currency.

A BRAIN-DEAD idea...

What EU leadership has offered to the world : ... The whole idea of creating the Euro without consolidating the debts was the BRAIN-DEAD idea of academics with ZERO trading experience and lawyers. We really cannot afford these types of people making financial decisions about how the run the world. Whatever Brussels could have done wrong, they did. (It was the idea of brain-dead french politicians with zero experience in almost anything except scooter driving and handling - not too well - multiple mistresses. The idea was to disarm the German Bundesbank by design and concept. A very french approach).   The EU politicians have assumed that they can dictate to the free markets by decree and suppress the right to freedom of choice, vote, and to just live un-harassed. The EU politicians have disregarded the people with the arrogance that they know what is best. The EU politicians are helping to destroy the world economy because they have tied the bank reserves to their own folly and then exempted them from mark-to-market to hide their track record. These politicians can hide their head in the sand to pretend they have not yet failed. However, the free markets ALWAYS win.  Well the free markets have voted. The Euro has crashed to the 1.15 level so far. A monthly closing BELOW 1.18 is a long-term sell signal; and support lies at 1.1375 A monthly closing beneath this level confirms the Euro is dead and should fall back to the 1.03-.96 area.  You just can’t make up this stuff. There should be a law against UNQUALIFIED people taking office. Enough is enough. These people create wars to cover up their mistakes. We have an ABSOLUTE right as a people NOT to be economic slaves to fools.

It sounds at first like a crazy thought experiment: One morning, every resident of the euro zone comes home to find a check in their mailbox worth over €500 euros ($597) and possibly as much as €3,000. A gift, just like that, sent by the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt.  Currently, the inflation rate is barely above zero and fears of a horror deflation scenario of the kind seen during the Great Depression in the United States are haunting the euro zone. The ECB, whose main task is euro stability, has lost control.  In this desperate situation, an increasing number of economists and finance professionals are promoting the concept of "helicopter money," tantamount to dispersing cash across the country by way of helicopter. The idea, which even Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once found attractive, has triggered ferocious debates between central bank officials in Europe and academics. For backers, there's more to this than just a new instrument. They are questioning cast-iron doctrines of monetary policy.  One thing, after all, is becoming increasingly clear: Draghi and his fellow central bank leaders have exhausted all traditional means for combatting deflation.  The failure of these efforts can be easily explained. Thus far, central banks have primarily provided funding to financial institutions. The ECB provided banks with loans at low interest rates or purchased risky securities from them in the hope that they would in turn issue more loans to companies and consumers. The problem is that many households and firms are so far in debt already that they are eschewing any new credit, meaning the money isn't ultimately making its way to the real economy as hoped.  In response to this development, Sylvain Broyer, the chief European economist for French investment bank Natixis, says, "It would make much more sense to take the money the ECB wants to deploy in the fight against deflation and distribute it directly to the people." Draghi has calculated expenditures of a trillion euros for his emergency program, funds that would be sufficient to provide each euro zone citizen with a gift of around €3,000.

Quantitative Thieving is the real job of Central Banks, and economists are nowt but low-grade clerics in the dogmatic religion of Economics that prop up the system of Banking and Finance.

Let's look at the numbers.... Using approx 250 million people in the Eurozone.

50 Billion Euros/month = 200 Euros/month per person...but when CENTRAL BANKS do this by QE, they only buy government and corporate bonds, so the money reaches the banks and the richest investors only. Only pure luck allows any to get down to ordinary people, because everybody above has helped themselves to the splurge.  If they really wanted to boost the Eurozone, they could hand out 200 Euros/month to each person. It would be far more fair, but more than that, it would actually work! Every little person receiving 200 Euros would either use their money for demand, or to pay off debt.  At this point, an economist will stand up and start spewing out jargon about money supply and monetary velocity and drown out all common sense.  Whoopee... Islamic fundamentalism is much easier to deal with than Economic dogma.

yesss--- perhaps Greece has a chance to get out of this misery called "EU"

Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann has called on Greece to stick to its agreements.  He said he hoped the new government would not make promises the country could not afford, Reuters reports, citing an interview with the broadcaster ARD. “I believe it’s also in the interest of the Greek government to do what is necessary to tackle the structural problems there,” Weidmann said.

He singled out administration, public finances and the economy as being particularly in need of reform.

“I hope the new government won’t call into question what is expected and what has already been achieved,” he said.   Syriza is on track to take 36 and 38 per cent of the national vote, well ahead of Samaras' centre-right New Democracy party which was seen taking 26 to 28 percent, according to an updated exit poll.  The updated poll showed Syriza securing between 148 to 154 seats in the 300-seat parliament. An absolute majority for Syriza will depend in large part on whether former Prime Minister George Papandreou's new centre-left party manages to cross the 3 per cent threshold to enter parliament.    Centrists To Potami and far-right Golden Dawn were tied for third spot with 6 to 7 per cent of the vote, according to the exit poll.

 

The head of Germany’s eurosceptic party Alternative für Deutschland, Bernd Lucke, has called for a haircut for Greece, although he said it must be accompanied with an exit from the euro, according to reports from the Berlin newspaper the Tagesspiegel.

“Syriza doesn’t question the euro, but demands further debt relief and more loans. That doesn’t fit together,” he said.

The chairman of the CDU/CSU group in the European parliament, Herbert Reul, called the idea of another haircut unthinkable. “Greece must continue with the course of reforms if it doesn’t want to risk a departure from the monetary union,” he said.

Pro-Euro, Anti-Austerity: A Perfect Paradox - The irony is that neither SYRIZA nor Podemos are Eurosceptic – at least not openly! Instead, what they represent is a manifestation of popular rejection of Troika-imposed austerity. As Tspiras said in a public address yesterday, “The bailout is over. Blackmail is over. Subservience is over.”

Unfortunately, Tspiras is either badly mistaken or he’s knowingly misleading voters. For as long as Greece is in the euro, subservience will forever be its fate. As I wrote many moons ago, the introduction of the single currency had one primary purpose:

To slowly, almost imperceptibly, weaken nation-state institutions to the point of total dependence on Brussels and Frankfurt; and ultimately have them supplanted with EU institutions. It is the financial equivalent of death by a thousand cuts.

It was ever thus and all by design. As Robert Mundell, the Nobel prize-winning father of the euro, admitted to Greg Palast, the euro is what allows congresses and parliaments to be stripped of all power over monetary and fiscal policy. Bothersome democracy is removed from the economic system as the wholly undemocratic and Goldman-compromised European Central Bank is gifted the reins of economic power. “Without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is the competitive reduction of rules on business.”

As such, if SYRIZA genuinely sought to save the Greek people from the Troika’s kiss of economic death, their only option would be a dignified exit from the single currency. Either that or accept the occasional ECB-provided crumb of sustenance (a little shot of QE here and there) and the slight – and no doubt temporary – loosening of the monetary strait jacket. Meanwhile, Brussels’ ever opportunistic elite would no doubt exploit this new crisis to claw its way that little bit closer to its ultimate goal: fiscal and political union. By Don Quijones.