If the eurozone blinks then both Spanish and Italian governments risk falling to insurgent anti-austerity populist parties, Spain’s Leftist Podemos and Italy’s Five Star Movement, threatening the future of the euro.   Many in Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels believe the costs of lending to a rebel government in Athens would soon outstrip the cost of "Grexit", Greece leaving the euro. 

Unfortunately for Mrs Merkel, Mr Tsipras has built his political base on opposition to austerity measures and his his party’s rank and file are unlikely to tolerate betrayal. Indications are that a new Greek government will force the issue by presenting it as a clash between the eurozone and democracy.   “It will not be easy to ignore the democratic mandate of the Greek people. Such a stance would send a very powerful message to others in Europe that the EU cannot incorporate democratic processes,” said Efklidis Tsakalotos, a Syriza MP and likely future Greek finance minister this weekend.  “It is not clear that the EU can survive showing such disdain for core European principles, such as democracy and social justice.”

source - th telegraph - this is a piece of todays world !!!

Many of us are used to swiping or tapping a card to get into the office, but a Swedish firm has gone a step further by putting a chip under its employees' skin.

People working at Epicenter, a new hi-tech office block in Sweden, simply have to hold their hands against the front door to gain entry. They can also wave their hand to operate the photocopier, the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones reports.

In time, they will also be able to pay for coffee and sandwiches in the cafe with a touch of a hand.

It's because some employees have a tiny RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip, about the size of a grain of rice, implanted.  A handful of staff currently have the chip, but soon others among the 400 workers will be given the chance.  On the day of the building's official opening, the developer's chief executive was, himself, chipped live on stage.  And even Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, had a go.  "A rather fearsome looking tattooist, inserted my chip," he explains. "First, he massaged the skin between my thumb and index finger and rubbed in some disinfectant. The he told me to take a deep breath while he inserted the chip. There was a moment of pain - not much worse than any injection - and then he stuck a plaster over my hand."

However, not all staff seem obliging. "Absolutely not," said one young man when asked if he'd sign up. An older woman saw little point in being chipped just to get through a door. 

The chips have been developed by a Swedish bio-hacking company.

Epicenter hopes the chips will soon catch on across the rest of the world.  "Today it's a bit messy - we need pin codes and passwords. Wouldn't it be easy to just touch with your hand? That's really intuitive," said Hannes Sjoblad, the company's chief disruption officer.

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.