"As long as the Greek crisis rumbles on, more people are buying into the

belief that the country is a special case, and the ECB will act to make

sure the rest of the members stay in the union."

Of course the ECB will act as above. The ECB is one of the seven institutions of the EU. The others being:

European Council

European Commission

European Parliament

Council of the European Union

Court of Justice of the European Union

European Court of Auditors

There won't be any Grexident. More bailing out by the back door coupled with renewed determination of ever closer union . There is no legal instrument, under the Maastricht Treaty, that allows Greece to be 'forced' out of the Euro against it's wishes. Similarly, there is no legal instrument, under the same Treaty, that allows Greece to leave the Euro unilaterally. If Greece does leave the Euro it can only take place with the full agreement of all the parties involved. And if that were to occur then Greece would still remain a member of the EU and as such would be entitled to full financial support of the EU, as it is receiving now. So whichever way Greece decides to go the EU/Eurozone will be picking up the bill for a long time to come...simple mathematical reality is catching up with the situation fast. Whatever inference Christine Lagarde wants to draw from Varoufakis's vague assurances about Greece meeting it's obligations, that IMF payment simply won't happen if they don't have the euros to make it.  Looking at the timetable of the coming 7 days, with a lot of payments due and the orthodox Easter weekend, it looks like the optimal moment for Greece to face the fact that the Euro game is up. We'll know one way or the other on Friday, if we hear that the payment was missed and reports come in that the Greek army is on the streets guarding bank branches.

I remember Greece with the drachma. There were small businesses everywhere. The average Greek had work and money to spend on the service economy. Luxury items were hard to come by. One TV, one stereo, one car per family, but so what. Nobody stayed in, there was nightlife. Everyone took their evening meals out. The common Greek's business did so well, they built houses for their families with the money. With a parallel currency, who knows, they may still be valued in Euros.  Since the financial crash of 2008, only one nation has made any sort of true recovery and that is tiny Iceland.  A nation that would not be bullied by either its banking sector, or, by the bought and paid for governments of other nations such as Britain, and Holland.

In fact so successful has their recovery been, that the ratings agency Fitch was forced to release this this statement.  "The Icelandic response to the crisis, although unorthodox, is the only one which has so far succeeded" -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

'Unorthodox' my backside.  They merely had the nads required in order to go against the bully boy bankers and their many minions.  Just as the Greeks are now also about to do.

Hopes that man’s best friend can help medics detect prostate cancer have been boosted by research suggesting that trained German shepherd dogs can sniff out the chemicals linked to the disease from urine samples with remarkable accuracy.   The reliability rate reported by an Italy-based team in the Journal of Urology comes from the latest of several studies stretching back decades and raises the prospect of canines’ sense of smell helping doctors identify a number of human cancers and infectious diseases.  The two female dogs sniffed urine samples from 900 men, 360 with prostate cancer and 540 without. Both animals were right in well over 90% of cases.

The paper’s authors, from the Humanitas Clinical and Research Centre in Milan and other institutes, admitted further work is needed to determine just how valuable the dogs’ skill might be in identifying, in daily practice, the signs of prostate cancer.

Cancer of the prostate is the most common type of the disease in British men, with 40,000 new cases reported every year.  Unanswered questions included what it was the dogs actually smelled and whether this was a single odour or those from a mixture of chemicals.

At present, prostate cancer is detected by a blood test known as the PSA test, by physical examination and by biopsy. The PSA test is not routinely offered because it is not considered reliable enough for screening.

Back in June 2013 on a state visit to Japan, French President Francous Hollande declared the Eurozone crisis was "over".  How could the ECB claim that recovery has not been achieved, when according to Hollande, the Eurozone has been out of recession for nearly two years?  The central bank’s estimates have been considered optimistic by external observers, as private forecasters remain more sanguine about the euro area’s prospects. Members of the ECB Board  warned that growth projections for 2017 relied on several elements which might turn out to be less supportive than the forecasts assumed.   Peter Praet, the ECB’s chief economist, said that the governing council had to remain cautious “given the very early stages of the economic recovery and the high degree of uncertainty,” particular when dealing with forecasts running up to 2017.

Members of the council “generally shared” the view that the forecasts represented an accurate assessment of the situation. The central bank has pencilled in growth of 1.5pc for this year, 0.2 percentage points higher than the consensus. It expects growth of 1.9pc and 2.1pc in the following two years.   Christian Schulz, an economist at Berenberg, said that “there are plenty of the risks” that both growth and inflation might be lower than projected. “The word risk appears 16 times in the minutes,” he said.   The minutes stated that the upward revisions to growth should not be taken to mean that the €1.1 trillion (£810bn) package of asset purchases “was less necessary”. The QE scheme has already been effective in reducing borrowing costs and weakening the euro. ECB purchases began last month, as the euro area entered a fourth straight month in deflationary territory.   The higher growth and inflation forecasts “confirmed that full implementation of these measures was required to deliver on the governing council’s mandate”, the minutes said. Members believed that this provided grounds for “prudent optimism” regarding a gradual recovery and returning inflation to its close to 2pc target. The minutes showed that the committee intended to continue the purchases “without hesitation” until its objectives are met. Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics, said: “

According to a poll published a week ago, more than half of Germans would like Greece to leave the eurozone, a rise of more than 10% on February. It is a sentiment that is likely to hang heavily in the air when the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tspiras, makes his first visit to Berlin on Monday.

“It feels a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes,” says Anton Brandt, referring to the Hans-Christian Andersen fairytale. “It just needs that child to stand up and say: ‘ha! they’re taking the piss out of us all’, but no one dares do it, especially not a German because we’re scared we’ll be accused of being anti-European,” the 38-year old administrator adds. “There’s no worse insult you can make towards a German.”  “The public mood is tipping,” said Thomas Oppermann, chairman of the Social Democrats (SPD) parliamentary group, speaking on a political TV chatshow Hard But Fair, which posed the question: ‘Bankrupt, insulted and brazen – does Greece deserve this image?’

The programme highlighted how any sympathy once felt for the Greeks is quickly drying up as feelings of resentment set in. Not least because Germany is the largest single contributor to Greece’s multibillion-euro bailouts and few see an end in sight to payments as long as Greece fails to implement any of the reforms it has promised. “But we must ask how dangerous would the exit of the weakest member from the eurozone be?” Oppermann added.  For years the German government has repeatedly excluded the possibility of Greece being forced to leave. The chancellor, Angela Merkel, appeared to repeat that conviction at the end of last week during an address to the Bundestag, in which she said: “We have a long and difficult road ahead of us.” But the more feelings of resentment towards Greece fester, the harder it will be for Merkel to keep voters – and members of her own party – on board.  It was no surprise that she drew nervous laughter from some politicians when she said she was looking forward to the opportunity to talk “and perhaps also to argue” with Tsipras. No one is in much doubt that arguing will be more likely than talking when Merkel receives him – with a military guard and a red carpet – at her chancellery.  The atmosphere between Athens and Berlin has soured in recent weeks over calls from Tsipras for Germany to pay war reparations for the Nazi occupation during the second world war.   German chagrin was only stoked further when the Greek defence minister threatened to send 10,000 refugees to Germany, and said he couldn’t guarantee there would not be a few Islamic State (Isis) terrorists among them.

This all followed years of tensions, in which Greek newspapers have repeatedly portrayed Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, as Nazis, and the German media in turn has depicted the Greeks as lazy and corrupt.

While opinions have been divided over the compensation claims, with Merkel’s government insisting the case was legally closed, one German couple took it upon themselves to, as they saw it, right a historical wrong.

On the back of an envelope, Ludwig Zaccaro and Nina Lange calculated that if the compensation claim was divided equally amongst the Germans, their own share would be €875 (£630), and so they paid the amount to a charity supporting austerity-hit families in the town of Nafpolio in the Peloponnese.   “We said ‘this is a symbolic gesture, that if we do this, maybe other Germans will follow’,” Zaccaro said. “It’s time to stop demanding the Greeks pay.”

Georg Franke, a 57-year old market-stall holder in Potsdam, said while he believed the Greek government’s behaviour had been “childish”, he did not find its second world war compensation claims so outlandish.   “The trouble is, Germans know a lot about the atrocities carried out in their name by the Wehrmacht and the SS against the Jews from Germany, Poland and Hungary, as well as the Slavs, but we learnt very little in school about the horrors carried out against the Greeks. It was only recently, around the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that I saw a documentary which touched on how they [Jewish Greeks] were almost all wiped out and it brought it home to me.”

The reason perhaps for the lack of discussion about the past is that for years, it suited both sides. Greeks began coming to Germany as Gastarbeiter (guestworkers) in their hundreds of thousands from the 1960s onwards. German tourists flocked to Greece’s holiday resorts. Both a mutual respect and a mutual dependency brought them closer together. Today, an estimated 300,000 Greeks live in Germany.  Germans still love to holiday on Greek islands. But Jorge Chatzimarkakis, born in the German city of Duisburg to a Greek Gastarbeiter, a member of the European parliament for the German liberal FPD as well as being a special envoy for the Greek government, in which role he has also demanded compensation and the setting up of a Marshall Plan-style reconstruction fund, said much of the erstwhile goodwill had evaporated since the financial crisis began.

“Relations are now a minefield,” he said. “I would not in my wildest dreams have imagined that there would have been such a hard confrontation course. It scares me.”

Despite the understanding of Franke, the market-stall holder, for the Greeks’ search for recognition for their wartime suffering, he believed, like many Germans, that it was wrong to mix the two issues.

“It makes you suspicious that the sum they’re demanding in compensation - around €300bn – is so amazingly close to the Greek debt total.” But he added that the German word for “debt” and “guilt” – Schuld – is the same. “The Greeks know that and they’re playing on that for all it’s worth,” Franke added.

Report UE - The central question in the report is that of forced loans the Nazi occupiers extorted from the Greek central bank beginning in 1941. Should requests for repayment of those loans be classified as reparation demands -- demands that may have been forfeited with the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990? Or is it a genuine loan that must be paid back? The expert commission analyzed contracts and agreements from the time of the occupation as well as receipts, remittance slips and bank statements.  They found that the forced loans do not fit into the category of classical war reparations. The commission calculated the outstanding German "debt" to the Greek central bank and came to a total sum of $12.8 billion as of December 2014, which would amount to about €11 billion.  As such, at issue between Germany and Greece is no longer just the question as to whether the 115 million deutsche marks paid to the Greek government from 1961 onwards for its peoples' suffering during the occupation sufficed as legal compensation for the massacres like those in the villages of Distomo and Kalavrita. Now the key issue is whether the successor to the German Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, is responsible for paying back loans extorted by the Nazi occupiers. There's some evidence to indicate that this may be the case.  In terms of the amount of the loan debt, the Greek auditors have come to almost the same findings as those of the Nazis' bookkeepers shortly before the end of the war. Hitler's auditors estimated 26 days before the war's end that the "outstanding debt" the Reich owed to Greece at 476 million Reichsmarks.  Auditors in Athens calculated an "open credit line" for the same period of time of around $213 million. They assumed a dollar exchange rate to the Reichsmark of 2:1 and applied an interest escalation clause accepted by the German occupiers that would result in a value of more than €11 billion today.

So there you have it - QE and ZIRP ( Zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP) is a macroeconomic concept describing conditions with a very low nominal interest rate, such as those in contemporary Japan)didn't solve anything, they merely delayed the inevitable and allowed an even bigger bubble to be blown, thus ensuring that the next crash is even bigger than the last one.  Let's hope that Gordon Brown is within ear-shot of the Bat-phone so he can save the world again when the time comes.  I'd love to know what sort of investor buys $131 billion worth of 'junk' bonds, though. Were they addicted to CDOs and other financial WMDs?  Well, bonds are really designed to be bought and held to maturity. The yield of any particular bond will contain a premium for the creditworthiness of the issuer, a term premium dependent on the maturity of the bond (lenders expect to be compensated for locking their money up for longer) and will also encapsulate the markets expectation for the future direction of short term interest rates.  Because the bond price already takes into account the market expectation of movements in short term interest rates, there shouldn't really be any desire to sell when interest rates move up as expected - but investors don't tend to think rationally or act rationally. As the article points out, when rates do start to rise, investors not acting rationally will want to sell bonds or redeem investments in bond funds. In order for them to sell, somebody needs to buy.  Unless you can find another investor happy to buy at the same time somebody wants to sell, the market will work more smoothly if there are liquidity providers happy to bridge that timing gap. Historically, banks tended to be those liquidity providers. They are used to taking on credit risk and can hedge if required. Managing the term premium is not too much of an issue - after all banks always lend long and borrow short, so can manage that risk. Plus they can also manage and hedge the expectations of the future direction of short term rates.  Of course, the liquidity providers expect to be paid for what they do, either by charging a bid/offer or indeed being paid directly by an exchange for committing to make markets. Having sufficient numbers of liquidity providers drives those costs down and also results in a very liquid, sharply priced market for end users.  Now that banks have been discouraged from that role (because it is viewed by some as a 'casino' operation), there is a fear that the market will be less liquid with investors being unable to buy and sell at very tight prices in sizes they need to transact in.