More about BIS from "The Tower of Basel" an excellent book..

"The BIS is a unique institution: an international organization, an extremely profitable bank and a research institute founded, and protected, by international treaties. The BIS is accountable to its customers and shareholders—the central banks—but also guides their operations. The main tasks of a central bank, the BIS argues, are to control the flow of credit and the volume of currency in circulation, which will ensure a stable business climate, and to keep exchange rates within manageable bands to ensure the value of a currency and so smooth international trade and capital movements. This is crucial, especially in a globalized economy, where markets react in microseconds and perceptions of economic stability and value are almost as important as reality itself.The BIS also helps to supervise commercial banks, although it has no legal powers over them. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, based at the BIS, regulates commercial banks’ capital and liquidity requirements. It requires banks to have a minimum capital of eight percent of risk-weighted assets when lending, meaning that if a bank has risk-weighted assets of $100 million it must maintain at least $8 million capital. The committee has no powers of enforcement, but it does have enormous moral authority. “This regulation is so powerful that the eight percent principle has been set into national laws,” said Peter Akos Bod. “It’s like voltage. Voltage has been set at 220. You may decide on ninety-five volts, but it would not work.” In theory, sensible housekeeping and mutual cooperation, overseen by the BIS, will keep the global financial system functioning smoothly. In theory....The BIS is now the world’s thirtieth-largest holder of gold reserves, with 119 metric tons—more than Qatar, Brazil, or Canada. Membership of the BIS remains a privilege rather than a right. The board of directors is responsible for admitting central banks judged to “make a substantial contribution to international monetary cooperation and to the Bank’s activities.” China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia joined only in 1996. The bank has opened offices in Mexico City and Hong Kong but remains very Eurocentric. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Slovakia (total population 16.2 million) have been admitted, while Pakistan (population 169 million) has not. Nor has Kazakhstan, which is a powerhouse of Central Asia. In Africa only Algeria and South Africa are members—Nigeria, which has the continent’s second-largest economy, has not been admitted. (The BIS’s defenders say that it demands high governance standards from new members and when the national banks of countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan reach those standards, they will be considered for membership.)"

We are constantly told that if we don't all neoliberalize everything, screw the poor to give to the rich and destroy all civilized parts of our society then the clever wizards say that TERRIBLE THINGS will happen. The "markets" and the "euro" and other abstractions will PUNISH US. No mechanisms are ever explained. Funny how much this resembles the wizards and magical shamans of the middle ages saying that God is on their side. If we don't give our tithes to the church then God will punish us, little children. ... One estimate put the cost to the eurozone of Greece making a disorderly exit from the currency at $1tn, 5% of output. This is exactly the kind of economic prediction that I'm talking about. How on Earth can they predict this with any degree of remote accuracy? It's like trying to predict the exact results of every match at the upcoming European Championships. Still, you can be virtually certain about one thing in both the football and the economy. Greece will eventually get knocked out.  ----  THE FACTS ARE :...If Greece decides to leave the euro it'll certainly make sense in the longer term-- the macroeconomic conditionality attached to the euro by the ECB is a 'one size fits all' framework designed to promote the economies of the EU's richer countries, and Greece is never going to derive any benefit from being in the euro. But for now economic catastrophe looms since Greece's current debt is denominated in euros, and the new drachma will involve a swift and drastic devaluation. There is no way Greece can pay its euro debt using the new drachma. The humane solution would be for the richer nations to cancel Greece's debt the moment it leaves the euro. To not do so would be to punish millions of ordinary people who did nothing to cause this crisis.

Outgoing PM Lucas Papademos has warned it would be "disastrous" for Greece to reject the austerity measures, which come as a condition of its bailout cash: Any modification... must be pursued in a spirit of consensus and with the full agreement of European peers. A unilateral rejection of the country's contractual obligations would be disastrous for Greece, leading unavoidably outside the euro and possible outside the European Union....The decisions we take could seal Greece's course for decades. They could lead the country to the fringe, canceling historic national achievements of the last 38 years.

The story of Mokotów is one of the prominent bright spots in the history of how the commercial property developed in Poland. The former industrial district of Mokotow, Służewiec Przemysłowy has rapidly been transformed into Warsaw’s ultimate office hub, where fully-leased projects from leading developers are regularly snapped up by leading investors. In fact, Colliers International claims that investor demand has intensified so much over the past 12 months that that along with being the hottest office district in Central Europe, Mokotów can actually be considered one of the most liquid markets anywhere in Europe. Is this just marketing overkill from the Polish office of an international agency? After all, with just over 900,000 sqm, Mokotów is hardly among the biggest on the Continent. But according to Neil Gregory-Eaves, Colliers’ international director of CEE investment services, one shouldn’t look at total stock, but instead at how much of it has changed hands in the last 12 months.
“Over the past 12 months, Moktów has had six major office investment transactions which represent approximately 18 percent of the total gross lettable area. The total volume of these transactions is approaching €500m. These kinds of figures mean that Mokotow has easily been the most active office investment sub-district in all of CEE both in terms of the number of transactions and total investment volume,” says Gregory-Eaves.BCE, Citigroup, Comisia Europeana, FMI, Federal Reserve, Germania, Grecia, Irlanda, Marea Britanie, PIB, Rusia, SUA, Spania, Standard and Poor's, Ungaria, Uniunea Europeana,