Financial Crisis in Greece

[Brian]

No "lazy compromises," Merkel says after dividing euro-crisis deal

http://www.idividi.com.mk/english/world/731821/index.html

Official: New euro accord to include 23 countries
http://www.idividi.com.mk/english/wo...784/index.html

More shuffling of the 'deck-chairs' at the expense of sovereignty - no wonder Medvedev is saying,

Medvedev's Twitter obscenity provokes shock

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/07/us-russia-medvedev-twitter-mishap-idUSTRE7B61LY20111207

(Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev caused shock and jeers on Wednesday after an obscene insult directed at political opponents appeared on his official Twitter feed.

The Kremlin chief and his more powerful mentor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have been facing growing opposition to their rule by protesters who say parliamentary elections on Sunday were not fair.

The offensive post appeared to have been retweeted on the MedvedevRussia feed at 33 minutes past midnight, according to cached copies of the feed and a notification of the post received by a Reuters reporter.

"It has become clear that if a person writes the expression 'party of swindlers and thieves' in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting f****d in the mouth " the post read.

Rest of article in Link.

[mango]

Beware of Greeks Bearing Debt

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/11/fouad-ajami-beware-of-greeks-bearing-debt.html

We are on a difficult course, on a new Odyssey for Greece,” former prime minister George Papandreou once observed of his country’s economic malady. “But we know the road to Ithaca and we have charted the waters.” The man could be forgiven for falling back on the iconic Odysseus—Greece has always looked on the classical age as a usable past.

But the metaphor of The Odyssey offers no guidance for Greece’s economic travails. For The Odyssey is about adventure and revenge and the yearning for home; profit rarely figures in the journey. And when it does, on one occasion in Phaeacia, it is used to taunt Odysseus to demonstrate his skill at feats of physical prowess. “Oh, I knew it!” said a local mocking the traveler. “I never took you for someone skilled in games, not a chance. You are some skipper of profiteers roving the high seas in his scudding craft, reckoning up his freight with a keen eye out for home cargo, grabbing the gold he can!” Odysseus takes the bait—after all, honor and glory matter. He gives the games of Phaeacia a whirl.

The ancient Greeks did not have much praise for commerce. Plato denigrated it in The Republic, as did Aristotle. Commerce was not fit for men of the polis and was best left, it was thought, for metics, resident foreigners. No solace could be found in that classical tradition Greece passionately claims as its own. German bankers should not rest easy if Greeks come bearing the inspiration of the epics and ancient Greek heroes.

Ironically, the more usable—and proximate—past comes from the way the Greeks performed as traders and merchant mariners during their subjugation to the Ottomans. The story is not heroic. Banking and business are not the stuff of legend. The Ottoman Empire created structures of collaboration: some three dozen nationalities and communities made up that ramshackle empire. The bureaucracy and the Army were the preserve of the Turks, but the Greeks found a niche for themselves, and they prospered as merchants and middlemen.

They could be found in all parts of the sultan’s domains, in the Greek peninsula, in Anatolia itself, and wherever the Ottoman soldiers went and conquered. Greek was the lingua franca of the Levant, on par, in places, with Ottoman Turkish. “So they always had the sea, the very essence of caprice,” Jason Goodwin wrote of the Greeks in his beautiful reconstruction of the Ottoman world, Lords of the Horizons.

The Greeks dominated the empire’s coasts. Smyrna (today Izmir), on the Anatolian seaboard, stood as a monument to the brilliance of the Greek merchants. In the 1600s, this city was to know a golden age, and the merchants did it on their own, outwitting the Ottoman bureaucrats and the sultan’s court in Constantinople. Its world was genuinely cosmopolitan; the Greeks were the city’s bankers, lawyers, merchants, and doctors. Alexandria, too, was a haven for Greek traders, and Greeks could be found peddling their wares in the remotest corners of rural Egypt. They were a resourceful breed, and the French and the British, pushing their way into the markets of the Levant, saw the Greeks as agile and brilliant competitors.

But this accommodation with Turkish power could not withstand the appeals of nationalism, and the Greeks sought a world of their own. As practical as Greeks had been under Ottoman rule, they grew increasingly romantic. They had lost touch with the classical world, which they would glorify in the course of the 19th century. There were foreign admirers, and they fed the Greek sense of specialness, of being set apart from the other nationalisms. Orthodoxy and Hellenism blew at will, and the great powers jostled over the making of this new Greece. The Greeks would at once need foreign help and suspect it—a pattern that carries over to the present. Conspiracies stalked their homeland. Greek nationalists believed that jealous nations were out to rob the Greeks of the place they had had in the past. The calling of “Greater Greece” was a rebuke to the small kingdom that had been secured from the Ottoman wreckage.

There would be no normalcy in the Greek political world—the dreams always deadly, far bigger than the Greeks could attain. The national church was no help. It stoked the fires of these grandiose ideas. Populism and communism closed the circle of this unhappy history. The Latin West was always needed and hated at the same time. The roots of this schism ran deep, all the way back to the conflict between the heirs of Byzantium and those of Rome.

In A Concise History of Greece, historian Richard Clogg writes of a foreign-office minister who, in 1980, opined that Greece’s entry into the European Community would be seen as “a fitting repayment by the Europe of today of the cultural and political debt that we all owe to a Greek heritage almost three thousand years old.” The Greeks took in and lived off this sense of entitlement and specialness. The debt crisis that overwhelmed the country by 2010 was born of that sense of abdication. The socialist tradition ran deep here, and membership in the European Union and the euro zone was bound to make Greece a European burden. Not for the Greeks was the discipline of the marketplace. If German savings were to sustain Greece’s indulgences, so be it. In the European Councils, the Greeks made the most of the truculence of their politics—the refusal of the country’s citizens to pay their way, to provide taxes needed to maintain a modern state, and to accept structural adjustments for an economy living beyond its means.

Reckoning came in 2010. Greece’s bills came due, and the coffers were empty. Prime Minister George Papandreou struck an accord with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union to secure a bailout in return for budget cuts of €32 billion. But the bloated public sector wanted nothing to do with the needed cutbacks. A 48-hour strike was staged May 4-5, ending in tragedy. Three bank employees were killed, as their bank was set on fire. Papandreou was in a fight for his political life, caught between the demands of foreign creditors and the ways of his population. (It was telling that this prime minister was the grandson and the son of former prime ministers, a dynasticism that Arab officeholders would envy.) The custodians of power in Greece were in no man’s land.

The markets found little comfort in the austerity measures that the Greeks had proposed. By mid-June, Greece got the lowest credit rating in the world, when S&P downgraded it by three notches, to CCC from B. Papandreou struggled mightily: he secured the passage in Parliament of an unpopular property tax, and he proposed cutting high pensions by 20 percent. But he could never put through these changes, and he was sandbagged by his finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, a political operative with a substantial base of support of his own.

Papandreou bowed out on Nov. 9, 2011. It was time now to turn to technocracy, which perhaps would succeed where politics had failed. Lucas Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank from 2002 to 2010, stepped into the breach.

A detailed, unsentimental report released on Nov. 18 by the European Commission, called “Task Force for Greece,” laid out the defects of Greece’s economy. Even in antiseptic bureaucratese, alarm bells can be heard. “The scale of the reform task is daunting,” the report states. The country was in desperate need of “unprecedented fiscal and economic adjustment. The contraction is deeper and more painful than expected. Unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment, is rising steadily. Small companies are facing severe liquidity constraints.” The commission uncovered no hidden secrets about the habits of the Greeks. Tax evasion was rampant (there was €60 billion in uncollected taxes), the channeling of savings into Swiss banks was a national tradition, and bureaucracy was doing its lethal damage: it takes 230 days to award a public contract in Greece—more than twice the average of the EU. Europe was paying for the pride of Greece, for the debt owed the classical age.

“Greece is not part of Western civilization, but it was the home of classical civilization which was an important source of Western civilization,” the late Samuel P. Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Greece was an “anomaly,” Huntington observed, the “Orthodox outsider in western organizations.” In their self-image, the Greeks stand sentry at the edge of the Western world—where Islam begins. But the borders between civilizations that Huntington drew with such a sharp pencil put Greece in the Orthodox world, a kin of Russia and the Balkan states.

Huntington swam against the currents of the 1990s, the giddy insistence that globalization had erased cultural differences. Greece would bear out Huntington’s thesis of its separateness from the Western world.

A fierce anti-Americanism would poison its political and cultural life. In the Greek demonology, America was Satan, its capitalism a dreaded menace. The pretexts of this anti-Americanism were endless. America had sinned against the universe by coming to the rescue of the Bosnians and Kosovars. American power was a threat to the “True Faith,” an accomplice of Turkey and Islam.

There was no coherence here, and no need for it, for in 2003 the Greeks feigned offense at America’s war in Iraq. In a worldwide Pew survey taken that year, the United States was considered a greater threat to peace than Iran and North Korea. Another survey, from 2005, taken by TNS Opinion & Social, a research consortium that studied European attitudes, showed that the anti-Americanism of Greece was relentless: 85 percent had a negative view of America’s role in securing peace in the world; 76 percent had a negative judgment on America’s contribution to the fight against world poverty.

Greek political culture has yet to be modernized and stripped of its ruinous passions. In that 2005 study cited above, seven out of 10 Greeks believed that the cultural differences between Turkey and the EU were too deep to allow Turkey’s accession. The Greeks, so sure of Turkey’s separateness, did not look in the mirror. The anti-modernist, anti-capitalist consensus that has wreaked havoc in Greece is a mighty barrier all its own.

From the day Lord Byron and the philhellenes flattered the pride of Greece to the present, the country has lived with the sense that it is exempt from the demands of political and economic discipline. It won’t matter how much relief is thrown at it, for that sense of entitlement will overwhelm all good intentions. The technocrats now go where the politicians had failed, but the anger displayed in the face of the harsh economic realities provides no solace that Greece is done with deadly dreams—and expectations. While the countries of Europe are troubled, each in its own way, the Greek predicament is deeper and more acute than the rest. And a final sobering note must trouble the Greeks: the Turks, who had once been soldiers and bureaucrats who disdained trade and commerce and left such matters to the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Jews, are now in the throes of an economic renaissance. Modern Turkey had destroyed or banished its trading minorities. Izmir had lost out to bleak Ankara, in the interior. The Turks fell back on economic protectionism—import substitution, a command economy that subordinated economic matters to the primacy of politics. They reaped the harvest of that strategy: their people grew impoverished, they flooded the labor markets of Germany to make their way in the world. Then an economic revolution remade Turkey; the markets were opened up; privatization worked its magic. Prosperity came to the dusty Anatolian hills. So culture does matter, but it can be altered and reformed. Decline is a choice, not a fated destiny.

[El Bre]

Hey...what's another couple of hundred billion?

Greece will have to leave euro, spokesman warns

ATHENS, GREECE — Greece’s government warned Tuesday that the debt-crippled country will have to ditch the euro if it fails to finalize a second, €130 billion ($169 billion) international bailout.

Spokesman Pantelis Kapsis said negotiations in the next three or four months with international debt monitors will “determine everything,” including whether Greece escapes a disastrous bankruptcy.

Greece is being kept afloat by a first, €110 billion ($142 billion) international bailout agreed in May 2010, after investors shocked by the country’s huge budget deficit and debt mountain demanded sky-high interest rates to continue buying Greek bonds.

An additional bailout was agreed in October, when it became clear that the first batch of funds would not suffice, but that deal has yet to be finalized.

Sorting out the details of the bailout, which also foresees a €100 billion writedown of Greece’s privately held debt, is the main task of the coalition government headed by former central banker Lucas Papademos, whose short mandate is expected to expire in early April.

“This famous loan agreement must be signed, otherwise we are outside the markets, out of the euro and things will become much worse,” Kapsis told private Skai TV.

In return for its first batch of rescue loans from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund, Greece imposed deeply resented austerity measures to contain its budget deficit — set to hit at least 9 per cent of GDP last year despite repeated spending cuts and tax hikes.

Kapsis said further cutbacks, possibly including new taxes, might be required to address a revenue shortfall,

“We will see what the shortfall is and it is very likely that measures will be required,” he said. “I also don’t believe it is easy to impose new taxes, but what does cutting spending mean? To close down the public sector?”

“There is no easy solution,” Kapsis said.

The details are expected to be determined during talks later this month with debt inspectors from the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF, who will determine whether the country receives its next €89 billion ($116 billion) loan installment.

“We can’t take (approval of the next installment) for granted,” Kapsis warned.

[Risto the Great]

Bring on the Drachma!
2nd class country with e 2nd rate currency.

[Stojacanec]

Greece will have to leave the Euro?......is that a threat or a promise? They may have to leave the Euro and then add one more subject to their high school and tertiary curriculum. Its called Spend within your means

[Phoenix]

Greece will have to leave the Euro?......is that a threat or a promise? They may have to leave the Euro and then add one more subject to their high school and tertiary curriculum. Its called Spend within your means

More and more financial commentators are speculating that one small member will be leaving the Eurozone...

[Brian]

Another tax, but coming from the EU, what sounds good at first can turn bad.

The Coming of the Universal Financial Transaction Tax

http://thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/europe-mainmenu-35/10493-the-coming-of-the-universal-financial-transaction-tax

MONDAY, 09 JANUARY 2012 15:49

In the clearest indication yet, a high French government official confirmed last week that an FTT — Financial Transaction Tax — will be implemented by the European Union by the end of 2012, a year earlier than planned. Jean Leonetti (left), France’s minister for European affairs, said on television that “This is on the program for the next European summit [on January 30th]. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have decided on this and it will be put in place before the end of 2012.”

The tax would be levied, initially at least, on every financial transaction taking place by any entity with a connection to the Eurozone, and would be levied at the rate of 0.1 percent on shares of stock and bonds, and 0.01 percent on all derivatives transactions. It is estimated that the FTT would cover about 85 percent of all transactions between financial institutions such as banks, investment firms, insurance companies, pension funds and hedge funds. It is expected to raise, in the beginning, about $70 billion annually to help fund the EU.

It’s being touted as punishment for the banks that were allegedly instrumental in causing the economic meltdown, but would have no impact on ordinary citizens or small businesses. According to the European Commission, the FTT “would help to reduce competitive distortions in the single market, discourage risky trading activities [such as high frequency trading and highly leveraged derivatives contracts] and complement regulatory measures aimed at avoiding future crises.”

Because of Great Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron’s resistance and because under the current treaty such imposition requires a unanimous vote, “exceptions” are being made so that the FTT can be applied just to those in the 17-member Eurozone instead of to all 27 member states.

Cameron’s resistance to the imposition of the FTT was initially thought by this writer to reflect Cameron’s overriding loyalty to the City of London, inside London but outside of his jurisdiction. Since the European Union is a creation of the Anglo-American establishment with its heavy concentration of financial interests located in the City of London, it was threatened with being subjected to penalties by its own creation. The Telegraph seemed to agree, writing on January 8th that the reason for Cameron’s resistance was for fear that “it will damage the City of London, a global financial centre where much of the tax would be raised.” But a careful reading of Cameron’s statement indicates he would favor such imposition if it was “imposed globally.” (emphasis added)

That makes much more sense to Anthony Wile, writing about the coming FTT at The Daily Bell. He said that the FTT would have numerous advantages in the march to the New World Order, including the ability to monitor and police every financial transaction in the world, and then declaring and enforcing rules yet to be written against those who work opposing its interests. Such record keeping would

Open up a bonanza of new crimes and criminals, in our view. First of all…trade data could be matched…to detect patterns of “insider trading.” But sooner or later other crimes would be discovered as well…

There could be “volume crimes” in which trades overwhelm the market…

Or how about exotic “front-running” crimes…by manipulative trades…

To counteract these newly discovered crimes, an international agency to fight market manipulation and insider trading would have to be set up. It would be a huge, global agency that would be funded by an ever steepening transaction tax.

Another threat envisioned by Wile would be the creation of “black lists” of entities not in compliance, and “white lists” of “good guys” who behave themselves according to the rules and who, as a result, are allowed to handle profitable governmental and banking business controlled by the insiders. Wile’s conclusion:

We believe that the City of London and its intergenerational, great central-banking families WANT a transaction tax. Why wouldn't they? Taxes are a way to develop information about people and business trends. Taxes are a way to ensure that one comes under pressure to conform and to do business in a way that benefits the larger system the powers-that-be have put into place.

In the make-believe world of public opinion polling, Europeans are buying into the story that’s it all about punishing the banks for their misdoings. A recent Eurobarometer poll of more than 27,000 people showed them favoring the imposition of a FTT by more than two-to-one. Another poll by YouGov puts the FTT favorability at closer to four-to-one.

With little informed resistance to the real purposes of the Financial Transaction Tax, it appears to be a fait accompli.

[Risto the Great]

families-abandon-kids-in-greek-debt-crisis

http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/newsbusiness/8401306/families-abandon-kids-in-greek-debt-crisis

Greece's spiraling debt crisis has left some families so poverty-stricken they have been driven to abandon their children because they can no longer afford to keep them.

A few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note written by the mother of a four-year-old student saying she was abandoning her child, the BBC reported.

"I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her," the mother wrote.

"Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother."

Other cases of abandonment are being reported by charities and child welfare groups across the country.

Father Antonios, who runs a youth centre in Athens for the poor, told the BBC he had found four children left on his doorstep, including a baby just days old.

"They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need," he said.

One mother contacted by the network said she was driven to leave her child Anastasia, 8, because she could not find work for a year.

She finally found a job in a cafe but makes just 20 euros ($AU25) a day.

While families suffer under the country’s ailing economy, some hope may be in sight.

Greek officials last night announced the country was closer to forging a deal with bank creditors to wipe out 100 billion euros from its huge debt.

Designed to save the country from bankruptcy, the deal could be settled as early as next week.

The eurozone in October reached preliminary agreement to accord Greece a 130-billion-euro rescue package to help keep the government afloat until it can return to borrowing on the markets at affordable rates.

However, this package is contingent on Greece reaching a deal with private investors to accept at least a 50 per cent loss on the Greek debt they hold, wiping some 100 billion euros off Athens crushing sovereign debt of over 350 billion euros.

Greece has a maturing debt of 14.43 billion euros that must be repaid on March 20.

[Bill77]

Strange how I dont see it that bad and I live here.

This is so sad.
Not just the denials of the likes of voltron,
But the predicament of the poor little children in the below story


BBC: Greeks Are Too Poor to Care for Children

BBC: Greeks Are Too Poor to Care for Children
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Greece's financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all - their children.

One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.

"I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her," it read. "Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother."

In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city's poor, has found four children on his doorstep - including a baby just days old.

Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.

Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable - they feel to Greeks like stories from the Third World, rather than their own capital city.

see full story here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16472310

[Brian]

This is so sad.
Not just the denials of the likes of voltron,
But the predicament of the poor little children in the below story

Maybe because your avatar is holding kid and your too good natured you think like that.
I cannot feel sympathy for anything that happens to them.

[Brian]

Looks like it is slowly catching up with them.

Aspirin Supply Dries up in Greece

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/20077/54/

Wednesday, 11 January 2012
For patients and pharmacists in financially stricken Greece, even finding aspirin has turned into a headache.

Mina Mavrou, who runs a pharmacy in a middle-class Athens suburb, spends hours each day pleading with drugmakers, wholesalers and colleagues to hunt down medicines for clients. Life-saving drugs such as Sanofi (SAN)’s blood-thinner Clexane and GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK)’s asthma inhaler Flixotide often appear as lines of crimson data on pharmacists’ computer screens, meaning the products aren’t in stock or that pharmacists can’t order as many units as they need.

“When we see red, we want to cry,” Mavrou said. “The situation is worsening day by day.”

The 12,000 pharmacies that dot almost every street corner in Greek cities are the damaged capillaries of a complex system for getting treatment to patients. The Panhellenic Association of Pharmacists reports shortages of almost half the country’s 500 most-used medicines. Even when drugs are available, pharmacists often must foot the bill up front, or patients simply do without.

The financial crisis is brewing a “Greek tragedy” of slowing access to medical care and worsening outcomes for patients, Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, wrote in an October article in The Lancet.

The Greek Ministry of Health didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
"Many Difficulties"

“It would be unrealistic to deny that there are many difficulties regarding all public services due to the financial crisis,” Nicolaos Polyzos, secretary general of the Ministry of Health, wrote in a response to McKee’s article posted on the ministry’s website. “However, this cannot justify characterizing the current picture of (the) health sector in Greece as a ‘tragedy.’”

The reasons for the shortages are complex. One major cause is the Greek government, which sets prices for medicines. As part of an effort to cut its own costs, Greece has mandated lower drug prices in the past year. That has fed a secondary market, drug manufacturers contend, as wholesalers sell their shipments outside the country at higher prices than they can get within Greece.

Strained government finances only make matters worse. Wholesalers and pharmacists say the system suffers from a lack of liquidity, as public insurers delay payments to pharmacies, which in turn can’t pay suppliers on time.

“Wholesalers simply do not have the money anymore to play bank to the pharmacies,” Heinz Kobelt, secretary general of the European Association of Euro-Pharmaceutical Companies, said in a telephone interview.

[Voltron]

This is so sad.
Not just the denials of the likes of voltron,
But the predicament of the poor little children in the below story

Spare me the drama Bill. Another story the BBC picks up to highlight the crisis in Europe. And Im supposed to feel bad about it. You know what, there has been times when things were much more worse in this world. True poverty after balkan wars, civil wars. True famine, yet families somehow managed backed then. Even if it meant a mother or father sacrificing themselves for their kids. These times have just given more of a reason and provide some psychological comfort to parents to make themselves feel better about their actions and say it was the crisis that made them do it. As if they didnt have it in the back of their minds all along. There is nothing in the world that would seperate my kid from me. Then again thats just me.

[Bill77]

A picture is worth a thousand words

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2085163/Children-dumped-streets-Greek-parents-afford-them.html

Something "Eleftherotypia" or "Kathimerini" would never show.

[Risto the Great]

Should we change the title of the thread to "Greece has exploded"?

[George S.]

not only exploded but imploded on itself.